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Comment by ripdog | Hacker News Reader

Seems somewhat unlikely to me. Now that OpenGL is gone from MacOS, the Mac is basically dead as a cross-platform gaming system. Who's going to rewrite their renderer on Metal just to target such a tiny platform? Maybe if UE or Unity do the work, games might still get Mac releases...

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MacOS was already dead for gaming since they have no hardware that can play most games. Killing OpenGL and not adding vulkan just finished it off.

There are libraries like [1] that expose a Vulkan api/abi on a Metal backend.

[1] https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx

Valve uses MoltenVK[1] on their own games. They have used it since 2018 for Dota 2[2], but I can't find a lot of uptake by others.

[1] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK [2] https://www.khronos.org/news/permalink/vulkan-support-for-do...

My experience from nearly 20 years of gaming on Linux: Just because a developer can support a platform, doesn't mean they will (sadly). It becomes less likely with any additional complications such as special libraries.

And yet there are more indie games for macOS than for Linux. Life is weird.

Unity and Unreal did the work. Both support Metal.

Both are ridiculously huge and have the money and manpower to do it.

Indie game developers though, which Steam have a sizable amount of, likely do not have the same resources.

Many indie developers do use these platforms instead of writing their own engines. From scratch is usually the exceptions

A large part if not the majority of indie games (both on and outside of Steam) are based on Unity.

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