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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Realistically the 32-bit abandonment in macOS Catalina significantly damaged the Mac gaming market (however “justified” it may be from an engineering standpoint, with many years of warning, etc.). There is simply no good way to tell people that the vast majority of games they probably acquired in the last few years are unlikely to run on any recent hardware.

Some games do move forward to 64-bit but it will certainly require several years for the Mac game market (such as it is) to recover even to the point it had reached.

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Ugh, you just reminded me of just how sad I was when I logged into Steam over the weekend for the first time in a while and discovered how many games I lost to Catalina.

I have 118 games in my library, 17 of which are Windows-only. Only 25 of the remaining 101 MacOS-compatible games survived the 64-bit upgrade.

Edit: thinking about it a little more though, this has been the situation for many many months, but I only realized over the weekend how bad it was because I've moved almost all of my gaming to my Nintendo Switch. (I only happened to return to Steam because I wanted to play A Short Hike.)

Many of those games are flagged as not working or not 64, but they are. Stardew Valley for example says it won’t work in Catalina, yet click run and it loads fine.

Plenty of FUD in that UI.

I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the last major version to support 32 it, it's been deprecated since 2009!

Game companies! The majority of the Mac compatible games I have are 32 bit.

Also, Snow Leopard may have been the last version to support 32 bit processors, but I don't think support for 32 bit apps was deprecated that long ago? Certainly, Apple themselves was still releasing 32bit software back then—if you have a copy of iWork '09 (which got updated as late as 2012), it's 32 bit.

Not to be a jerk but... why? At a certain point none of your customers are running 32 bit hardware, so which parts of your toolchain/dependency tree are so ancient or difficult to alter that you remain compiling to 32 bit?

And while you're right it was deprecated immediately, I do recall universal binaries were soft and then hard deprecated some years ago but I could tell you the exact date. I know there's a lot of vintage software that would never be updated, but like, a good chunk of stuff seems to have been new development or continued support.

I'm not a game developer, so I can't really answer your question. But it's worth noting that most of these games are 32 bit on Windows too. I don't know if that's because of middleware or an actual desire to support 32 bit hardware, but regardless, it probably doesn't make sense to use 32 bit on Windows and 64 bit on macOS.

For non-games, a lot of the Mac software that was still 32 bit was using Carbon, which doesn't have a 64 bit variant. Carbon is old as heck, but if you're using it, there's no upgrade path other than a complete rewrite. That may or may not be worthwhile versus EOL'ing the software.

(As a complete tangent, I recently learned that Apple did once promise a 64 bit version of Carbon. The library was present in the developer preview of Leopard, and many devs began building with it. But then it was gone in Leopard's final release, and Apple never mentioned it again.)

Because no serious game developer expects a platform vendor to pull the rug out from under them. What benefit is there to an up-to-date port, especially when very few people already buy games on Mac? Most of these port projects were done 10 years ago, when Steam on Mac first released.

Except that has happened multiple times across the industry's history, specially on the consoles, it is a know business factor to take into account.

Console generations are a known quantity for both developers and consumers. A lot of people keep their old consoles around when they buy a new one.

You will never see Sony release a PS4 update that drops support for 2013-era PS4 games, at least not purposefully. If they did, people would be very mad.

Game consoles come and go, e.g. Saturn, Jaguar.

I did saw Sony drop the almost unused GL ES support on the PS 2.

Sure, but you're missing that it's worth the effort to maintain. Console platform sales are extremely healthy. Mac sales have never really been enough to support initial porting work, let alone continued investment.

I can only speculate as to each company’s intentions but I will say that it is not just a matter of “recompiling” to support 64-bit.

For example, one thing I noticed on the iOS side (when it went from 32-bit to 64-bit) is that pixel position rounding changed so you would see things like random one-pixel gaps where textures were previously adjacent, etc. These things add up, and a company might decide an older title is not worth fixing.

On the Mac side, the entire damned UI library was thrown out (Carbon), and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if games had been relying on it. That is a huge thing to just redo, and again I would not blame any game company for not bothering to spend the resources.

Adobe.

Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).

Once upon a time, I would have suggested Aperture as a Lightroom substitute, but funny thing about that...

There are a litany of lightroom competitors on macOS ATM: CaptureOne and Irridient Developer are probably my favourites, but there's also Luminar and a few I'm forgetting.

I suspect Apple's intent is to leverage the massive interest in game development on their other platform, iOS, to spur game development on Mac. This feels fairly evident with the Apple Arcade push and Catalyst allowing for relatively easy porting from iOS.

I doubt that Epic would have bothered targeting Metal in UE4 if it were macOS only. With it, building games for Macintosh for a great deal of developers is fairly trivial. Unity also targets Metal, as far as I am aware.

I expect developers to fully abandon the Mac now.

It sucks because I feel like gaming on the Mac was actually quite nice for a bit. With Steam/Source running on Mac you actually had a good run where you could play a lot of great games. I remember being so excited to play TF2 on the Mac.

The only games worth developing on the Mac are the 99¢ style iOS games. Anything else just isn't worth it, as developers have been burned too many times now. Just a matter of time before Apple makes it mandatory to use some technology or drops support for something that's currently required and everything has to be updated.

It's back to running games in a VM for me. Not the worst thing, really.

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