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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Very few people use Macs for gaming, and many of those that do probably just play Apple Arcade games (which I'm sure will have a smooth upgrade path). And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture. In Unity your game logic doesn't even need to compile to native code.

Even beyond games, the thing is that nearly every development platform these days is an abstraction above the hardware - be it the JVM, the web browser, etc - and the rest (of the new ones coming out) are built to be cross-platform from the get go. Just look at how smoothly Rust/Cargo can target different architectures. I'm sure the same is true for Go.

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> And most of the games people play that are on Steam are (these days) built with either Unity or Unreal, which will no doubt have 1-click-rebuilds for the new architecture.

I highly doubt that. The architecture difference is too big, and gaming studios are not known to press that button even if it's available. The native Linux gaming support story speaks to that. That they will port existing games is even more unlikely.

Will be funny to re-read that comment in the future, be it right or wrong.

The entire draw of Unity and Unreal is that they target all platforms. With regards to Linux, Epic Games has released their games for Linux in the past. There is no commercial incentive to release games for Linux, though. The game engines will support Mac ARM if game developers require that feature, and game developers will target Mac ARM if there is a commercial case for it.

The existence of gaming on Mac I think is largely due to companies that support it by choice, like Blizzard, and I don't see why they would abandon the platform due to a CPU architecture change.

I disagree with almost everything in this comment.

Unity and Unreal do not only exist for their multiplatform target, but because they are premade engines to make games with in general. Many games made with them support one single platform.

There is absolutely a commercial incentive to release Linux games. Developers would not do it otherwise, or at least they would have stopped after one try. They did not.

I highly doubt that Blizzard supports MacOS out of goodwill, and I doubt even more that if it was based on that, they could easily continue doing so after a cpu architecture change. They'd have to port whole custom engines plus middleware. That would not happen in that case.

One thing I assume is correct: If there is money to be made here engine developers and game developers will make it happen. But I don't see why it would be that easy.

Just giving you some data points, there are many people that play older games on their laptops, one such community is the Sims3 players, they got screwed when 32 bits support was dropped, some still hope EA will make a 64 bit soon (IMO it makes no sense for the devs to do the work for free for this old game).

So the people the play games on Mac are not the same group that play latest AAA shooters or arcade games, they are people that play some casual games or retro games on their laptops so no "hardcore gamers"

That’s not really “data points” in any useful sense of the word. The sim3 community could be a few thousand people - still large enough to be a community where this came up as a noticed issue, but not meaningfully large in any real sense as far as Apple is concerned.

Sure, I don't say that Apple should do X op Y. I just wanted to present some example of people that game on Mac, because some people in this HN forum would think that gaming means only latest AAA games or console gaming. There are people that don't have a dedicated gaming device, they are not that many as percentages but they exist and they are affected by the 32 bit drop and other backward incompatibility updates.

So it is possible that this people when they buy a new laptop would not buy an ARM Mac buy a Windows one to continue playing the casual or old games - sure Apple can ignore them because as percentages is nothing for their giant vault of money.

The story is admittedly different when we're talking about legacy games that are no longer supported. Even if pushing the button is easy, if there's nobody there to do it, that doesn't help.

But the good news it that game life cycles have gotten much longer; where in the past a game was seen as a fire-and-forget project, these days a game may get active updates for five or more years after launch. And not just AAA, but indies too.

Sometimes we do not need updates, we need existing old games to continue to work. Ubuntu tried also to drop 32bit support but the community responded strongly with use cases like games and some other old apps, then Canonical/Ubuntu listen and 32 bit support was partially dropped, 32 libraries needed for games and different apps are still supported.

Meanwhile I see Mac players upset their 32 bit games no longer work (like the Sims3 players and I also see some Mac users in r/winegaming ). Again Apple can do whatever they make them more money but for example gamers voice was heard in Ubuntu/Linux and Canonical did the work (for free) to continue supporting gamers.

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