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Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

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"

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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.

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.

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