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Comment by PeterCorless | Hacker News Reader

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PeterCorless

"I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight."

Obv someone doesn't shop on Steam.

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I do, and being a Mac user on Steam sucks. Epic is even worse.

Apple doesn't seem to be particularly worried about it.

For all the hate dumped on Mac as being a "toy" computer, it is a terrible gaming computer. I use it to do work.

Oh yeah, I can't even run Steam anymore (because they require 10.11 or newer) so I can't play any of the hundreds of games that WOULD run on my machine, because the downloader (Steam) can't run... :)

My x86 Macbook Pro has been just extraordinarily capable, dual-booting Windows and using an eGPU has been great for gaming. Maybe some of this will survive through virtualization if we can assign eGPUs to virtual machines.

Valve doesn't seem particularly worried about it either. Steam's macOS support has always felt like an afterthought -- they've put more effort into supporting the miniscule number of users on Linux (through efforts like Proton) than macOS.

From my understanding it's because Valve really wants to directly interact with Apple as infrequently as possible.

I tried so hard to be a gamer on macOS, and I kept telling myself it would eventually get better. But I had to give up. You can't even turn off mouse acceleration, which is a bare-level requirement for RTS games like StarCraft.

There's something about an OS that won't let me decide how my mouse works that just irked me to no end. For a while there was some sketchy kernel extension you could pay $20 for to kill the acceleration, but even that stopped working.

Considering that 80% of mac games got axed with the removal of 32bit support, and approximately 100% of the remaining with the ARM transition, id say they don't use Steam at Apple either.

x86 games will run under emulation on ARM hardware.

Not well, of course. Just passably.

That's not something we know at this point. All that we know is that Apple has demonstrated a game running acceptably well on their current development hardware. Performance is likely to improve in production versions of the OS, and/or with production hardware.

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