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Comment by an_opabinia | Hacker News Reader

> What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware?

It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs.

Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market.

Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already support Metal on iOS. However Switch games sell for $50+, already higher than PC or macOS titles, so it's usually pretty bad economics - you'd rather the user buy on their Switch than their Mac.

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Curious why you think it's the death of pc gaming, unless you just mean Mac gaming

He means to say 'death of PC gaming on a Mac' because some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers" (and not mainframes which is what the distinction is for).

> some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers"

If you call a Mac a PC, you'll only confuse your interlocutor. No-one ever refers to Macs as "PC", except to point out that "Macs are 'Personal Computers'".

Over here, we just call them all 'computers'.

"PC" comes from the "IBM PC" which was the first MS/Intel computer. Then clones arrived, also called "IBM PC Compatible" because they were compatible with the IBM PC. Then we ended up calling them simply PC, and that was in comparison to Macs, but also Atari, Amiga, Amstrad etc. computers.

Some people forget the "I am a PC, I am a Mac" ads.

I suspect it was sarcasm. Overwatch is Blizzard's new flagship, and the first game by them to not run on Mac (Hearthstone did). They'll Soon (tm) release Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2, so we'll have to see what they're going to support with that.

Apple should just support valve with proton(wine). This would enable 90% of all Windows games on the Mac.

CrossOver runs on macOS just fine, including Apple Silicon macs.

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