Comment by lmedinas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmedinas | Hacker News Reader

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I partially agree with you, the problem is not technical, although using the most famous and portable APIs definitely helps gaming companies porting and making their games available for MacOS or iOS.

But i guess the main 2 problems are:

1) Not enough Mac users which would be significant for a AAA gaming company to port their games on day 1 and get profit.

2) Apple has not taken yet gaming seriously, maybe because they have not seen a viable business model for gaming. I guess here this could change as Apple is slowly putting their feet on it with Apple Arcade (which is definitely not going to bring hardcode gamers), making iOS a good gaming platform (device stability, good GPUs and good support for 3rd party controllers) now its the first time most popular Macs are getting a good GPU. Perhaps also this is one of the reasons why they are blocking Cloud gaming.

> 1) Not enough Mac users which would be significant for a AAA gaming company to port their games on day 1 and get profit.

I am a huge apple portable fan Macs, iPhones, iPads etc. However like a lot of people who casually play video games I also have a Switch and a PC with a nice RTX 2070.

Apple is dead last on my chain of gaming machines. A lot of people I know with Macs also have a console or PC that serves as the gaming machine(s).

I'm probably wrong, but I also imagine there's a good amount of that just use Bootcamp with Windows. Which adds to the Windows players stats over macOS, yeah?

I wonder if M1 could possibly change this since (atm) you can't bootcamp Windows. Not only that, but the m1 iGPU seem way more capable on entry level Macs over Intel's iGPU.

> although using the most famous and portable APIs

That would be D3D11 (most famous/used at least) ;) Metal is actually quite similar to D3D11 (or rather a hypothetical D3D11 successor if Mantle wouldn't have happened, which in turn heavily influenced D3D12 and Vulkan). If you have a D3D11 backend in your engine, a Metal backend is fairly easy to derive from this.

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