Apple is getting more serious about 3D and the gaming market, which isn’t surprising considering the market size.
Architecture makes that still icky, but MoltenVK running Proton (so DirectX to Vulkan to Metal) makes Fallout 4 and Titanfall run playable on M1 (with some graphics glitches). If there was real funding behind it they’d have a winner on their hands.
Counting the App Store service fee of 30% as "game revenue" is disingenuous, as then we could count every single Windows license sale and every single dollar of revenue from hosting game servers as "making money from games".
It was total revenue from App Store derived from Gaming Apps. I dont see how that is disingenuous. Just like Sony makes a cut from games on PS5.
When Apple has a total 0 input in making and marketing of said game and just charges for services - that's not revenue from games.
And if you want to put a bar that low - Google makes billions from ads for games, YouTube play alongs and other services purchased by game makers. Let's also no forget Starbucks revenues from all the game devs, that definitely counts as game revenue.
> Just like Sony makes a cut from games on PS5.
You do realize that all PS5 games get input and support from Sony, do you?
(Also - if you downvote, then don't bother replying)
Walmart dictates what gets put on their shelves. Should we throw them into this contest too?
I think people -- on both sides of this little mini-debate -- may be trying to carve out too fine a distinction. Insisting that it's only correct to say that a company makes money from games if the company is developing or publishing games suggests that GameStop doesn't make money from games -- a rather hard position to defend.
The reason why Walmart or GameStop wouldn't be counted in Game Revenue is because they belong to Retail segment. Even if they were to be counted I think retail label would have to be inserted somewhere.
Neither Walmart or GameStop contribute anything to the actual making of Games. They have added zero value to the making of Games in that value chain and act as distribution only ( and arguably discovery in terms of foot traffic ). Since Retail is a clearly defined term, It is perfectly valid to suggest ( Apple's ) App Store as similar to Walmart and GameStop. But I dont think anyone would agree Apple == App Store. Apple as a Platform ( providing tools and support ) Apple as a Publisher ( Buy apps from you and resold to their customers ) and Apple as a Distributor ( App Store ).
It is all about the value creation and where the cuts are taken. It is also the reason why most of the debate about Apple becomes pointless where these aren't clearly defined in the argument. Although Judge Rogers seems to be able to dissect all of these in a very clear manner.
They did help us out when we ran into issues with the dev tooling, but then so does Apple.
Source: I was lead engine dev on a couple of mid-cycle PS2 games.
Apple also is taking open source more seriously .
Recently I had a need for a CAD program and rediscovered how insanely expensive commercial 3D software is for the average person.
Sure, many companies now offer monthly subscriptions, but even those subscriptions are ginormous for the amount of relative value returned. Like, do I really want to pay $220 a month for AutoCAD when I only need to design a part for a non-commercial personal project every so often? I'm sure even a lot of small companies secretly pirate such software, especially if they are relying on something like Solidworks. I really don't know how anyone affords that package.
And yes, there are sometimes free student editions of these packages, but unlike 15 years ago it's tough to get a hold of them without an email from an academic institution the company has verified.
In my case, I was looking at AutoCAD because FreeCAD is... well, pretty terrible as a n00b. From what I can tell it works very differently in many ways from standard CAD applications. It's good for converting between formats, but it's not at all intuitive and seemingly minor actions with nothing but a cube in the workspace can cause it to go into a tizzy and completely freeze.
EDIT: Ultimately I ended up using OpenSCAD.
Commercial 3D software isn't even necessarily better, though. I know I yakked on about CAD, but I have a sort of background in Animation and used Autodesk Maya for many years, which would be the closest direct competitor to Blender. Dear lord, what a disaster of a software package. Granted, I haven't used it since the 2018 edition, but it's astoundingly bad in many areas. The main reason it's so widely used is that it's established and is capable of just about anything. The downside is that, like AutoCAD, the slightest breeze can make it crash unexpectedly. Anyone smart will save their scenes in ASCII format because who knows, something might go wrong during the saving process that makes your scene unable to open when you reboot Maya, and looking through the text-version of your scene may be the only way to fix or recover anything. That's not even all of it. And Maya is also very expensive. Unless you are a student, the only way to use Maya on a hobbyist level is to pirate it.
Having switched entirely to Blender, although there's things about it that I still find unintuitive, it's a breath of fresh air having come from Maya. Unlike Maya, it's rare that anything I do will cause Blender to freeze or crash. The default viewport rendering not only looks better than Maya's "viewport 2.0" but just seems snappier.
What I don't like about Blender is that it tries to do too much IMO. Does Blender really need a video editor and to clutter up the UI with references to it? Not specifically related, but what's with the way that modifiers work? It's kind of like Maya's "history" except it's both better and worse. Unlike Maya, you can actually change the order of how modifiers are applied. But modifiers are really only good for specific things. In Maya, the history of an object is far more generalized.
But overall, I want to see Blender succeed and maybe, just maybe knock things like Maya down a peg, even if it takes another 20 years.
I use Blender these days mainly for direct manipulation of meshes in ways that a parametric CAD program won't let you. If I was doing character animation again, I'd probably still use Blender for that. General modeling, Blender is very good. I just hope the UI continues to improve and not obscure so many things behind various icons.
It is amazingly capable but for those who want a tool to do one job well it would seem like hell.