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Comment by tpush | Hacker News Reader

Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform. Game consoles have unique APIs, yet both AAAs and Indies happily develop for those platforms. What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs.

Additionally, most Macs simply aren't gaming machines; they're mostly thin laptops or AIOs with very high resolution screens, meaning the GPU has less cooling headroom and has way more pixels to draw than pretty much all Windows machines that are used for gaming.

That makes the potential pool of users even smaller than it already is, so most of the time it doesn't make sense to develop games for the Mac.

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> Different graphics APIs aren't a reason not to develop for a platform.

> What matters is whether the prospective income from those platforms outweigh the additional dev costs.

Different APIs increase costs. If dev costs were lower for porting games, the platform would see more games.

Those different APIs are usually wrapped by game engines like Unreal Engine or Unity. Porting a game to a new platform is almost always a business decision, and the actual porting cost is minimal compared to marketing and (customer) support cost.

1) Porting costs are not per game but per engine, which can be shared between multiple games.

2) The majority of costs is ongoing support, not writing to a different API.

Disclaimer: I have done some amateur game development, nothing professional.

> 1) Porting costs are not per game but per engine, which can be shared between multiple games.

That's not true. Majority of the costs maybe, but every platform needs its own tweaks, if for nothing else input often very different in a way engine abstractions are usualy not good enough. And then there is DRM, and anti cheats etc, that are quite platform dependent.

In pretty much any engine there are games that work beautifully and games using same engine that are like trash on fire[1]. There is a reason nvidia and amd often have to release new driver with fixes/optimizations for new games.

[1]: I meant cross platform support (where they work decently on one platform but are trash on others), not that game as a whole itself being trash and or buggy.

> 1) Porting costs are not per game but per engine, which can be shared between multiple games.

True but they're still big enough that that cost is significant. Even when diluted across game budgets.

> 2) The majority of costs is ongoing support, not writing to a different API.

Ongoing support is still required for writing to a different API. Ongoing support involves (a) updating in line with API version changes and (b) updating API-integration abstractions in line with game engine API updates. Supporting multiple APIs adds at least some amount of friction to every code-change.

There's also the increase in cost of testing every engine code change across multiple graphics APIs.

I’ve never worked on a game where we didn’t have at least one rendering programmer who would be assigned to a particular platform, even with Unreal or Frostbite or whatever. Major titles will still write their own platform-specific shaders, they’ll still tweak and modify the game middleware, and they still incur a per-platform, per-api costs.

Apple silicon changes this. Macs have plenty of gpu power now for AAA games.

Indeed, and what will keep being even more true as apple silicon evolves and the PS5 and XSX stay the same for 5 years or so.

Likely related to this, I've heard that both Sony and Microsoft have approached apple about getting more games on their platform.

And a much better temperature story

> Game consoles have unique APIs

They also bend over backwards to get games on the platform and using those APIs despite that.

Yes, this is the big one. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have dedicated integration teams just for getting your specific game working on their platform. They might even release updates to their platforms to cater to what you want to do

Apple will update it's apple tv with a beefy graphics M chip. And enter the console gaming market well it's already in it but it will really start competing against Xbox and Playstation in the next couple of years.

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