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Comment by npunt | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about game developers, but gamers are a low-margin, high-touch, low-satisfaction-score, garish-aesthetic, speeds-and-feeds market. Pretty much antithetical to Apple's core focus and I think they rightly avoid them. Despite personally wanting more games on Mac :)

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Also I feel like everyone is missing their AR/VR push right around the corner. VR headsets with these chips will be dramatically more powerful than other devices on the market. Combine that power with Apple product marketing, and devs will be there regardless of how much the Metal APIs suck.

Doesn't matter if apple didn't want any serious games on their mac platform. And it is for now afaik.

VR is happening on PC. Event the Quest2 has a PC link that expands its possibility many-fold, and you guessed it, it works only on PC.

Apple could come with its magic to take the field, but it’s been a while we saw them succeed in a market where a serious competitor is already expanding (voice assistants or the apple TV comes to mind). I’d love to be proven wrong, but won’t be holding my breath)

There is no “serious competitor” in VR/AR, because there is no market yet. The number of devices sold is miniscule. When AR/VR actually takes off, it’s going to look very, very different from what we have today.

Games on Apple will always be treated as 2nd class citizens. I don’t feel it will be any different on their new XR platform which is both good and bad because it’ll mean that we’ll have an XR device that the masses will finally accept if the price is right.

> low-margin

Really?

Have you missed the insane markups on anything 'gaming' related for many years?

Could you provide an example?

The AAA studios and titles filled with lootboxes and custom skins.

Ah, like that Genshin Impact game Apple was using in their iPad Air demo earlier today. Good example!

Compare any normal keyboard with 'gamer' models where the only difference is colored led...

At this point in time, basically any GPU.

What does high-touch market mean?

Want to be hands on and make customized modifications

So, hobbyists and hackers.

Entitled, difficult, immature, higher return & damage rate, undervalues 'just works', etc.

It's because they skew towards being children more. Apple already has a large children market via the iPad. "Serious games" on daddy's macbook pro and their iPads & apple TVs would further that stronghold. Games are their biggest money maker on the app store as it is, a real serious gaming department with 100-200 employees will pay for itself multiple times over. Apple arcade is another example. Apple Game Studios with first party games like nintendo would probably do better than Apple TV+ does today. They're alllllmost there.

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