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Comment by natly | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity to make games for the mac. You can make decent things with a month turnaround if you're proficient and there's a lot of mac users. If they're this desperate it might be a lower hanging fruit than a lot of other SaaS type ideas that you could try to tackle for a side hustle.

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My partner and I tried for 20 years starting around 1992-ish and released several games that all ended up being basically failures. The biggest thing is that Apple loves deprecation, so we found ourselves having to rewrite everything every 3 years or so, meaning it was all engine work and very little actual storytelling/art/plot/whatever. And it's not just us - the vast majority of the apps and games on my hard drive no longer run.

Personally, I don't endorse any vendor lock-in. If I ever make another game, it will target Steam and whatever Unity or the engine of choice cross-compiles to, maybe Oculus and a few others.

Also mobile ended up being a disaster on multiple fronts. I truly feel that software development lost its magic around the time that iOS and Android forced everyone to use Objective-C and Java. Which also undermined web development because vendors stopped solving actual problems in the browser and passed the buck to frameworks. Now we have the perception that stuff like Electron is somehow bad, which is like saying that higher education or any other quest for a better future is bad. The glorification of ignorance has passed the point of believability.

And yes, I'm a bit saddened that I spent the most productive programming years of my life chasing a dream that didn't pan out. But, I also feel that the world is waking up out of whatever this malaise we've been in is. There's arguably more opportunity to earn a living making software now than ever before.

Just remember that the next recession starts right when you finish your software project, so embrace that idea and build it anyway.

I don't think there's any market. The only people who buy macs are people that have no intention of playing videogames on that system.

I personally transitioned from Windows -> Linux -> MacOS, and each switch correlated exactly with how much I was playing videogames at that time. I don't play games anymore which is why I'm perfectly content using a mac. If I wanted to play games again I would go back to linux, or all the way back to windows.

For niches like stragey games there's actually a surprisingly high level of support for macOS on Steam. Just don't expect the latest AAA game console ports.

> Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity to make games for the mac.

M1 Macs can run the extensive iOS game library. While you won't find many AAA Windows or console games on it, there is no lack of entertainment on the platform.

Back in PowerPC days, there used to be a company that would port popular game titles to OS X a few years after they were released for Windows.

I don't remember their name or know whether they're still around, but I believe that at least on Intel Macs, Wine/Crossover have already claimed that niche, and it seems like there are some promising efforts to go on on Apple Silicon (with a combination of Wine system call translation/reimplementation and Rosetta 2 CPU architecture emulation).

I think you’re thinking of Aspyr, and they are still around: https://www.aspyr.com/

Mac folks that want to game just use GeForce Now.

Halo: Combat Evolved was originally a Mac game, before MS bought Bungie. Bungie's earlier games were released on Mac first (and maybe only; I don't recall). Myst was a Mac only game for a few years after its release in 1993.

Yeah, Bungie started off as a Mac-only shop.

They had some really good games (for the time. They would be a bit old-fashioned, these days). I liked the Marathon games (I think they open-sourced them, and you can actually run them, nowadays).

I know that they started developing Halo as a Mac-only game, but didn't realize that they had shipped it, as such, before being borged.

They didn't, the Mac version of CE is a port of the PC port, shows the Gearbox logo on startup.

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