Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alwillis | Hacker News Reader

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It's ironic that Apple devoted a chunk of its WWDC keynote on gaming on the Mac. I’m not a gamer but apparently Resident Evil Village is coming to the Mac and folks are excited about that [1].

It's not that Apple doesn't want games on macOS—they do. Now that nearly their entire product line is running on Apple Silicon with their GPUs, Metal is the best way to write game code that can run on Macs, iPads and iPhones.

From their press release [2]:

Metal 3 — the latest version of Apple’s graphics framework — comes with new features that enable game developers to tap into the power of Apple silicon for even greater gaming performance. MetalFX Upscaling enables developers to quickly render complex scenes by using less compute-intensive frames, and then apply high-quality spatial upscaling and temporal anti-aliasing. The result is accelerated performance that makes games feel more responsive and graphics that look stunning. Game developers also benefit from a new Fast Resource Loading API that minimizes wait time by providing a more direct path from storage to the GPU, so games can easily access high-quality textures and geometry needed to create expansive worlds for realistic and immersive gameplay.

Game developers that integrate with Game Center can now add Activity views into the dashboard, making it possible for their users to see which games their friends are playing and their high scores. And with SharePlay support, it’s easier than ever for users to play together in real time.

[1]: https://youtu.be/q5D55G7Ejs8?t=4867

[2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/06/apple-provides-develo...

> Metal is the best way to write game code that can run on Macs, iPads and iPhones.

This is true: but Apple also shot themselves in the foot here. My understanding is that Apple Silicon GPU cores are designed differently from traditional PC/console hardware, and closer resembles a phone's instruction pipeline. So, yes, Metal will inherantly optimize for it better, but Apple also deliberately chose to go in the opposite direction of the gaming industry. Expecting developers to drop everything to optimize for a platform that will represent a fraction of their sales (minus 30% of course) is pretty unreasonable, and I think Apple knows this (and concedes here). Metal is not made for meticulously optimized gaming releases, it's a high-level interface designed for mobile-first applications.

> Expecting developers to drop everything to optimize for a platform that will represent a fraction of their sales (minus 30% of course) is pretty unreasonable

The same thing has been said about Apple over and over throughout the years. Apple plays the long game. If they want to get more involved in gaming, it's built into their roadmap, and we'll see it manifest itself in the coming years.

I don't think macOS market share is the right fraction to look at. As iOS and iPadOS continue to evolve, they will continue to eat the PC market, and more and more games will be released mobile-first. Building for those devices is far more lucrative.

I personally think the Apple TV is the dark horse here. All Apple needs to do is release a next-gen Apple TV that has enough horsepower to run current-gen games, and suddenly Apple is competing in the console market.

Investing the time to optimize for Metal will give devs access to far more than just the Mac market.

> The same thing has been said about Apple over and over throughout the years.

And it hasn't really been wrong? Try booting up any Mac game from the 2010s on Apple Silicon; there's a 90% chance it depends on a 32-bit library Apple won't give you anymore. MacOS just hasn't proven to be a great platform for game development, and that's fuelled by Apple's constant desire for constant architectural reform and perpetual yak-shaving. That's fine, and it works well for some applications, but it makes for a pretty lousy target for gamedev.

Apple plays with their cards held to their chest, so I agree with you that they're playing the long game. They already own the casual gaming market (and profit handsomely from it), and they seem perfectly satisfied to ignore everything else. Long-term though, I don't see how Apple can make any of their devices attractive gaming consoles without bringing a legacy of PC/console titles with it. I guess all that remains to be seen, though.

> I personally think the Apple TV is the dark horse here. All Apple needs to do is release a next-gen Apple TV that has enough horsepower to run current-gen games, and suddenly Apple is competing in the console market.

That's a fairly grounded argument, but I still don't see a carrot at the end of the stick for game developers here. Sure, casual games will be easy to port, and what few native MacOS titles remain will be easy enough too, but why would studios like EA or Ubisoft port their games? Why would indie productions with limited time dedicate resources to ensuring Metal compatibility? I see no appeal, and I bet Apple knows that it's a pretty raw deal too. It will be interesting to see if they respond to this.

> Investing the time to optimize for Metal will give devs access to far more than just the Mac market.

You're right, but all of this hinges on whether or not developers want to pay the Apple tax and deal with the constantly changing ecosystem. That comes at a cost, one that's greater than dumping a game on PC or releasing a title for a console. Maybe the scales are turning in Apple's favor, but the momentum of the current gaming ecosystem seems to not care.

> Try booting up any Mac game from the 2010s on Apple Silicon; there's a 90% chance it depends on a 32-bit library Apple won't give you anymore.

The funny thing is... you know what does work on Apple Silicon? Wine, using 64-bit Windows binaries, DXVK, and a Vulkan to Metal wrapper. Don't expect stunning results on a just-released title like Elden Ring, but there's a project called XIV on Mac for an old title, FF14, that has at least proved to me that it can be done.

CodeWeavers has done an amazing job getting Wine gaming functional on macOS, but it looks like they’ve been fighting the platform every step of the way.

32-bit games have terrible performance because 32-bit support has had to be reimplemented in Wine.

DirectX 12 games (such as Elden Ring) don’t even boot, and likely won’t run at all for another year or two. Metal has been missing major functionality utilized by the vast majority of DirectX 12 games such as Elden Ring. The Metal 3 improvements announced the other week should go a long way towards making this actually possible, though.

> You're right, but all of this hinges on whether or not developers want to pay the Apple tax

I don’t know what the rate for console game releases, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say it was less than Apple’s take. So if the Apple tax was a problem, there wouldn’t be any console games.

Apple has tried the strategy you suggest several times, and it's gone well enough that you didn't know that

Apple has had less success in gaming with more effort than even Google stadia

They seem like they’ve had plenty of success on mobile.

The casual gaming market and the enthusiast market are two distinct classes of users, and Apple has long neglected the latter. That's a perfectly fine (and lucrative!) business decision, but the point still stands: Apple doesn't really do gaming.

> Apple doesn't really do gaming.

They do, just the casual gaming market. Which is gaming. They don’t do all gaming, but nobody does.

This is true: but Apple also shot themselves in the foot here.

Perhaps you missed this headline: "Apple earns more from gaming than Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Activision combined" [1].

Like someone posted, Apple plays the long game; the economics are making it so that if you're a game developer, you have to deal with Apple, like it or not.

[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/03/apple-earned-more...

> Expecting developers to drop everything to optimize for a platform that will represent a fraction of their sales (minus 30% of course) is pretty unreasonable

Capcom must have their reasons, and it would be interesting to know what they are. Perhaps they were already targeting iOS. Or perhaps Apple paid them to make a macOS version. Or perhaps they're just experimenting to see whether making a macOS game is worth it.

Realistically though Apple has tons of game developers already, including well-known companies like Capcom, on iOS.

The path of least resistance is not convincing Windows game developers to develop for macOS (this is a losing battle as you note), but to make it as easy as possible for iOS game developers to flip a switch and get additional sales on macOS.

> So, yes, Metal will inherantly optimize for it better, but Apple also deliberately chose to go in the opposite direction of the gaming industry.

Vulkan runs just fine on phones. MoltenVk on macOS sometimes runs things faster than the native Metal port since the Vulkan port is likely to be far better optimized.

Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12 have pretty much converged to roughly the same architecture.

Apple could switch to Vulkan. Valve has already demonstrated this by funding MoltenVK.

Apple chooses not to play nice. This is 100% purely the fault of Apple.

>This is true: but Apple also shot themselves in the foot here

A 2.2T company doesn't usually do that. It's all about the lock-in they get with Metal games that won't run on non-Apple hardware. And incentivizing PC game devs to learn Metal to target Macs and eventually iOS where they take 30% of all gaming revenue. They don't give a crap about Mac users being able to run new or old games because they make no money from it.

Apple has nothing to sell in that space from a hardware-design perspective. Is there even a M-series machine with a PCI-Express x16 slot?

There's also probably both NIH and price problems with GPUs. They clearly want to go for full Apple Silicon designs, but they have no answer to today's high-end GPUs. Even if the brought a "Geforce killer" to market, they'd have an uphill battle of proving compatibility and earning trust (compare Intel Xe). So to be competitive, they'd have to offer an existing trusted premium GPU at least in the near term. That either means selling a normal Radeon or Geforce with little markup, or adding enough of an Apple Tax that it makes the whole endeavour uneconomical.

I am curious though if it has an impact on higher-margin sales. I could see people saying "I have a $2000 budget, and I want to play games as well as use MacOS... I can buy a fairly kitted out Mac that won't game, or I can buy the cheapest Mac Mini and a $1200 gaming PC to sit next to it."

Apple has just started designing GPUs. Who knows if they are able to make massive leaps in the GPU space like they did in the CPU space.

Apple's GPUs are great, at least on the cheaper products. The M1's GPU provides 1050-like performance in a 9w power envelope, which is pretty damn impressive.

But the last 30 years of PC gaming hasn't been optimized for ARM and tile-shading. And likely, anything in the near future targeting PC or home console isn't either. So, whether or not Apple's hardware is up to the task is irrelevant: their architecture and software stack isn't ready for cross-platform development. Apple dug their moat, now everyone has to deal with it.

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