Skyrim on Mac When? | Hacker News Reader

Skyrim on Mac When?

skyrimonmacwhen.com

Hey HN! And welcome to a hill I'm willing to die on.

I've been teaching myself basic HTML/JS/CSS to begin my webdev journey and this is the first project I've put together.

It was recommended to me to make a project I'm passionate about so that I'm motivated to keep learning and get something real out there.

Well here it is: SkyrimOnMacWhen.com!

Its been far too long since Skyrim came out for there to be no release for the Mac. We've had ports for everything! PS3/4/5 Xbox360/One/XS, hell even Alexa got a port...

As a Mac user who has to carry around a laptop for work anyway, it would be great to have a port to macOS, as their target base is at least as big as some of the other ports that got attention.

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Quick FAQ:

* Why did you choose Potential User Base as a metric, why not <X>?

I thought about it for exactly 30 seconds and made a choice. This is more effort than Bethesda Softworks put in to making Skyrim on the Mac

* Why did you use <Y> as a data source, or choose <Z> timeframe? I think <A>, <B>, or <C> would be better

It turns out its _really_ hard to find true sales data for various consoles, PCs, etc. At least for free, via Google. If you have a good source, please lmk.

* Why does your CSS look so bad?

I'm so bad at design thinking I could screw up a stick figure

* Why didnt you use <X> technology to make your site?

I started learning web dev like two weeks ago, between a full time job and a sub par social life I'm trying to keep going. I havent had time to learn anything else.

* Who hurt you..?

A lot of people, but Bethesda Softworks mostly

Use a framework like Bootstrap or Bulma, your website will look ten times better with no effort. But cool project!

Nah this page load instantly for me, I like it. All Bootstrap websites look the same to me.

Bootstrap sites are also loading instantly. If you prefer a basic html from 1990, you are not the average user.

Doubtful, especially on a 3G/4G connection. You're not an average user if you're on a Gigabit connection running the latest CPU

Defeats the purpose of the project.

Nice website! Programming is the most fun when you're applying it to something you personally care about, so you're in a great position already.

if you wanted something fun to do server-side, you could calculate #skyrimCounter and bake it into the html rather than displaying a noscript error

But either way, thank you for using noscript only for the counter and not to blank out the entire page! So many websites these days don't load at all without JavaScript.

The potential user base for skyrim on macOS is much lower because there simply isn't a large user base of gamers on Mac platforms.

Mac users of Steam represent 2.45% of the total user base in the following survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

That's a circular argument. No content or support is the reason there are very few Mac gamers.

There are an awful lot of people out there who have a Mac and play games on other platforms and devices. Probably even people who bought a pc just to be able to play games on it.

>That's a circular argument

It is not. Many developers have tried and stats have shown the cost of porting Games to Mac, as well as maintaining it with each macOS changes were not sustainable with its revenue generation. That is at least for Games coming from console or PC.

This may change if those Games come from Mobile Platform.

I mean you say that, but for Linux the figures were very similar -- perhaps worse, until Valve put work into Wine and developed tech like, e.g. Proton

True, but with the Steam Deck it was obvious why Valve did that -- they weren't doing it to be nice to Linux users (although they've benefited) but because they wanted to use Linux (and avoid the Microsoft tax) on their consoles. There's no benefit to them for improving Mac gaming. In fact, the Mac Steam experience has been getting worse as many games (including many of Valve's own) only have 32-bit ports to the Mac which do not run on current versions of MacOS.

It's a vicious cycle, not a circular argument.

It's the main reason why Windows failed to catch on in the mobile market space. And yes, their constant changes to APIs didn't help, but that's the reason their lack of content started in the first place.

It's a vicious cycle that can only be broken by huge investments and trade deals from Apple. They're trying to get games back on the platform: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/apple-gaming-updates/

However, they're doing so relying on their upscaling tech from the get go. They're also marketing this exclusively for ARM Macs, which are still the minority out there. Perhaps in another couple of years the cycle will be broken, but Apple has historically been quite dismissive of gaming on Mac for anything but "casual" games.

With Apple’s switch to Intel, there was much more support for porting games to Mac. Unfortunately, since Apple overpriced commodity Intel hardware, Macs were noticeably underpowered especially when compared to PC desktops, which was made even slower due to the lack of video card options. It made no sense to play games on a slower system. And that is how the idea of playing non-iOS games on a Mac died.

I am happy to use PCs for games, while using Macs for everything else.

To make matters worse the Mac ports were often not as optimized as the PC versions often leading to worse performance than the PC version on the same hardware. And before Steam started selling Mac versions they were often more expensive and several months old. I distinctly remember seeing SimCity 4 as a "new" release for Mac in the local Mac shop for over twice the price of what I had paid for it on PC a few months prior WITH the expansion pack.

Maybe there’s a market for a company that specializes in porting, maintaining, and updating PC ports. Maybe even a Marketing that markets Mac Studio performance if it’s good enough. If the company is successful enough perhaps a deal can be made with Apple.

That company has existed for well over a decade now. It’s Aspyr. While they’re still at it, even they know that it’s not going to lead to anything big.

Two such companies: Feral Interactive as well.

My memory might be off, but I think they’re the same company. Aspyr might have purchased them a while back

I’ve been wondering how hard it would be to port(?) proton to the mac? Surely theres a version of the vulkan api available for macs?

Not just optimizations to blame, MacOS shipped with an extremely outdated OpenGL and Apple refused to update it. This caused many projects to drop support for MacOS entirely.

Apple have made it clear they don't want games on MacOS. They have not updated the OpenGL for way too long and it's missing any of the modern extensions. There is MoltenVK thankfully but none of that thanks goes to Apple who only push for Metal.

I think the metric is only supposed to represent the absolute maximum possible users. Otherwise one could also say that many people only use their PlayStations to play FPS’s or that a large portion of Switch users are children that wouldn’t purchase Skyrim etc etc.

Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy though, isn't it? If there aren't enough games, there won't be enough gamers. I would like to be able to use my mac as a gaming platform but the games I want to play there simply don't work on it, so I mostly use a console and have no incentive to build up a game library on it.

I wonder if that went down after macOS Catalina, where Apple removed 32-bit x86 app support and nearly every game in the Steam catalog available for the Mac became unplayable overnight. That’s when I decided to give up and build a gaming PC. Maybe others came to the same conclusion.

Yeah I had a Mac at the time and had to chose between updating to Catalina to play the newest Tomb Raider or lose access to a huge swath of my Steam games. Not a great choice.

I remember playing Skyrim on Mac through wine in 2013. I think the situation has actually gotten quite a lot worse now and I’m not sure it’s even possible anymore.

Obviously no-one games on mac, because Skyrim isn't on it!

A chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs.

I think it’s safe to say that Steam stats undercount the potential size of the Mac gaming market. There are a few reasons for this:

- The trailing effect of Apple’s underpowered Intel Macs. For many years the average Mac was an Intel MacBook Air, which never had a hope of running many contemporary games.

- As a result, few developers tried to target Macs, which meant Steam felt like a bit of a ghost town for Mac users.

- Store fragmentation with the App Store and Apple Arcade.

I think given the switch to Apple Silicon, and the fact that Apple platform users are typically willing to pay money for things, that the potential revenue share from Mac users could be a lot higher than 2.45% of the PC gaming market if the games were there.

EDIT: I do think that unless Apple does something more to jump start gaming on their platforms that it will never reach its potential. I think they should acquire some studios and pay for exclusives like their competitors do.

Apple's removal of 32-bit support has significantly reduced the number of games which are natively available for newer Macs.

Many users aren't going to go through the effort/expense of working around this.

That’s a good point. A poor commitment to backwards compatibility on Apple’s part hasn’t helped. However, I assume they did it to smooth the transition to Apple Silicon. On the long view Apple Silicon is going to be a bigger benefit than the ability to run old games.

On MacOS Mojave before Catalina ended support for 32 bit binaries I was surprised how many Steam titles were downloadable as Mac native. I'd say almost 20% of my library was downloadable for MacOS which impressed me a lot. Steam was the best thing for MacOS gaming, Catalina was the worst. Now that Apple are moving to ARM expect the library to shrink further.

I mean isn't that simply a self fulfilling prophecy? There are no gamers because there are no games. In fact 2.45% is MUCH larger then I expected.

More than that, the combined Mac userbase is smaller than PS3, and only slightly larger than Xbox360, and would require targeting multiple hardware platforms, including different CPU architectures and various GPUs, with non-standard graphics APIs.

As a game dev, I would struggle to target MacOS over even Linux with the Steam Deck now becoming available.

Just because there are 89 million macs out there doesn't mean there are 89 million mac gamers out there. If you've got the money to buy a mac, you've probably got the money to buy a games console for your gaming needs.

Macs just aren't a popular gaming platform. I'm sure there's a vicious cycle there about how the lack of games cause a lack of gamers, but still.

Steam publishes their hardware survey. About 2.45% of Steam installs are on Mac. 58% of those users are still on Intel. With 5-10% of OS market share that means that mac users are twice to four times less likely to want to game compared to Windows users, and most PCs in the world definitely don't run Steam.

There's also the performance problem: Macs come with high resolution displays and comparatively bad GPUs. The Intel Iris GPUs aren't bad, but they're no gamer powerhouse. The ARM chips are a lot better, but they're still crushed by any dedicated GPU in most similarly priced computers, especially in laptops. Their excellent AI+transcoding support blowing PC out of the water doesn't help when you want to render a game.

My expectation would be that a port of modern Skyrim (the re-release with signiciant bumps to the graphics) would result in a stuttery mess on most Apple users with an interest in gaming. I'm sure the original release would play fine, but giving Mac users the inferior version probably wouldn't go down well. Yes, the new Macs have been demoed to show some very graphically intense games, but if their Tomb Raider demo was anything to go by, the graphical fidelity of the new models still leaves much to be desired, especially for such an expensive device.

Lastly, there's the fact that Microsoft bought Bethesda. They've been working hard at making Xbox Game Pass a thing, unifying Windows and Xbox where they can. With the absolute defeat in performance per watt that Apple brought to the desktop space, I think it would only hurt Microsoft to invest time into making Mac a more viable gaming ecosystem. They can't ignore the gaming market when it comes to the PS5 or Switch, but why invest in bringing a new competitor to the market?

I know Skyrim has been ported to pretty much any device, but with the small amounts of Mac gamers, the relatively slow GPU in most Macs, and the whole OpenGL/Metal situation, I don't see how it would make sense for Bethesda to ship Skyrim to Mac.

The whole OpenGL versus Metal situation doesn’t help in porting games to macOS. Also, Crossover ports no longer work. Getting a nice console has been my solution for gaming.

That's what I do, got a PS5 direct from Sony and am playing Skyrim on there now with a M1 Mini for compute.

I love this and I hope someone at Bethesda sees it. Unfortunately, I think the odds of Bethesda releasing anything for non Microsoft platforms in the future is approaching zero.

It is an interesting development that AAA gaming is becoming nearly an all first party affair with the acquisitions and consolidation that have happened over the past couple of years. We are already at the point where for the most part only indie games will be available cross platform.

As a gamer and an Apple fan, I’m vexed and puzzled that Apple isn’t doing more in games than Apple Arcade and milking iOS in app purchase. They finally have capable hardware with the transition to Apple Silicon (and this includes iOS devices), and their software stack is pretty good, but it’s tragically underutilized. Simply building a good platform and hoping the games will come isn’t enough in a world where your competitors buy up all of the game studios.

I'm a little surprised that Skyrim runs on Windows PCs and consoles as well as it does. Bethesda has such a reputation for releasing ambitious-but-buggy games, I half-expect the headline "after 11 years, Skyrim bug-fix patch released".

> Bethesda has such a reputation for releasing ambitious-but-buggy games

As far as I know, I've only played one game by Bethesda - Doom Eternal. It was also the only game I haven't found a single bug in. I'm more used to Ubisoft games, which are chronically buggy. Doom Eternal was a whole other level for me.

Instead of waiting for Skyrim (or other Beth titles) to be released for macOS, why not lend a hand to the OpenMW? Work is already underway in supporting later versions of NIF, so you can already use some Skyrim assets in OpenMW, support for reading ESM4 was recently introduced. We should have basic Skyrim "walking simulator" in a few releases.

Here is a PoC of Skyrim running in OpenMW, don't mind the Morrwind HUD for now, that will be dehardcoded. :)

https://youtu.be/oWPAGuPsQ4A

https://openmw.org

In the past most Macs sold were Macbook Airs or other Macs which only had integrated Intel graphics. These made Macs a less attractive market to develop games for as the games run poorly on them.

Now with the way more powerful graphics by default on the M1 chips, I expect way more games to come out in the future supporting Macs. Like how No Man's Sky is coming out for Mac in the fall. Also the unified memory on Apple Silicon will help a lot in game performance when the games are optimised to use it.

The whole OpenGL versus Metal situation doesn’t help in putting games to macOS. Also, Crossover ports no longer work.

Today, if you can stand 1080p, a ridiculously small bitrate, and using a gamepad: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming

Later this year, or whenever Microsoft upgrades xcloud if you’d like to actually enjoy playing it!

Nvidia GeForce Now is also an option if you already own the game on Steam

Sadly not, GFN is incredible but Microsoft/Bethesda removed it from that service 2 years ago or so.

GeForce Now is incredible, but some publishers like Bethesda removed all their games from it. I dunno why. It's really sad, because the catalog started out huge and gets smaller every year.

There's also https://shadow.tech/ that lets you run Steam in the cloud (any game you own, not limited to a subset). It's a lot more of a PITA to use and keep updated than xCloud or GeForce Now, though.

Considering that the game is 11 years old now, I doubt a macOS port would be worthwhile. Mac users who wanted to play Skyrim has likely already played it on PC or console.

I really liked the game, but I’m certainly not paying to play it again on my Mac when I already own on other platforms.

'Skyrim VR' potential user base links to an article on smart speakers. I also think it is very unlikely that there are 200M VR devices out there, but only 90M macs.

Good catch, fixed

Haha, genuinely curious, how did you end up linking to smart speakers instead of VR equipment?

Probably because of researching numbers for the skyrim alexa edition.

Careful what you wish for. I find that StarCraft Anthology — the original which was released for free, not the remastered version — is the app most likely to crash my 2020 MacBook. When devs put this stuff on many years after the fact as a sop to diehard fans, they don’t really have an incentive to do a good job on the implementation side. There is no reason that a 1998 game should crash a 2020 computer.

MacOS will never be a gaming platform. Apple has never shown any interest in making it one and compatibility has only gotten worse over time.

Apple is working with several games developers to get more games on Mac, although that could just be a way for them to boast how powerful their mobile-GPU-turned-desktop-GPU is.

See: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/apple-gaming-updates/

Skyrim runs fine on Proton

EDIT: my bad I guess Proton is Linux-only

Crossover fills a similar role for macOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRwkvrp2rBw

It's actually using DXVK here, the same D3D11-to-Vulkan wrapper used by Proton, so they must be stacking it on top of MoltenVK to go D3D11-to-Vulkan-to-Metal. Two levels of translation isn't ideal but it seems to get the job done.

It would work on MacOS too if apple hadn't made supporting 32 bits binaries so hard.

Apple needs first party Vulkan support. It would be a huge first step to making many modern games very functional on Mac.

It's somewhat of an open secret that Apple gave up on games maybe two or three decades ago. Halo was being developed exclusively for Mac before Bungie was acquired by Microsoft; gaming on Mac was on the low burner ever since.

Don't hold your breath for a Mac port then. Instead, take a look at the ridiculously long list of platforms for which Skyrim is available, and pick one.

To be fair, it takes like 20 minutes to setup a windows boot on a MacBook with Bootcamp. Windows runs smoother and less buggy on my Mac than any PC I’ve ever owned, and even AAA games run just fine. You’ll need a fan to keep an Intel MacBook cool though… those things are practically space heaters once you try to do anything useful.

FYI, not a native port, but you can already stream Skyrim in a browser: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/the-elder-scrolls-v-s...

The percentage of macOS users who want to play Skyrim and haven't already on a PC or console is probably pretty low. None of these demographics are mutually exclusive.

Besides, iOS pulls in more revenue for Apple than does Steam for Valve. Apple doesn't gain much by targeting gamers on macOS.

It works smoothly with high quality using CrossOver (wine) on my M1 MacBook pro from 2021.

I just play it on my Switch.

I picked up Skyrim for my Switch when it was on sale a month or two back and was very happy at how good a job they did with the port. Yes it is a 10 year old game but the Switch is 5 year old mobile hardware and weak harder at that so it wasn't a given it would be as good a port as it is.

Sure you don't get mods, etc. so it is just vanilla Skyrim but it is still a wonderful experience.

Of course I kinda want to try it on the Steam Deck now, I wonder how well it plays there with a bunch of QoL mods?

When it was released on PC I felt mods were essential. Largely because man that PC release version was a mess.

Now the Switch version is very bit of DLC or add on they've added and I can't think of anything I would want.

Cool stats! Being a long time Bethesda Softworks fan myself, I could see Todd Howard announcing a version of Skyrim for this website before it gets a Mac OS version. Skyrim JS of course!

Their engine barely runs on windows, expecting it to run at all on mac is a reach.

For reference, they’ve been patching up the same homebrew game engine for decades.

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