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Comment by robby_w_g | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 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.

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.

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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