Why Apple doesn't want you to play games on Mac | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple doesn't want you to play games on Mac

20 pointsbehnamoh24 comments

It's no secret that when it comes to gaming, Windows is the major player in town. But in the last few years, Linux has caught up thanks to Steam. I find it ironic that nowadays you can run more games on Linux than Mac!

What's the purpose of Metal and all the big announcements Apple made, then? It seems as though they don't __want__ users to play games on Mac. I mean, how hard is it to do what Linux did in terms of gaming compatibility on Steam?

iOS games are great and all, but no one wants to play silly iOS games on a big Mac screen.

View on HN

I think historically it was customers — it wouldn't bring new customers. It might make the existing customers happy, but I can't think of a segment of customers who are on the fence about a Mac because there aren't gaming options.

Nowadays, hardware. Apple Silicon is so far away from the existing gaming hardware (somewhat with regards to ARM, not discounting mobile devices, and the custom-built integrated GPU's with shared memory) that supporting games would add whole new complicated use-cases to their chip designs — to effectively reach no new customers.

All that said, the Game Porting Toolkit highlights that, for people to take their VR offering seriously, Apple has to take games, or at least their engines, seriously.

I'm skeptical it'll turn Apple into a gaming destination — but Apple Silicon is truly impressive and it would be a industry wide shock if they suddenly made gaming a key strategic direction.

> it would be a industry wide shock if they suddenly made gaming a key strategic direction.

It seems they did. https://www.macworld.com/article/1945978/game-porting-toolki...:

“One of the new developer tools for macOS Sonoma is a Game Porting Toolkit that is based on the CrossOver source code from CodeWeavers. Essentially, it takes the x86 code, DirectInput commands, XAudio commands, Direct3D commands, and other Windows gaming API calls and translates them in real time to the appropriate Apple Silicon stuff.

Yes, Apple has a developer tool that will literally let you run a modern, high-end Windows game on Mac without any recompiling or other changes.”

(AFAIK the license forbids you from using this to ‘port’ a game without any effort: it’s intended to be used to easily get an idea about how much work you’ll need to port your game)

> Apple Silicon is so far away from the existing gaming hardware (somewhat with regards to ARM, not discounting mobile devices, and the custom-built integrated GPU's with shared memory) that supporting games would add whole new complicated use-cases to their chip designs

My understanding of, say, a PS5 is that its architecture is the AMD x86 SoC version of apple Silicon: unified cpu/gpu/ram. If anything, the M2 units are closer to gaming consoles than anything else.

They literally had Hideo Kojima, one of the most celebrated game developers of all time, featured in the WWDC keynote.

How much would making gaming better help them? How much more in time and energy would make a difference in Mac sales? Windows has the market. What would a real, actually push for gaming buy them? They're a hardware company, not a software company.

Every time I want to play a game, I have to dismiss a few weasel-worded Edge adverts, and work around some asshole dark pattern trying to trick me into logging in to Microsoft account and agree to tracking. And I haven't even upgraded to Win 11 yet.

I'll happily burn Windows to the ground if Apple manages to make majority of Steam games work on their platform. I don't think it will happen, but it's nice to dream.

How do you do it? I'm also on Win 10, and every time I want to play a game, I just hit the Start button, type the game's name, press Enter, and the game launches (sometimes, there's a Steam update along the way, if Steam wasn't already running on my machine). Where do you get those dark patterns?

I have Firefox as default browser. You probably already have Edge and MS account.

They just pop up as "Finish setting up" screen when starting up. Or a floating search bar popped up in the middle of the desktop yesterday. Looks like a malware infection, but it's from Microsoft.

I think the search bar is actually a powertoys shortcut.

I have Chrome as default browser, and don't use Microsoft login on my Windows.

I don’t follow that Apple doesn’t want people to play games on Macs. Of course they do. But the question becomes “Do developers want to make games for the Mac?” And the answer has been “no” most of the time because it’s expensive to develop for a small platform. You won’t get a lot of sales out of it.

Apple just recently released a porting toolkit to make it easier to get Windows games running on macOS. Frankly, not unlike the work that Valve has put in to running Windows games on Steam.

In typical Apple fashion, they want you to do things their way. Instead of bolstering OpenGL (for instance) or Vulkan they developed Metal.

Apple does want games on the Mac, but games are a bonus for Apple at this point. They’re not going to define the platform, or drive adoption.

Apple is utilizing huge parts of the the linux-windows gaming stack, and clearly they see "gaming" as a huge use case for their headset. Game development also has lots of intersection with VR and other graphics/UI stuff (as Facebook is learning the hard way).

Apple is working on console class gaming even if they aren't focusing on it as much as their other efforts.

> clearly they see "gaming" as a huge use case for their headset.

do they though? not once did they mention gaming in their demo.

They supposedly will have a game mode in next major version: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/05/macos-14-game-mode/

Perhaps they were just not ready to demo any games. Trying to push games on Vision Pro would likely attract more attention than the other use cases they presented.

We may see more gaming announcements closer to the actual release. Rumor has a version of “No Man’s Sky” for Vision OS coming at launch.

The fact that Apple revealed the Vision Pro before any games were demo-ready is a strong signal that Apple doesn't treat gaming support as a major blocker.

Indeed, looking at Apple's product lineup and marketing, it's clear that they don't treat gaming as a primary concern. They are content with making devices that happen to run games, not making gaming devices.

That's not a smart take. While games are probably going to be important for Apple's XR products, it's not an area of strength for them. Apple does not talk about things they don't think they are the best at (they might and are often wrong!)

It would not be a good idea for Apple to lean into games with no credibility. They need to build that before they go hard with games.

Also, launch context is important. This was announced at a developer conference. There is no content or apps for it. They want to excite developers into creating some useful and engaging apps for their new platform. At this point, consumer interest is secondary.

Linking too closely to games excludes the massive, largely unaddressed non-game market. Linking to non-game content does not prevent a successful launch as a game platform later.

There is a thin line to walk between becoming a reimplementation of Windows API and getting developers to write native games.

Linux went for the former, and it became irrelevant for a developer points of view, why develop for Linux and Vulkan when your Windows game works good enough? Maybe it will change in the future and developers will start to write native Linux games, but at the moment they don't.

Apple chose the latter, and for now they hope to bring more developers to write native games. Maybe they will try a different strategy in the future, who knows.

Because Apple does not want anyone profiting off their platform without getting their cut, as that has been a significant factor in their rise to one of the wealthiest corporations ever in existence, and as well - none of the major game producers respect Apple well enough for their own game development efforts to want to cut the 30% checks that Apple demand. Apple simply haven't done enough to their platform to warrant that reward, I think, in the minds of many Game Company CEO's ..

Well this is largely due to the steam deck rather than desktop linux. But we also see linux popping up in pro audio inside of the current line of akai mpc its a small linux system with only 2 gigs of ram but its dedicated to only doing music. Apple's main competition isn't linux or windows its these dedicated devices with linux inside.

I think because gaming is demanding and it makes Apple too comparable, which may not be desirable.

When you compare battery life and performance of your macbook you are comparing hardware + software together, and Apple controls the whole vertical and can optimize in both. With huge GPUs there would be less margins and less opportunity for optimizations.

IMO Apple will never embrace gaming. The VR headset could be a success, but IMO not as a gaming device.

Traditionally DOS dominated the PC gaming market (Mac had some games but definitely could not compete), so naturally Windows inherited that dominance.

I think the issue is that the game developers don't develop for Mac because they see it as a small market compared to Windows and the consoles. Gaming laptops are a relatively recent development and I doubt that the MacBook keyboard would cope with the pounding that gamers would inflict.

Perhaps a M2 based AppleTV could become a console competitor but then it would probably cannibalize the Mac-mini marketshare.

What hardware would those game run on? M1 and M2 are great but can they run AAA desktop games? I doubt it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com