Valve says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS not happening, there aren't enough players
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
The days of this being relevant are probably numbered though, because at some point we will lose Rosetta. But I'm going to enjoy Antichamber [1] on my mac while I can.
Valve seems to be making a pretty strong effort to distance itself from working with that engine where possible (though it's unclear if their lagging tentpole title Team Fortress 2 will get the Source 2 treatment)
It's possible that rebuilding these games for 64-bit Macs specifically would encounter an undesirable amount of bugs
Sure there are minor bugs like flashlight in HL2 not working correctly.
But IMO Valve just don't care about macOS to assign even one engineer to fix this and compile the new binaries.
Q1
I occasionally get the itch to surf or kz and boot up CSGO on my M1 Mac to do so.
It's just more convenient for me to do this on my laptop, rather than to slug over to my desk to use my windows desktop that I rarely boot up.
I tried doing the same with CSS, but because it's 32bit, it is no longer supported on macOS.
I'm assuming this is a similar feeling that Overwatch players went through when their game got replaced with something that they no longer enjoy.
Obviously Valve ran the numbers and I'm clearly in the minority, but man this just doesn't feel good. There will be more Mac players if more games support it, so this feels like a step backwards and is a negative feedback loop (just like others in this thread are also saying.)
Apple has a gaming strategy. iPhone makes developers too much money to ignore, and since adopting in-house silicon across all product lines their handhelds, tablets, laptops and desktops all use the same APIs and CPU/GPU cores.
If you target iPhone, there is not much additional work to add a keyboard/mouse/gamepad UI to target the rest of their ecosystem.
We've started seeing Console games get ported to iPhone, which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
> Resident Evil Village on iOS Is Legit. I Forgot I Wasn't Playing on a Console
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...
and it truly is their ecosystem, because they refuse to support vulkan or OpenGL.
>which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
for sure, it's surprising to see a real AAA game get ported to phones instead of the usual cashgrab gacha/social garbage. on a technical level id be more impressed if it wasn't a game that already has to support consoles that came out in 2013.
IMG has had raytracing in powervr for like a decade, and they just did another "most advanced ever!!!" thing a few years ago ( https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-th... )
But it's mobile and so it's way too slow to be useful, so nobody cares. That's 99% likely to be the case with Apple's newest offering, just like it is with Qualcomm's and ARM's (that's right, literally every mobile GPU offers this now - Apple is one of the masses here)
Look at how hard it hits consoles and PCs, it's utterly pointless on a 6" display with a 5w SoC
Everything that doesn't follow that pattern gets the boot.
I'm not a game developer though and don't closely follow this stuff, I'm just a person who occasionally likes to play CS on my macbook and can no longer do so.
Note: I am aware of Apple not generally being very supportive of games on their platform. It's always been that way.
Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
Gaming is what drives new hardware development, is what drives new personal computer ownership, and is what drives operating system preference.
For everyone else - a 10 year old computer does the job just fine... and it doesn't really matter what OS it happens to run.
Imagine if Apple had made it a point to dominate gaming too. Suddenly the folks spending $2-5K on a top of the line gaming machine would be forking it over for the latest generation of $5k Apple Desktops.
Oh well, at least it's not the first time that Mac gaming has shown to be a dead-end, but without BootCamp, it really feels final. Can't even count on half-baked, outdated ports from Aspyr anymore since they got bought by Embracer and are probably trapped in their financial struggles.
If you want to know how to access cs:go you can check out this vid https://youtu.be/A8cWDxqOG2k?si=w4xdxmRntqKLtYg0
It’s really simple and I would have wrote the steps here but I’m not at my computer atm.
- Apple Silicon not supporting EGPUs
- Apple not adapting Vulkan and went with Metal exclusively
...
Even though its not as popular as the others, I just stick to CS:Source and CS:1.6. Can't beat the classics, and they have been around for so long that they aren't going to be taken away at any point.
* Apple has billions of dollars and a hierarchy of decision-makers who could prioritize the R&D and implementation of making "gaming on Mac" a reality
* Linux is a distributed, community project without billions of dollars or top-down decision-makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
1. Apple has multiple teams of well paid engineers to solve any problem that arises. There's a lot more money in the game supporting Mac than Linux.
2. Apple has been shown to be hostile towards game development and make active decisions to make it harder to port to them, whereas Linix's most hostile issues arise from the proprietary nature of games vs. the open source nature of Linux (e.g. Package management, DRM, etc).
3. Linux makes concessions on its philosophies for games while Apple makes ultimatums. You can't ever trust that your game on Apple will work in 5 years, at least if you were developing in the 2010's. Meanwhile there are proprietary ways to deliver your game if you want to launch on Linux (not as sure about DRM but I've heard of solutions that simply haven't had mass adoption yet).
We are not talking here about people trying to uplift themselves or humanity around them, and get/give access to education, Internet, computing, etc. We're talking about people who dropped 2 grands to buy into an luxurious anti-freedom walled garden.
What you're emulating is irrelevant. What matters is which provides a better experience to you, the end user. One choice is actively being worked on, while the other (despite under-the-hood perf. improvements IIRC) seems to garner more loathing and disdain with each release.
Years ago I was optimistic that fixed shared library runtimes, such as the ones offered by Steam, would be enough to make native game development for Linux viable. But even with these, so many things simply break in places they should NEVER break, and can only be fixed by recompiling them (thanks glibc), so I no longer feel this way.
While my heart bleeds for open source, video games are fundamentally more art than function, so the expectation that the user (or the upstream maintainer, Steam) needs to be capable of recompiling them is simply unrealistic when considering the licensing & support required for this. Video games need a stable API, perhaps even more than most other types of software. A game built 10 years ago should continue to work when run today.
When considering all of this, along with the fact that Valve is the only large organization with the resources and incentive to fix this situation. The only real path forward Valve has here is to create their own custom desktop application API for Linux that goes beyond just a set of shared libraries and is fully integrated, meaning third-party game developers don't need get involved in the often messy inter-library politics the Linux community is accustomed too.
But if Valve really needs to go that far, why invent a whole new API for it? Why not just copy win32? That's the most popular API among game developers after all. In fact there is already a Linux runtime that not only supports win32, but actually treats desktop stability as a core priority: WINE. Why not just throw resources at that instead of making something new?
While I'm mostly speculating here, I suspect that this line of reasoning is what gave birth to Proton. It has also led to interesting situations, consider this: Elden Ring on release had/has a problem with micro-stuttering, this issue was patched in Proton very quickly, within the first week of release, but remains an issue on Windows to this day. This means that right now, Linux is the best platform to play Elden Ring on if you want the best performance and graphics. Much like video drivers are updated to fix bugs for individual games, Proton now fills this role as well, but with an even faster development cycle.
This highlights one of the key benefits of Proton: it scopes an entire Win32 runtime (wineprefix) to each game. A hasty hotfix for one game will not break another, each game needs to only pin the runtime that works, and no further tweaking is necessary. You simply cannot do this on Windows, Microsoft does not have this kind of flexibility.
A future where Proton outlives Windows, one where Proton expands the win32 API to include more features never supported by Windows, while I can't say it will happen, it certainly can happen, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
Developers might be more interested in developing for it if it is more than a footnote of an OS, possibly creating a positive feedback loop. Especially with companies such as Valve invested into it.
A man can at least dream, no?
The biggest problem isn't the small market share (3% of desktop users is still a decent chunk of customers), but the lack of standards and fragmentation making good QA basically impossible.
So for example, I as a linux user download factorio_alpha_x64_1.1.91.tar.xz
This isn't a package made specifically for my distro. Was it tested with my distro? Almost certainly not. Do I care? No, not really. Might I have some trouble with it? Probably not, but maybe! Do factorio devs get flooded with hate mail for not packaging factorio as an RPM and testing every single release with every single long-tail distro? I think they don't. They might get a few nutjobs sending them letters but by in large the linux gaming community (as it were) has low expectations and is easily pleased with the bare minimum.
Unfortunately, the Linux fans continue to ignore the worsening fragmentation issues.
The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Even it it had, what matters here is actual number of players.
Steam stats come in at Windows 96.94% Linux 1.63% macOS 1.43% [1].
So when they say excluded platforms account for 1%, they are right, barring rounding errors.
Someone who is into the PC gaming scene already owns a gaming PC by now. If they own a Mac it’s probably their productivity machine.
It’s obviously an anecdote but that’s how I do things. I have a gaming PC and all it does is gaming. My Mac is for portable computing and general productivity. Even though I own a Mac and some of my games work on Mac (like Baldur’s Gate 3), I rarely if ever use that Mac for gaming.
I think it’s on Apple to put real money into changing that perception (and to make the OS a little better for gaming - for example, Windows handles window management for games better, Mac handles mice with scroll wheels terribly unless you get third party software).
Valve have been improving/supporting Linux gaming for almost a decade[1].
Apple figured out that privacy is a marketable product. They don't do it because of altruism, they do it because it makes extreme amounts of money.
Likewise, Valve figured out that doing good by the customer is a marketable product. Gamer loyalty to Valve is an insurmountable fortress that no other storefront has managed to pierce. The likes of TotalBiscuit and AngryJoe galvanized the PC gaming community into one that does not tolerate anti-consumer bullshit, and anti-consumer bullshit Apple does.
> The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Which is completely irrelevant to gamers. A substantial amount choose to have a console and no desktop/laptop machine at all[2]. Linux is trending up [3], while MacOS trending down (and in addition is installed on fewer gaming machines than Linux overall) [4].
MacOS is completely and utterly irrelevant to gaming - unless you're talking about Candy Crush and the sort. This is unlikely to change unless Apple has a radical change in direction regarding gaming; both in terms of hardware and business model. They have clearly and loudly demonstrated that they have no interest in either: you can't use GPUs with MacOS, and their fork of WINE is neither free nor upstreamed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer) [2]: https://venturebeat.com/games/pc-and-console-sales-are-down-... [3]: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ [4]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Could've fooled me. Their first party title Halo MCC is riddled with bugs (crashes, textures not loading, etc.) and has cheaters flaunting super speed in multiplayer.
Seems nuts for a game whose entire draw is being able to be played on commodity hardware at high speeds.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/26/resident-evil-4-iphone-...
Oh, this is so sick—I didn't know that anything that used the Game Porting Toolkit as something better than a developer tool existed yet. I'm going to make use of this.
I have a M2 Pro Mac Studio as my primary computer, and I tend to use steam's streaming from my gaming PC to my mac for casual gaming, but there are sometimes I just want to natively run a game that isn't supported in macOS or streams quite poorly with Steam's streaming.
(Why is my setup the way that it is? My gaming PC is in the garage—primarily to have a big VR playspace—and on early mornings it can just be too cold in there.)
It's a shame that Valve made this decision, because Apple is pushing hard to make a gaming comeback on Mac (hence Game Porting Toolkit), so we might see those numbers change in the next few years.
We hear this every few years; it's never been true. I'd be shocked if this new effort were any more successful.
That said, I probably wouldn't be spending enough on battle passes/whatever to make it worth their time. To be cynical, I wonder if it's less the total number of Mac players and more the amount of money earned from those players. Stands to reason anyone that didn't buy a specialized gaming rig is going to be more of a casual player.
The problem is kernel-level anti cheat like EAC, BattleEye, Vanguard and EA's AC. The first two work flawlessly (on Linux) if the developer enables support for Linux (Halo, Apex Legends).
Quite a few modern games are supported: https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit#Ga...
Sad little loop :(
Sadly this is a problem of Apple's own making.
That’s only if you publish through the App Store. A developer who publishes on their own website doesn’t pay any percentage fee, though they do pay 100$ a year for the developer account which allows to sign and notarise the app. A developer who publishes on Steam pays 30% to Valve.
You can just skip the app store, can't you?
Which is exactly the same cut every other publisher takes. Valve, Origin, GOG, etc are all 30%.
I've played:
* Lots of Paradox games (Stellaris, E4, Hearts of Iron, Victoria)
* Civilization 5/6
* Factorio
* League of Legends
There are a ton of games that don't work on macOS, but it's incorrect to say that you can't play on macOS.
I'm hoping a new expansion comes out soon!
I tried, unsuccessfully, to find stats on the matter.
Edit: As Sayrus points out below you can click on the rows in the Steam Hardware Survey to show more information.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
I also wonder if Linux or Mac OS users are more or less likely to answer the surveys. Unless they've changed how it works, it is a pop up asking if you want to be recorded.
The answer is yes. Mac is currently at 1.43% while Linux is at 1.63% (43% of which is Steam Deck)
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
Looks like linux barely beats out macos
DirectX was vendor lock-in _from the vendor that owned 80-to-90-percent of the market_. Yeah, it sucked to be tied to their platform, but at least you were tied to the platform that nearly your entire target audience was already using.
Metal is vendor lock-in from a vendor that owns like, what, _maybe_ 10% of the market if we're being generous? And that 10% of the market is a group that largely is already disinclined to care about video games, so you're already unlikely to capture a noticeable portion of that already-small minority market segment.
It's a dumb move, really. Compare that with how Linux has started getting support for games: WINE and Proton are compatibility layers so that you as a developer can still target that 80-to-90-percent of the market and your game will (probably) work on the 1% that run Linux too without you needing to do extra work -- and Vulkan (and OpenGL before it) are ways of targeting _everything_...except of course Apple, but that's only because they tend to take an IE6 approach to implementing standards (that is: either everyone accepts our crap as a de-facto standard, or else we don't implement any standards).
On Windows you've been able to use OpenGL if you want, literally forever, because there was always a baseline version of it available with the OS (and then if you installed video drivers, you got a GOOD version of OpenGL.) Now you have the option of native Vulkan if you have drivers too. All of this is maintained collaboratively by Microsoft and the GPU vendors' driver teams. You don't even need a GPU, Windows has shipped software rasterizers for Direct3D literally forever as well (and the modern software rasterizer, WARP, is actually quite fast)
And on Linux you can either use OpenGL (natively), Vulkan (natively), or Direct3D (via Proton), and all three perform great and are reliable, maintained collaboratively by the Linux community and GPU vendors' driver teams.
Meanwhile on Mac your option is to write your own custom Metal backend, or hope that an emulation layer you get from a third party like MoltenVK will work good enough for your purposes and won't break when your end users install an OS X update, since Apple is happy to break backwards compatibility for any reason any time they want. If the build of MoltenVK your app ships with breaks you need to integrate a new version and ship updates to everyone.
But I guess they fixed it with the Apple Silicon switch : no direct comparison possible so they can pretend to be as competitive as they want. I believe the AS switch was in part to avoid competing and the prices increases validate that...
"Few users" also describes Linux, but Linux (gaming) usershare is growing and recently passed MacOS usershare (as measured by Steam).
I would argue that Apple's indifferent (if not hostile) attitude towards gaming has driven away many game developers.
And having picked up a Steam Deck about a year ago now, going into it with the expectation that it would run maybe half my games and tending away from the AAA releases, I can say they have a very credible option. Valve can run almost everything without Microsoft now. Pretty much everything I have runs on my Deck just fine, since I don't do the multiplayer games that have aggressive anticheat on them. I almost don't even think about compatibility any more because it's just there, for what I do. This has spilled over to my Linux desktop, too; I switched it due to having my fill of Microsoft's belief they own my system, own my users, and can do whatever they like with them, and if that cut off all gaming it would have been fine with me, but in reality the spillover of Valve's efforts is that it works just fine.
Apple has chosen to make themselves strategically unimportant to Valve by making it probably even more difficult to support them well than to just give up and submit to Microsoft entirely. They could have played this role but have chosen not to, because in their world, this is relatively minor compared to what they want out of their platform.
So even if the user count is roughly the same, Valve is going to support Linux much more, and is pushing it harder.
I'm not sure if you realized it but you are arguing the same point many others have been in this post. Apple is not investing in gaming, especially relative to their market cap compared to valve. Valve is making gaming on linux a reality because they are investing in it.
Apple has the money, they don't have the motivation to make it happen, because they don't want to participate on an open platform. That would be counter-productive to their goals of a walled garden.
If you buy into Apple, you cannot leave their walled garden and that's by design, with no plans on changing.
Apple told game devs on Macs to GTFO, and this is the result.
Did anyone else expect any other outcome?
Because the games are there. In large part because Valve is making it happen.
> Apple's indifferent (if not hostile) attitude towards gaming
They’ve been touting the abilities of Apple Silicon for gaming on their events. Their platforms support modern gaming controllers with zero setup. They had Hideo Kojima (and others) at WWDC. There are two separate sections on the App Stores just for games. They developed multiple technologies specifically for games: https://developer.apple.com/games/
We can argue if Apple’s gaming strategy is any good, but calling them indifferent or hostile to games does not align with reality.
That's a pretty huge difference, and things like the yearly fees (even if they aren't expensive in practice) only make the switch less attractive.
But having proprietary APIs on Macs isn't going to get other desktop games to Apple, when Macs aren't nearly as numerous as people would like to believe.
Couldn't Apple do the same? Why isn't it working? You don't realize it but you are proving the counter-argument many are making. Apple refuses to contribute to an open platform for gaming, so they have to rely on converting game developers to work within their walled garden.
That strat will never win for PC gaming.
If so, then dual booting a mac into Linux for gaming purposes might be a workable option at some point.
Though it is possible to use FEX-EMU to run it on Linux on a Mac: https://youtu.be/_tG3kfgqPhc
I do wish I could go mac only - my desk would definitely look tidier. But I don’t see it happening soon.
It is kind of annoying you can't game on Macs, however thats just how things are. Cars handle better than Trucks, and Trucks can haul more than cars. There is a lot of overlap in what they can do, but ultimately they have different specialties.
That said, my experience with Microsoft from a long time *nix users has been pretty horrible. I do think a lot of this is Microsoft, but a lot of it is going from being a poweruser to being a total novice is quite annoying.
The final justification for a physical windows desktop was to play games, but I haven't touched a single title in months. Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
My ideal tech stack at home is starting to look like one MacBook as you say. All the windows stuff I do for work is on a Windows365 desktop in the cloud. I've got a region within 10 milliseconds of my home office and it's been working out great so far.
Will probably get rid of these boxes before next year rolls around.
Could you elaborate on this more? What do you mean? What makes you a big Microsoft guy? I mainly ask because everything else you said seems contradictory of that so I'm curious your definition
Which is why releasing games for Mac users has less sense, than Windows or Linux. You're probably in the category of a casual gamer, which is served well by mobile games.
The pool of players is so small because gaming has been neglected on the Mac for so long, while tech like Vulkan that might have opened the possibility of gaming on a Mac has been blocked entirely. Valve is probably spot on in saying it's not worth the effort for the users they'll pick up right now.
That said, now that Apple is at least presenting as if they're trying to change this, that user base could grow over time. The problem is that in the shadow of Epic's big battle with Apple over App Store rules, it would make sense that Valve is wanting to just NOPE right out of this arrangement. Why help build gaming on the Mac when the balance of evidence suggests it's just going to be used to drive you off the platform? It presents a risk to a chunk of Steam's install base for little to no benefit.
I'm honestly pleasantly surprised macOS still gets the support it does by Unreal engine, it would be really easy for Epic to deprecate macOS support entirely (albeit not in the consumer's interest).
This only works on macOS Sonoma currently, unlike Whiskey[1], but it's a good sign for the future and support for Windows games not ending at D3D11.
[0] https://www.codeweavers.com/about/news/press/20230927 [1] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
Some consoles did ship an emulator for the previous generation, and they don't support all titles.
It simply has never been a decent platform for games, bar some mobile ports, due to its closeness.
If Apple really wants games to bother supporting their platform of questionable financial viability, they may need to learn a lesson that other platforms figured out a long time ago: you can pay a developer a bunch of money and they'll make their game run on your system. I know that's a big ask for a small company with $166 billion of cash sitting around, so I don't expect it to happen.
Sad to see Mac development shops bailing on the platform as it finally comes around to having useful GPUs in all of their computers. Blizzard used to have all their games cross platform up until Overwatch and now Diablo 4, but apparently it just wasn't worth doing anymore.
I think it's just been decades of the Mac mostly sucking for gaming, people don't even think about buying games on it. If you want to play games you already own something that's better for that.
Game devs already support their primary mobile platforms, that make them the most money. Macs are basically for work and low intensity recreation at this point. Gamers don't buy Macs, due to low customizability.
I can say that the game seems to run fine on Crossover. GeForce Now is also a great option if you're on Ethernet on great Internet.
It's a competitive shooter, the kind of game people play at the lowest settings to reach 400 fps. I doubt many CS players will tolerate the added latency of streaming.
There's an alternate universe where Apple opened up Metal to work across platforms and languages, and that would be the successor to OpenGL. As it is right now, we're in this complete mess like we were in the 90s, where there's this hodgepodge of stuff being written using OpenGL and DirectX and Vulkan.
Maybe if I learned it better I would learn to love Vulkan, but with the little I've played with it, it is absolutely dreadful. Doing even a minimal amount of stuff with it requires hundreds of lines of arcane, hard-to-read code. I spent two days figuring out how to make a cube rotate, and then I was done. OpenGL wasn't exactly "ergonomic", but it was substantially simpler to get something built with it than Vulkan.
Metal, on the other hand, is a genuinely pleasant graphics API. I find it reasonably straightforward to do a lot of stuff, it's reasonably easy to intuit what the code is trying to do, and at least in the things I've played with, it performs just fine as well.
If Apple had pushed for Metal to be the successor to OpenGL, I think the world would be a better place now.
Ie, you might prefer bgfx[0], cinder[1] or openframeworks[2].
Yeah Apple are just fantastic stewards of open standards, as can be seen from the amazing job they did with OpenCL...
Still so angry at Apple and Nvidia for that.
So if a game that is consistently in the Top 5 most played games by concurrent users (For the last 20 years) doesn't have enough to support MacOS. What does?
Can't totally blame them for their decision but the developers that worked on the macOS port either wasted their time or they figured out it wasn't worth the effort with all the restrictions Apple has on their OS.
A few years ago I listened to a podcast[1] where they described playing Team Fortress 2 - spawn, get killed by a bot. Spawn, get killed by a bot.
I was excited to see how well Portal 2 performed on my Mac mini, only to discover that it isn't even playable on Apple silicon at all.
color me annoyed. especially since (presumably) these games work on x64 hardware just fine (someone please verify this.)
given how much they are lagging behind target on key features of the old game, i can understand why they decided this (for now).
even their own darling platform (linux by proxy) is not currently well-supported.
EDIT: forgot about MacOS and Vulkan.
I play Dota from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook Pro and it runs more than fine. It's very odd the Dota team can justify it but the CS team can't.
> I play Dota from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook Pro and it runs more than fine.
Dota on macOS doesn't ship an arm binary and uses moltenVK to translate graphics api calls, it's on borrowed time if valve doesn't want to ship proper binaries as rosetta isn't gonna exist in a few years.
When in reality it's just more cost for the studio to port over and debug.
• Even years after the introduction of Apple Silicon, the Steam STILL only has a legacy Intel version which requires Rosetta. Despite being little more than a glorified web view, apparently they can't even bother to compile it for the newer CPUs.
• They outright LIE about macOS compatibility: The store pages of some games show a big warning banner about being 32-bit-only and unable to run on Catalina+, BUT THEY RUN FINE!
So Valve is not only not trying, they seem to be actually sabotaging Mac gaming. It's a good thing I started switching to GoG even back when I was still on Windows, and making most of my purchases there than on Steam with its additional DRM bloat.
As for the hardware, even my previous fan-less MacBook Air M2 with just 8 GB RAM ran games like Baldur's Gate 3 at a playable framerate, and my current M2 Max just blazes through everything (that's available).
So without Vulkan support from Apple, Proton is not really transferrable at all.
for many (probably most) ideas and concepts you probably could apply them to macOs with just a few tweaks
but code reuse will be much more tricky in multiple ways. 1st while both macOs and desktop Linux are unixy what proton has to interact with is much more OS specific for quite a bunch or parts; 2nd when proton devs run into some issue with linux OS services/tooling they can (and have) fix the problem upstream, they can't with macOs; 3rd you can do much more "unusual" things with linux, some of them might matter for proton
most importantly proton for mac would be either way a non small money investment and that investment has to pay of in some form
if you only look at game sails I would be surprised if is worth it for either mac or Linux
I my opinion what Valve gains from proton is not earning more money through Linux game sales but a "safety net".
Windows has shown that if they can they would (at least for non enterprise licenses) love to lock down Windows similar to iOS, e.g. allow only their app store and and not allow 3rd party stores on their store. While the last time they tried that it didn't work out and EU is pushing regulations to reduce how much such app stores can be locked down this is still a _sever_ risk for Valve.
So by making large parts of their library "good enough" usable on Linux they always have a way out by providing a in-between of a console and a open Linux desktop which people can run on their hardware or for which they provide hardware ... like the Steam Deck (which is a bit different focused as a handheld but Windows is also not locked down at this moment in time). As a bonus the know-how and code stack they are building allows them to fan out in more areas even if Windows never get's locked down. E.g. they could create an actual console os with a immutable locked Linux core but then use stuff like flatpack-like container technology to still allow using it like a fully free Linux desktop for most use-cases but due to it being locked down at the core they can promise copyright protection and anti-cheat similar to a console to investors and game (weather that is ethical good is another question unrelated to this argument.)
So proton provides value in form of "potential" and "safety net".
But proton for macOs doesn't have any of this benefits. More so then windows macOs is increasingly getting more locked down and you could call Apple "king of the walled garden business strategy".
So for proton for macOS it has to be clearly profitable, which it doesn't seem to be.
And while Apples seems to wanting to get back into gaming on desktop slowly, they also tend to have quite a strong preference for software being developed with their proprietary tools. So while it might seem a good idea for apple to cooperate with Valve short term, long term I would speculate they wouldn't even like something like proton, because that can diverge sells away from their app store and isn't under their control but (Steam being) a part of the "experience" people might start to value a lot.
I just run
gameportingtoolkit-no-hud ~/my-game-prefix 'C:\Program Files (x86)/Steam/steam.exe'
CS:GO is a competitive shooter. Macs are not widely popular with that type of customer.
It has nothing to do with the technical limitations or business decisions of Apple (especially since Valve would distribute via Steam, where Apple's cut wouldn't factor into it).
If they ever ship to iOS, they'll have to support Metal, and once they have to support Metal, they'll get Mac support essentially for free. That will change the calculation on whether Macs are worth supporting for them.
> Regardless of numbers, one of the reasons Valve is reluctant to develop CS2 for Mac is that Apple devices do not provide native support for the Vulkan API that the game is based on. Vulkan was designed to succeed OpenGL and address some of the latter's shortcomings, and while there is an open-source library called MoltenVK that provides a Vulkan implementation on top of Apple's Metal graphics API, it still lacks some of Vulkan's advanced features.
The fun doesn't stop there in Apple Land if you're interested in hobbyist development, you get obnoxious code signing requirements, you can only deploy a few iOS app to the devices you paid for per week, and they only last a while before they cease working and you have to redeploy them.
I'm glad Valve isn't wasting their time.
The reason mac users are complaining is because Valve released this as an update to CS:GO rather than a separate game.
I don't think mac players would really care that much about CS2 not being mac compatible if Valve hadn't done that. They would've shrugged and said "ok, I'll keep playing CS:GO then". But they can't do that, and that is 100% on Valve.
However for the game makers where's the payoff? It's been long enough of Apple by their actions making it not a suitable platform as a gaming target. Even if it was today, there's little reassurance that there won't be some tech/policy change that impacts the publishers and gamers in an undesired way.
Today I use Apple hw/sw products in a commodity manner. Most apps/tools I use can or could easily be run elsewhere. I'm not interested in walling myself into anyone's garden.
Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.
Besides which, Metal is a fantastic API, at least as capable as Vulkan and less cumbersome to use.
PSA for all OS vendors: nobody is going to write software for your walled garden anymore. Nobody. The more you try to force this, the more you will simply repel developers from your platform.
The OS graphics/app API wars are over and everyone lost. For GUI people are going to use Electron, Tauri, or maybe Qt. For games they're going to use OpenGL or Vulkan.
Even big companies are avoiding native development. What do Slack and Discord use? Electron.
Apple is known for the fancy screens, the retina screens, high end graphics.
But then what, falls down in gaming?
It seems like a no-brainer they should have the best ports of games, and people would see them and be "wow, that looks great, I'm going to buy an apple".
It's probably great for other types of games where reaction times are not critical, but for competitive FPS esports titles, it's a nonstarter.
(I accept that this might nowadays make me a minority, although in games like GTA I think the modding community is pretty active still)
Don't get any illusions that Valve loves Linux, or Linux users. They just hate being locked into a Microsoft ruled monopoly.
And picking between MacOS and Linux as a platform to compete with Microsoft, it really is a no brainer that you'd pick Linux due to the freedom of development it offers.
Playing single player games on a streaming service is fine, but competitive games? I don't think that's gonna get too much traction.
For now the best way to game on a Mac IMO is Sunshine/Moonlight and just run a gaming PC somewhere in the house, works perfect.
I think Apple is starting to push hard to get into the gaming market. You already mentioned Game Porting Toolkit as an example, but they have been regularly giving the floor to AAA game studios during Apple's big keynote presentations. Notably, Capcom is bringing RE4 Remake to Apple devices, following Resident Evil Village. Death Stranding is also getting a macOS port soon.
If I had to guess, I think Apple is actually going out of their way to financially incentivize these companies to port their games to Mac, even if sales are low (e.g. paying them to port the game). Throwing money at it may be a good way for them to get out of the chicken and egg problem.
I can’t fathom who could be interested in it outside of peer pressure or nostalgia.
I could barely finish one full round. Haven’t touched CS in years but did enjoy 1.5 and 1.6 quite a bit back in the day.
Just move on.
I picked up CS about 5 years ago and it's... still a great game?
fast twitch team shooter where solid teamplay and good shots win.
Valorant is too... gimmicky. I don't want magic, I want straight forward tactics.
4/5 of my last solo queue lobbies were solid -- people communicating and playing decently well together. Can't ask for more.