Not enough games on mac > So nobody buys macs to games > So no players on Mac > So games not made for mac
Sad little loop :(
Sad little loop :(
You can just skip the app store, can't you?
I don't have a single store-installed app on my mac and I only get warnings (once) from 1-2 open source apps whose developers don't code-sign.
Neither do apps distributed directly by third parties as long as they are signed etc. (you just need the $100/300 per year apple dev. account for that).
Any game dev that wants the full hardware capabilities reaches out to NVN.
Honestly, this is the biggest division between gamers who obsess over API and people who develop gamers. API divergence is really not that big of a deal as long as you can do similar things.
It's very different than anything on a Mac or PC.
Sadly this is a problem of Apple's own making.
Apple switched to ARM ISA and moved away from an open graphics abstraction layers. Those two things go hand-in-hand. ARM ISA isn't the problem, being a proprietary API on a platform that isn't of value for major game devs - that's the problem.
(FFS - Blizzard left MacOS, the one that released their titles on OSX one of the first.)
Arguing over what ARM ISA includes or not, is besides the point.
Since then Apple has only made more excuse and even raised the price of their weak-ass proprietary hardware. They made their bed they deserve no efforts from anyone ; not developers not users. If they come out with competent hardware at a decent price then we will see...
The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.
Metal and Vulkan are very conceptually similar. Most things you can write against Vulkan will work in Metal, only the API calls will differ. MoltenVK will even wrap Metal with Vulkan's API.
But the OP isn't talking about graphics APIs, they're making the absurd claim that ARM CPUs are "obscure". It's so wrong it borders on asinine.
Only because you're complaining about their exact wording and ignoring context.
As far as high level code is concerned Apple's chips are just ARM chips. They've got microarchitectural features that put them ahead of other ARM chips clock for clock. But if you want to call their implementation obscure then by that twisted logic then AMD chips are obscure because they operate differently than Intel chips despite the AMD64 ISA.
It's a stupid distinction to justify an ignorant statement. Between iPhones, iPads, and Macs Apple has shipped a billion of their CPUs. At a billion units it's just dumb to suggest they're obscure. Different from Wintel PCs? Sure. But obscure? That's just asinine.
Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around).
Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.
That ET(1982) game is indicative of the money-grabs that were trying to be avoided.
Which is exactly the same cut every other publisher takes. Valve, Origin, GOG, etc are all 30%.
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.
Not the point. Also, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest gaming platforms, catering exclusively to games, is doing better in games than a more general platform; it would be strange if it were the other way around. Also also, no one is defending the state of gaming on macOS, we’re all aware it’s bad.
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!
On the one hand I wish it was better. OTOH in the back of my mind I wonder if part of the magic is forcing you to get into the nitty gritty and do you best to manually optimize and if you don't you accept the chaos and inefficiency--nearly a metaphor for life.
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.
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
[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.
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).
This is also probably why Apple is holding out. They see their phone/tablet iGPUs getting powerful enough to be in a league similar to those in their laptops and believe that mobile and desktop gaming will eventually converge. Game publishers might not care about the tiny share of Mac gamers, but will they also feel that way about the far more numerous iOS gamers?
There’s been hints of this happening with some games straddling the line between desktop and mobile like Genshin Impact which is often compared to Breath of the Wild and now the upcoming RE4 remaster will run on iOS in addition to the other major gaming platforms.
In fact, even if you would somehow find a way to divide power consumption of current competent gaming system by ten it would still not be enough. And all that is before talking about the fact that peoples who games for hours on end tend to prefer displays bigger than 6 inchs...
Anyone with functioning brain cells can objectively understand that AAA gaming on mobile is a distraction at best and a waste of ressource when you are not filthy rich like Apple. But Apple gonna use marketing to say otherwise instead of using it's money to offer more competent hardware at better price...
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...