Don't blame developers Apple clearly never gave a shit about supporting a gaming friendly ecosystem. It's their way or the highway.
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...
Will it work? No clue. Historically premium games had absurd piracy rates which is why most premium games pulled out and why F2P games with servers holding to value rose. But IOS always had lower piracy rates than android, so Apple has a better foothold for trying to re-appeal to console games studio than Google.
That's not how you get the Xbox, you'll barely get a Stadia shaped hole if you give it a fair shake.
This wasn't some 2 year flash in the pan like Stadia, I could still name a dozen premium games from this time I greatly enjoyed. But if Zenonia 2 had 70% piracy rates and the ftp Zenonia 3 (or maybe 4) made more money in a day than Zenonia 1+2 combined, what you going to do?
(note these figures are made up, I don't know the Zenonia piracy rates nor sales. But 70% is the average Android game piracy rate in 2015).
I remember this too.
We had a period with plenty of premium pay in advance games, then a period of games with ads that you could pay to remove, then the companies decided that the most reliable monetization strategy in the face of widespread theft was microtransactions.
A wise man once said that widespread software theft is a service problem. Legend has it that he still runs a successful game storefront to this day!
But then, Windows PC were in the same boat. Looking from the sidelines, Windows gave publishers a lot more freedom in implementing anti-pirating (super invasive) features, and when push came to shove Microsoft stepped in to add OS supported anti-piracy features that the games could hook into (Microsoft using the same system for its own games).
I think we can at least blame Apple for doing nothing in a situation where a whole group of developpers are stuck with an issue that could be alleviated with the platform's help.
Irrelevant to the point, but Stadia was 3 year and half (nov 2019 start, to the death announcement on sept 2022, and actual shutdown on jan 2023). So basically the same span than the 2010 ~ 2013 miracle for Apple.
I forgot a lot about these early days (was absolutely not into PC gaming), for people in the same boat a nice refresher:
https://www.cultofmac.com/73192/why-2010-was-the-year-mac-ga...
The fun part being that 2010 span was triggered by Valve, so from beginning to end Apple just didn't do anything.
Also, in general im not a fan of "hate marketing" to begin with.
Once upon a time, there were many iOS games that you paid for up front with no micro-transactions at all, for instance, XCom was about $20 a decade ago.
I have a feeling the console game ports will be pay up front, just like they are on a console.
To keep investment in the platform strong, they stand to benefit from stabilizing and recovering from some of their NIH brain damage.
Will the fixation on collecting their cut come to an end? Time will tell.
it's the same apple who said "please bring games to our system" followed immediately by "opengl is going away. also, fuck you."
Again, Apple uses the same GPU cores across all it's hardware platforms. It will have hardware ray tracing on handhelds, tablets, laptops, desktops as well as on their upconing AR/VR platform as the SOCs are updated.
There is no Steam (let alone any other game store) on iDevices. Just Apple's store.
As a consumer, I don't wanna pay for a game on Apple's store just so I can have a shitty iPhone experience. Especially when nearly every other game I have is on Steam and I can play on whatever device of mine I want.
They encourage windows games to bundle old and insecure dlls, which the games generally did anyway. On windows, they don't really do anything here, it's mostly just that windows provides quite a bit of backwards compatibility anyway.
On linux, they do a bit more. They ship a hacked up copy of various libraries from ubuntu 12.04, mostly without security patches, and have the games use those, calling it the "steam runtime" despite it really being "ancient ubuntu libraries". They reduce the security of your machine, and I would only play steam games on a burner machine you don't login to your bank accounts on.
Id be more worried about game GUIs basically using a web browser.
Many of these games have such fragile netcode that they'll crash even if you don't fuzz them.
Except for Mac, apparently. Not much android support either.
I'd say we can't truly reach "whatever device I want" until we at least cover the 3 major desktop platforms, the 2 major mobile platforms, and the 3 major console platforms. Until then we are all making compromises when buying a game.
I take your point. Even so, Steam is leagues ahead of everyone else in this regard. I have Steam games I bought 10 years ago that I can still play on my current desktop PC. That is absolutely not the case with consoles. It isn't even the case for mobile for me, since I switched from Android a few years back.
Why does it matter if Apple makes their own controller? iOS/iPadOS supports other popular controllers and the Apple Store even sells multiple controllers (including the PS5 controller).
Imagine you have developed a game, it is selling well, and one day you find out that the game engine you are using has been banned for disobedience and Apple wants you to rewrite your entire game in a different engine.
Apple doesn’t just not care about games, they despise game developers with a burning passion.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/microsoft-backs-epic-...
Apple also has no buy in for the segment of gaming people wish it supported. Where SteamOS and Windows both have first party AAA game development studios.
Apple wants the same level of control Microsoft had with DirectX. It is blatant, and they're fighting for it even harder than Microsoft did. There's nothing wrong with offering a high-level API, but there is a problem with avoiding industry standards for the sake of maximizing your market size.
Stuff like the Game Porting Toolkit demonstrates just how deeply behind Apple is. They're desperate to prove how capable Metal can be, without acknowledging why nobody targets it. It's not surprising that a DXVK port could also support Metal. It's just not what developers intend to support; not upstream, downstream or direct from Apple. That sort of pointless insistence is where I draw the line between "just business" and "being an anti-competitive asshole".
I'm not sure this is a fair portrayal of gaming on iOS.
Now, a reskinned Bejeweled with in-game currency IAPs – that's more like it!
I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
This theoretical "steam of Android" would work similarly to how desktop steam works. Allows sale of proprietary premium games, Bans f2p games in the beginning (inevitably opening up once it's culture is established), does some QA to ensure certain features (e.g. Input, compatibility, no viruses, etc.), has discovery algorithms for consumers, user reviews, forums, etc. It could even allow adult games like Steam, but it may also ban those for a while to establish culture (the porn black hole is a real, scary phenomenon).
>Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
I think it'd be fine in the beginning if you banned f2p apps (which most of google's revenue comes from), but yes. I'd wonder how big it'd get before we get the next Apple v. Epic debacle over such matters.
If you, as Valve, launch Steam and take your own payments within Steam - which I suspect Google would quash instantly - you would build up an install base that "owns" value in your store (modulo weaselly subscriber agreements).
When Google does Google things and kills your popular product, perhaps citing that it is a competing app store, you now have millions of angry gamers. Maybe they cannot sue you, but they can certainly abandon your market on other platforms.
It's just not a good bet.
Now, can Google remove your apk regardless? I haven't heard of a case, but it's not impossible for Google to her in the way. The much less publicized lawsuit from Epic involved Google blocking Epic from negotiating with Fortnite pre-installs with OEMs, so Google won't just sit by and let their money walk (even if they were leaving it on the table to begin with). Not a bad bet if you're determined, but it's not easy street even if you find your audience.
Nah. Anyone gaming seriously will still take a Switch because even if their phone theoretically has more horsepower, in practice it's just not as good a gaming platform.
> I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
Amazon ran an alternative app store for a while, and were pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it. I don't know exactly why, but my naive explanation would be that no-one was spending money there because mobile games are bad and not worth paying for (or perhaps just that it's a lemon market and while there are good proper games on mobile it's impossible to distinguish them from the bad ones until you've bought it).
I love my switch, but it and the steam deck do highlight an aspect that died in Gen 8: "pocketable" handhelds are really no more. I can fit a vita in my pockets with little issue, and I have baggy enough jeans where I could even fit a GPD Win in if I really tried. But I'd say the latter is past practical pocketability. You can throw a switch in a bag but so can my laptop. I liked handhelds for the ability to simply grab and go.
Phones picked up that mantle for 6 years, since there was nothing else left. and I await the day that some portable PC strives to hit that Vita size. won't happen for years but probably by the end of the decade.
>pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it.
I think they pulled out the same time they gave up in the Kindle fire lines. Kindle was a store that penetrated the market but not Amazon. I even remeber the days where they had "free app of the day" a LA Epic Games Store.
It still technically exists but isn't really trying to compete as a store anymore. It has some "Amazon coin" deals for a few f2p games that let you get expensive whale packs for slightly less money. Probably due to some deal they made with certain game studios.
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.
Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...
I don't understand why you're replying to me with irrelevant facts?
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One came out in 2013. Resident Evil Village came out on Playstation 4 and Xbox One on 2021. Unlike wine, video game consoles do not improve with age.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
im not surprised that a layperson is unable to discern between the version of re8 he's playing now and the version of re8 he says he played two and a half years ago. It's also completely irrelevant to the fact that the most impressive game on iphone is a port of a game that also came out on PS4 and Xbox One.
consider this: Microsoft at the height of its monopoly in the 1990s could have ditched OpenGL support to lock developers into the DirectX ecosystem but they didn't.
Not so for macOS.
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.
It takes extra effort, and fairly deep and unique knowledge of rendering, shaders, and compilation to support Metal, and even engines which do (Unity, Unreal) face some amount of difficulty in doing so well.
Apple's strategy of giving the middle finger to graphics APIs is patched over poorly by their partnership with Unity, and the fact that lower-end games can get away not needing a crazy amount of compatibility...but it's still on Apple to do better.
While "ok" for porting an existing game as a secondary platform, you don't want to be using it for primary development. And that will be why it will remain (at best) a second class citizen.
Apple should not be happy about this outcome. It doesn't help them build some kind of walled garden, it just makes their hardware perform worse. They should add Vulkan support!
They don't make many games these days, but Valve tends to be a studio that prides itself on performance. It can very much be "this game runs well or we don't use that platform at all" for them, compared to other AAA studios happy to take the PR hit for a quick buck.
Apple refusing to update graphics drivers outside of major OS updates doesn't help...
Also, there's no reason why Apple can't support OpenGL properly either, there “no reason besides the refusal to task someone to it”.
They do. OpenGL is deprecated, but still supported. If it wasn't supported at all it would not have worked on apple silicon macs.
So now they can only blame themselves if they're losing games because the developer doesn't want to invest in Metal either.
Many of those 'bugs' remain unfixed to maintain backwards compatibility, not because Apple doesn't want to fix them.
> the fact that it is officially deprecated sends a message to anyone wanting to do new development on MacOS “don't invest in OpenGL now as we could pull the rug under your feet” and it's done on purpose to push developers to Metal.
As it should be.
> So now they can only blame themselves if they're losing games because the developer doesn't want to invest in Metal either.
There's nothing to 'invest' in. Metal is by far the simplest low level graphics API out of all I've used and it would not be hard for valve to write a source 2 rendering backend for it (few days/weeks at most for an experienced dev). There's plenty of AAA games being properly ported to apple silicon now and in a year or two there will be many more. Valve intentionally withdrawing themselves from the ecosystem is purely out of spite.
Put your money where your mouth is and write one. Just write one. If it's that easy, do it.
Which is more likely - a company that dumps tons and tons of resources into Linux, Wine, DXVK, and put out the Steam deck didn't do this supposedly easy thing because they just don't care or could it be that they don't have the talent in house and wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it?
I can't because source 2's source code isn't available.
> Which is more likely - a company that dumps tons and tons of resources into Linux, Wine, DXVK, and put out the Steam deck didn't do this supposedly easy thing because they just don't care or could it be that they don't have the talent in house and wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it?
They don't have the talent? That's funny, considering Valve ported all their games to macOS many years before they ported to linux.
Perhaps then refrain from telling everyone how easy it as when you have no idea what’s going on in the code.
> That's funny, considering Valve ported all their games to macOS many years before they ported to linux.
Are those people still at the company? Either they are not or they’re doing a piss poor job at advocating for their platform.
I've been reverse engineering source engine games and modding them on and off for the last ~15 years, I almost certainly know more about it than you.
> I can't because source 2's source code isn't available.
No contradiction at all here…
Using OpenGL, not metal, thought. There's a good chance that they don't have a single developer knowing metal.
Sure they could learn, but then there's the next part of the sentence you're responding to: it's unlikely they wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it.
Backwards compatible kernel panics is a interesting idea for sure…
Also, talking about backwards compatibility when discussing about Apple is pretty ironic as well.
> As it should be.
Can't complain if Valve don't follow them on that then.
> There's nothing to 'invest' in. Metal is by far the simplest low level graphics API
That doesn't change the fact that porting the game engine to it is still a massive undertaking. It doesn't depend on the graphic API itself that much, but more about the size and complexity of the rendering engine.
Valve isn't stupid, if it was profitable to do so, they'd do the investment anyway, but do not because it doesn't make financial sense.
Apple isn't entitled a free port of popular games to their walled garden. Developers may do it if it's profitable, but that's it. If Apple wants to bootstrap the gaming use case, then it's on them to make an effort.
> Valve intentionally withdrawing themselves from the ecosystem is purely out of spite
“Boohoo stupid Gabe does that out of pure naughtiness.”
I hope you realize how childish your statement is.
Well and, whatever embarrassing game that Apple will trot out at their developer conferences 2-3 years after it was released and claim Macs are built for gaming.
I think you're missing the context here that CSGO was just replaced with CS2, and CS2 is an entirely new engine (it's Source 2 based whereas CSGO was still Source 1)
So this is a switch from a DX9 engine from ~15 years ago to a modern, Vulkan-focused actively developed engine.
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.
Got hooked on Microsoft as early as the DOS days by playing games as a kid. They earned a customer for life indirectly there. Maybe Adobe helped a bit too.
Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.
So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.
Being the default OS is what made Windows dominate personal computing. The average person doesn't think about what OS they use at all, even when they're thinking about getting a Macbook.
And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..