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Comment by _carbyau_ | Hacker News Reader

Coverage. Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more.

But money talks and game engines want a slice of that sweet apple pie.

> Metal only covers Apple. Vulkan covers so much more.

I'm not sure "more" is the right term here. There are about 1.3 billion iPhone users worldwide. Sure, Vulkan covers more OS environments, but how important is that to a game developer vs. total available users? Does Vulkan user reach exceed 1.3 billion?

How many iphone users will pay 60 dollars for a game, like you can try and achieve on Steam or Switch? I feel like the iOS game market is pretty different.

More money is spent/made made on iOS gaming than on traditional PC gaming, even if the $60 up front model isn't something iOS users are willing to accept. I almost think they're right to tolerate mtx models btw. At least if games are f2p, companies aren't releasing them broken/unfinished.

Can't release unfinished/broken games, when what they're releasing are not games at all.

OS coverage vs pure numbers is something for the game developer to be worried about, and by extension the game engine devs.

You want to get into the iOS gaming market, go Metal. By definition you've expressed you don't care about the other OS's.

You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs - though I will be delighted to be proven wrong when a AAA iPhone game comes.

If Apple want to change their "AAA game" attractiveness they need to address this. It's not that hard - the article took a month but even a year is fine. Apple just needs to get it done, but it doesn't seem like they care to make User<->GameDev relationship easy. Either the gamedev needs a whole other version of their game on Metal. Or the users have to do a lot of homework and fiddling to get a modern AAA game to run.

I wonder if they have Vulkan internally and simply know their GPU won't look good in direct comparisons - which is fair; beating or even leveling with nVidia is hard. But if anyone can show AMD and Intel how to do it....

AAA don't care about Vulkan, they care about Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft proprietary APIs.

minor nitpick: did care when Google Stadia was in the list. But it did not worked out and everyone took a big L on that and now Vulkan support has been mostly purged already.

The reason why Stadia is no more, is exactly because they don't care.

Google was starting to offer a DirectX porting kit on the same year they decided to ramp down Stadia, there is even a GDC talk on it.

My opinion on the facts I saw don't agree with your interpretation. No one here on HN cares about it =) so I just drop it.

My hot take is that when AAA games will be shipped on mac os they will not use porting kit in runtime and just call Metal. Imho API court battles are fun to watch from afar.

> You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs

Likewise you don't care about Vulkan. You care about DirectX and whatever Playstation has

> You care about DirectX

...exactly. Which is why, unless you're given a license to re-impliment DirectX, it makes so much more sense to use Vulkan and it's DX9 through DX12 translation layer.

What am I missing here?

You're missing that people don't care about Vulkan at all: https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/

And the translation layer exists largely due to Valve business decisions, not because "community came together or something". This glorious amazing support didn't even really exist until 2018 (when it was launched with official support of 27 games)

1. Apple has never truly cared about gaming on the Mac

2. iOS only supports Metal, and Metal serves Apple extremely well

3. Apple's dropping of 32-bit apps and switching to M* chips has hurt gaming on Macs much more than any perceived harm from not supporting Vulkan.

Surely there are more Android users than iPhone users worldwide, and if you target Android you target Vulkan.

Only if we don't care about those using devices where OpenGL ES is still more stable, with less buggy drivers.

If you only care about latest Android versions, and Samsung and Google phones, sure go Vulkan.

My brother in Christ, OpenGL ES is officially depreciated on all Apple platforms. It is not "more stable, with less buggy drivers", I've used it.

I thought we are talking about Android, and which APIs makes business sense, when AAA actually want to get paid, instead of having to pay back store returns.

I thought we were talking about capable APIs for creating enjoyable experiences, not barebones rendering frameworks for building flashier online casinos. My mistake.

Depends if those enjoyable experiences pay the mortgages of the developers.

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