The fact that they did this before bothering to recompile it for 64-bit Mac says a lot—Valve clearly doesn’t see Apple as a friendly place to do business. Makes sense, with Apple trying to lock game devs into the App Store.
Unless you know for sure that you're going to get a decent player base, I don't think optimising for Mac makes much business sense for games companies. Users that can afford a Mac can probably also afford a console anyway.
You can trick games into running by using the same wrappers and workarounds that you'd use to game on Linux (except you need to optimise the wrappers yourself because they're less mature) but gaming on Linux already has plenty of DRM/anti-cheat incompatibility issues, and using less mature tools will only make that worse. And, of course, Apple doesn't care much about backwards compatibility; they've killed 32 bit for no apparent reason other than "we don't want to maintain compatibility" and who knows how long they'll maintain the current set of replacement APIs. Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's why the go-to method of playing games on Linux is to run them in an emulated Windows environment.
I think games companies will recompile games for Snapdragon before they'll bother with Mac. By the time they got all their 32 bit x86 libraries to work on ARM without emulation, Apple has probably switched around a couple of APIs and requirements anyways, so why bother.
See also: Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...
I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.
They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs specifically for games, which eventually powered their own gaming console. They were practically the only company doing this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go. This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were just no alternatives.
Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC gaming landscape as we know it today.
Regardless, it seems silly to claim that Microsoft's 30+ years of supporting Windows to make it the dominant gaming platform on PC rests on the shoulders of 3 employees. I don't have any insider knowledge, but it would be safe to assume that this was a long-term strategic decision for the company. I can imagine the existence of internal detractors at every step of this direction, but what they've achieved and their position today is surely the result of the successful execution of this vision, and not something they stumbled into by chance.
> As [1]announced on the official TF2 website
[1] https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 states:
> We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
So that seems to be coming, at least in the sense of x86-64 which Apple Silicon supports better via Rosetta 2.
That is actually more than I thought, but its clear without compatible games there is very little reason to install Steam.
Also, Apple only recently started to be more gaming friendly, so it's really not surprising they would try to port a 20 year old game.
About 30% of the games I own on Steam would run on my Mac. I think that's quite much for a platform that nobody likes to develop for. But to be fair, I have few mainstream games like CoD, LoL or whatever.
I can't find it. But essentially it was Apple not wanting their machines to be used for gaming. And so axed all the work of the port and refused to publish the game.
The best I can find is from 2007 from Gabe:
> We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. The cycle then repeats itself when a new group of people replace the old ones at Apple.
> We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
So it sounds more like Valve just hadn't done the work to make it possible to run on more modern macOS (that has long been 64-bit only) until now. Not much Apple could have done except maybe tried to directly pay them to do it earlier...
Windows Vulkan and OpenGL drivers exist, because Microsot still hasn't removed the ICD plugin interface from the OS, which is used by GPU vendors themselves, not Microsoft, to provide drivers on Windows for VUlkan and OpenGL.
Likewise, Valve could have use MoltenVK if they actually wanted to.
Valve didn't bother with Metal because Apple are hostile to their business model, they've given up dedicating serious rescources to the platform and at this point Steam only exists on MacOS out of inertia.