It's actually really small, according to Steam Hardware Survey, Macs are only 1.88% of Steam users, which is less than that of Linux, which is probably why most developers don't care.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...
On the other side of the fence in Windows land, adoption of features much more trivial than an architecture change are absolutely glacial because devs know they can lean on back compatibility in perpetuity.
Apple’s approach is perhaps too aggressive but Microsoft’s is far too lax. I don’t think it’s realistic to dump a binary and expect it to work forever with no maintenance.
The moment Windows actually has non-x86 hardware which people actually want to buy I bet native app support comes pretty quick.
Snapdragon X laptops are here already, and reviews are generally positive (of course, use and workload dependent, nobody should get one to game, but for web browsing and long battery life it's perfect).
Looking at the M1, there was no "if", "but", "for certain", etc wording. It was just better all around, even comparing gaming performance vs older MacBooks. Even running Windows ARM in a VM was better than buying a Windows laptop (x86 or ARM) in terms of both performance and battery. Based on your description, I don't think the Snapdragon X laptops are the same story?
macOS x86 games + macOS arm64 games == same number of games. Whats the loss angle here?
My guess is that Mac users simply don’t buy games for their macs
1. Metal precedes Vulkan
2. Hardly anyone supports Vulkan https://www.carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/
2. I can easily list 5x as many AAA games, engines, or libraries supporting a Vulkan backend vs a Metal backend, does that mean Apple shouldn't support Metal? I'd say no, but maybe you're seeing this kind of logic differently. I'd be fully in support of macOS/iOS/iPadOS/visionOS adding native DirectX support, if that's what you mean. It just seems less likely than Vulkan (for several reasons).
Vulkan is the primary rendering API on Android and Linux these days and also well supported on Windows by GPU vendors. Applications that don't use it yet generally don't because they don't need it and still OpenGL (ES) (or for Windows applications, use D3D instead).
It's fascinating that history is changing so fast now that even events of 10 years ago can be claimed to be something they weren't.
- 2013: AMD starts developing Mantle, and it is only available as part of AMD Catalyst, and only on Windows.
- 2013 (at least): Apple starts working on their own graphics API.
- June 2014: Metal 1.0 on iPhones is announced by Apple (it means it had already been in development much earlier, that's why I wrote "2013 at least" above)
- July 2014: Khronos starts work on Vulkan
- August 2014: The announcement of the Vulkan project and the call for participation.
- June 2015: Apple announced Metal on Macs.
- Sometime in 2015: AMD discontinues Mantle and donates it to Khronos.
- December 2015: Vulkan 1.0 specification announced by Khronos group
- February 2016: The full spec and SDK for Vulkan 1.0 released
So, reality: Metal had been released two years before Vulkan even had a specification.
> also well supported on Windows by GPU vendors.
Keyword: GPU vendors. Not by Microsoft.
> Vulkan is the primary rendering API on Android and Linux these days
But not on Macs, iPhones, Windows, XBox, and Playstation.
And yet, "omg why doesn't Apple support this late-to-the scene quite shitty API that it must support because we say it must".
Wouldn't it make sense to simply implement the technically best solution everywhere?
Also the question of "technically best solution" is also fraught with subjective definitions of "better". You also want competition in approaches. E.g. Vulkan might not have happened (an we would be stuck wit OpenGL) without the newer more modern GPU APIs from Metal and DX12.
Actually, I think the last time I installed Steam on a Mac I did so in a CrossOver Games bottle, so even there Steam would have seen that install as a non-Mac user.
EDIT: Also just because I think it's interesting to note this, Steam Deck accounts for most of Linux's headroom there, if you subtract the SteamOS numbers from the rest of Linux it's at 2.07% instead, which is much closer to Mac.
Exactly this. As a piece of anecdata, I play World of Warcraft every day on my Mac, but I don't have steam installed.
I think the only game I've put serious time into on my Mac was Hades 1, which I pretty much finished before the console ports happened.