Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Many people blame the lack of OpenGL/Vulkan... but I really don't buy it. It doesn't pass the sniff test as an objection. PlayStation doesn't support OpenGL/Vulkan (they have their own proprietary APIs, GNM, GNMX, PSSL). Nintendo supports Vulkan but performance is so bad, almost everyone uses the proprietary API (NVN / NVN2). Xbox obviously doesn't accept OpenGL/Vulkan either, requiring DirectX. Understanding of Metal is widespread in mobile gaming, so it's weird AAA couldn't pull from that industry if they wished.

View on HN

The primary reason is Apple's environment is too unstable for gaming's most common business model. Most games are developed, released, and then sold for years and years with little or no maintenance. Additionally, gamers expect the games they purchased to continue to work indefinitely. Apple regularly breaks backwards compatibility in a wide variety of ways (code signing requirements; breaking OS API changes; hardware architecture changes). That means software run on Apple OSes must be constantly maintained or else it will eventually stop working. Most games aren't developed like that.

No one who was forced to write a statement like [this](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...) is going to be enthusiastic about continuing to work with Apple.

I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the sniff test in 2025.

1. When is the next transition on bits? Is Apple going to suddenly move to 128-bit? No.

2. When is the next transition on architecture? Is Apple going to suddenly move back to x86? No.

3. When is the next API transition? Is Apple suddenly going to add Vulkan or reinvigorate OpenGL? No. They've been clear it's Metal since 2014, 11 years ago. That's plenty of time for the industry to follow if they cared, and mobile gaming has adopted it without issue.

We might as well complain that the PlayStation 4 was completely incompatible with the PlayStation 3.

I mean, I worked in this space, and I'm telling you why many of the people I worked with weren't interested in supporting Apple. I'm happy to hear your theories if you don't like mine, though.

I think the past bit people, but unlike the PS4 transition or gaming consoles in the past (which were rarely backwards compatible), there wasn't enough cultural momentum to plow through it... leaving "don't support Apple" as a bit of a institutional memory at this point, even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent. What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

Yeah, I buy that, so I think we are actually agreeing with each other. The very rough backwards support story Apple has had for the past decade, which I mentioned, has made people uninterested in supporting the platform, even if they're better about it now, as you claim (though I'm unconvinced about that personally, having worked on macOS software for more than a decade).

> What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

Sure, I can think of lots of things. Every macOS update when I worked in this space broke something that we had to go fix. Code signature requirements change a bit in almost every release, not hard to imagine a 10-year-old game finally running afoul of some new requirement. I can easily see them removing old, unmaintained APIs. OpenGL is actively unmaintained and I would guess a massive attack vector, not hard to see that going away. Have you ever seen their controller force feedback APIs? Lol, they're so bad, it's a miracle they haven't removed those already.

> even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent.

You see, the existence of that "almost" is already less confidence than developers have on every game console as well as Linux and Windows.

What happens when apple switches to riscv, or depreciates versions of metal in a backwards incompatible way, or mandates some new code signing technique?

The attitude in the apple developer ecosystem is that apple tells you to jump, and you ask how high.

You could complain that Playstation 4 software is incompatible with Playstation 3. This is the PC gaming industry, there are higher standards for the compatibility of software that only a couple companies can ignore.

Apple will never transition to RISC-V; especially when they cofounded ARM. They have 35 years of institutional knowledge in ARM. Their cores and techniques are licensed and patented with mixtures of their own IP and ARM-compatible IP. That is decades away, if ever. Even the assumption RISC-V will eventually achieve equality with ARM performance is untested; as sometimes ISAs do fail at scale (Itanium anyone? While unlikely to repeat; even a discovered 5% structural difference in the negative would handicap adoption permanently.)

"This is the PC gaming industry"

Who said Apple needed to present themselves as a PC gaming alternative over a console alternative?

Consoles are dying and PCs are replacing them. Like the original commenter suggested, people want to run PC games. The market has decided that the benefits of compatibility outweigh the added complexity. On the PC you have access to a massive expanding back-catalog of old software, far more competition in the market, mods, and you're able to run whatever software you want alongside games (discord, teamspeak, game streaming, etc.).

Macs are personal computers, whether or not they come from some official IBM Personal Computer compatibility bloodline.

Steam Deck - 6 million

Sega Saturn - 9 million

Wii U - 13 million

PlayStation 5 - 80 million

Nintendo Switch - 150 million

Nintendo Switch 2 opening weekend - 4 million in 3 days

Sure.

For comparison, the lifetime sales of the first Nintendo Switch would be considered a good year for iPhone sales -- six generations of phones sold >150MM units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

And in the last 48 hours, Steam peaked at 39.5M users online, providing a highly pessimistic lower-bound on how many PC gamers there are.

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/stats/

If you consider time zones (not every PC gamer is online at the same time), the fact that it's not the weekend, and other factors, I'd estimate the PC gaming audience is at least 100M.

Unfortunately, there's no possible way to get an exact number. There are multiple gaming PC manufacturers, not to mention how many gaming PCs are going to be built by hand. I'm part of a PC gaming community, and nearly 90% of us have a PC built by either themselves or a friend/family. https://pdxlan.net/lan-stats/

> I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the sniff test in 2025.

I mean, it's at least partially true. I used to play BioShock Infinite on my MacBook in high school, there was a full port. Unfortunately it's 32 bit and doesn't run anymore and there hasn't been a remaster yet.

Game developers make most of the money shortly after a game release, so having a 15 years old game not working anymore shouldn't make much difference in term of revenues.

Anyway, the whole situation was quite bad. Many games were still 32-bit, even if macOS itself had been mainly 64-bit for almost 10 years or more. And Valve didn't help either, the Steam store is full of 64-bit mislabeled as 32-bit. They could have written a simple script to check whether a game is actually 64-bit or not, instead they decided to do nothing and keep their chaos.

The best solution would have been a lightweight VM to run old 32-bit games, nowadays computer are powerful enough to do so.

PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox all have 10s of millions of gamers each. Meanwhile MacOS makes up ~2% of steam users which is probably a pretty good proxy for the number of MacOS gamers.

Why would I do anything bespoke at all for such a tiny market? Much less an entirely unique GPU API?

Apple refusing to support OpenGL and Vulkan absolutely hurt their gaming market. It increased the porting costs for a market that was already tiny.

> Why would I do anything bespoke at all for such a tiny market?

Because there is a huge potential here to increase market share.

I don't buy it either, because Apples GPTK works similar as Proton - they have a DX12-to-Metal Layer that works quite well - if it works. And their GPTK is based on wine, just as proton. It is more other annoyances like lack of steam support. There are patched version of steam circulating that run in GPTK though (offline mode) but that is where everything gets finnicky and brittle. It is mostly community efforts, and I think gaming could be way better on Apple if they embrace the Proton-approach that they started with GPTK.

Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't see a reason to support it.

You don't buy Apple to use your computer they way you want to use it. You buy it to use it the way they tell you to. E.g. "you're holding it wrong" fiasco.

In some ways this is good for general consumers (and even developers, with limited config comes less unpredictablilty)... However this generally is bad for power users or "niche" users like Mac gamers.

Apple collects no money from Photoshop, Microsoft, or anything else that runs on the Mac besides the tiny minority of apps sold on the Mac App Store.

Not to mention many subscription services on iOS that don’t allow you to subscribe through the App Store.

> Apple collects no money from Steam sales, so they don't see a reason to support it.

That is true, but now they are in a position where their hardware is actually more affordable and powerful than their Windows/x86 counterpart - and Win 11 is a shitload of adware and an annoyance in itself, layered ontop of a OS. They could massively expand their hardware sales to the gaming sector.

I'm eyeing at a framework Desktop with an AMD AI 395 APU for gaming (I am happy with just 1080p@60) and am looking at 2000€ to spend, because I wan't a small form factor. Don't quote me on the benchmarks, but a Mac Mini on M4 Pro is probably cheaper and more powerful for gaming - IF it had proper software support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com