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Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

Developers need to optimize and debug their game for each console. Xbox/PS are completely different platforms (UWP vs heavily customized BSD) so fixes don't transfer over. Adding another incompatible target with new store guidelines and system APIs adds a lot of work so Apple would have a hard time convincing them.

Now add the perception that Mac users don't play games and Apple devices are made for people already in their ecosystem. The only way they could gain market share is competing with Steam Machine as a more open platform, but without a giant library of existing games.

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XBox no longer uses UWP (ERA runtime), that is left around for compatibility mode, nowadays modern XBox development is classical Win32.

One of the reasons C++/CX was killed was because of this, even though UWP application developers were fine with it, apparently game devs were quite vocal against it, even though they love their compiler extensions in other platforms.

My Macbook Pro is my favorite emulator machine, and CrossOver is incredibly good at running most of the games I want to play.

OSX has also recently released a proton-style compat layer so we are seeing gains there as well.

For a long time Apple was outright AGAINST games. They wanted their machines to be for musicians and artists, not bratty kids.

Apple is still against games. Next year they'll remove Rosetta 2, and all the games that require it will stop working. There's no upcoming Vulkan drivers, or upstream support for Proton. CrossOver is expensive and incomplete.

The best gaming hardware will always be the hardware you keep on you; be it a phone, GameBoy, or a Mac. macOS is basically last-place in supporting PC gaming though, and Apple has no qualms letting it die again.

They’ve stated an intent to exempt games specifically:

> Beyond this date, we will maintain a subset of Rosetta features designed to support older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel frameworks.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527

Ah, good catch. Gotta keep Tomb Raider around for a few more keynotes, I suppose.

i was referring to the game porting toolkit, didn't know about rosetta 2 deprecation though, disappointing.

honestly, I just use it for emulators like PS2 Dreamcast etc...

All good. I'm just frustrated at Apple for letting macOS fall behind Asahi on features like FEX and Vulkan support.

Mac users deserve to have a platform where games and software work forever once you buy it. It doesn't take much work on Apple's behalf to support it, so it's worrying to see them shift away from well-maintained software stacks and industry-spanning standards to focus on their own fragile runtimes.

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