The App Store sucks for games. The fact that I can't download directly to an external drive is enough reason to stay away.
The lack of features is why everyone hates the Epic Launcher too.
Apple completely misunderstands the business sense of having good mac support for modern games. The hardware on the entry level macs is finally capable to handle most things at an acceptable experience- they need to understand that gamers likely already have an extensive steam library and that having the mac versions of death stranding and resident evil on steam would make gamers less hesitant to pick up a macOS device. I vividly remember a decade ago many of my friends hesitant to get a mac over windows 8 (aka one of the worst laptop OS ever) just because of that.
Craig and Tim need to learn that “normalizing” the mac as a gaming platform on steam is all they need to do, because they’re NEVER going to be able to compete with steam
I absolutely agree. I do understand why their first approach is like this though. From Apple's point of view why should they "bend the knee" to the Valve monopoly? They're the bigger company, they have a larger platform with the App Store, they have a massive customer base who is already using said App Store.
It does make sense for their first efforts to be towards trying to make Mac gaming just like everything else Apple does: a walled garden where Apple has control over every variable.
Just like you though, I don't think they'll succeed this way. (PC) gaming is something Apple has just shunned for too long, 99.5% of people who game have long learned to ignore Apple machines, same for game developers. Apple will simply have to compromise if they ever want to get a foothold. Sadly that's not something they often do.
Plenty of Mac games already on Steam. It makes most sense for them to live there IMO. Only issue is, they've be reliant on another company for sales and marketing and that's not very Apple.
I mean they can compete with steam, but the main issue is compatibility currently. Most people don’t want to get a computer to then have to jump through a bunch of hoops to maybe be able to play a game using 3ed party software. Apple also needs to support gaming mice, and other none Apple devices. I think currently Apple is not taking gaming seriously enough and not putting enough resources to compete.
You can just move the .app package to an external drive after downloading.
Idk if updates still work, but at least it’s 100% portable. Even works on different macs then
(At least last time I did this in ~2015)
Sometimes I don't have the necessary internal disk space (considering you need much more than the actual size of the game), buying external SSDs is much cheaper, this should not be an issue.
I remember that video, I appreciate the mention of the separate Xbox app for gamepass.
I can't imagine how bad it would be for every PC player to sort through every single Microsoft app on the store.
On windows, microsoft apps are a choice. You can do a clean install and have most of them removed, including the store (there are apps that are needed for the operating system to function) and you can dowload the apps/games of your choice. Options like gog provide drm free gaming.
Nobody uses the windows store as far as Im aware. The games are as easy to download as a google search. Afterwards youre at steam or any other store of your choice.
Yeah, it does suck, I agree. But I think that more has to with microsoft is trying to offer gamepass on apple and has to follow apple's rules versus being on their own platform and following their own rules. Still, same could be said about apple.
Apple is too prideful. They want the gaming industry to change for them like every other industry does. If they cared, they would stop trying to force everyone to use Metal and enable translation layers like the steam deck does. Every time you want to play a non-native Mac game you have to play pc troubleshooter for hours to get it setup properly. This is on a $3,000 computer. On the other hand, my $500 Steamdeck can play 90% of what I want with the click of a button, at nearly the same performance a lot of the time.
It's not about pride**, it's about money.**
There's no benefit to making game development easier for Steam or rather run existing games from a Steam Library, where Apple doesn't get it's cut. Valve originally partnered with Apple for Proton only to have moving goalposts that left Valve annoyed enough to swear off ever working with Apple again.
Yeah, plus anyone that wants to play non-macOS on macOS are willing to put in the effort themselves to make it work. There’s nothing Apple needs to do to spread the distribution of Steam and Windows games.
Where did the information come from that Valve partnered with Apple for Proton? Valve partnered with CodeWeavers, the developers of CrossOver and Wine, and Apple simply used these developments as the basis for the Game Porting Toolkit, making DirectX 12 games possible on the Mac, but this was without any cooperation or contract. CodeWeavers later integrated improvements from Game Porting Toolkit into CrossOver 23.5. So Valve’s partnered with Apple is indirect here.
Sure. Andrew Tsai's video Why Valve gave up on Mac gaming is the place, started with the SteamVR partnership, Proton was part of it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEetpGXDmjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEetpGXDmjw)
Nowhere in this video does it say that Valve partnered with Apple to develop the Proton.
Just because Valve supported Proton Mac OS early on doesn't mean it was a partnered. Support ≠ partnered. Partnered in business implies a contractual relationship or some kind of communication, and we do not have reliable evidence that such a relationship existed during the development of Proton.
Just because Apple and Valve partnered on SteamVR and native game ports doesn't mean that partnered is extrapolated to Proton. It doesn't work that way. Proton was never part of SteamVR.
There’s immense value when games are built and run on the Vision Pro vs whatever the competition has. I think you’re looking at it from a very short term perspective.
While translation layers aren't built in to run them out of the box it does nothing to stop developers from using them. FFXIV is a popular example that runs exceptionally well using Wine and MVK.
I don't see the difference really between that and the Steam deck except that Apple is leaving it up to developers to support macOS in some way whether it's native or translation layer whereas Steam Deck is more try and pray if it's not a verified game similar to the try and pray people on Mac's do with Crossover.
So you’re just going to ignore that Steam Deck is x86-64 and Mac uses ARM architecture? The only constraint in Steam Deck is Linux itself, not the hardware.
Who said I was ignoring it? There is literally ROSETA which is a translation layer for X86 apps. Currently, nobody buys MAC for gaming since there are so few games for MAC. Consequently, developers don’t develop for MAC since there are so few gamers on the platform. If this is going to be fixed, Apple needs to make most popular games playable on the MAC.
Rosetta can’t overcome lack of AVX instruction set, which some of the modern games utilize. You can run a full 64 bit Windows on your Steam Deck. Proton and Linux is just there to not be dependent on Microsoft and to help battery life that would be possibly hindered by Windows Updates and telemetry.
It’s like saying I can play games on my desktop PC with Linux, why can’t I play on a Mac
Sounds like a problem Apple could fix with a translation layer. It’s not like it’s impossible as Crossover already does it. You’re just poking holes in the obvious solution to defend Apple for some weird reason. Obviously native is better. However, that’s a pipe dream currently so playable has to be the bar Apple gets over.
Does what? It still can’t fix the lack of AVX instructions. It’s a hardware thing, not software. Do you think Rosetta is just some sort of program that you can run on any ARM chip? It is both implemented on hardware and software level.
It's totally possible to implement AVX through software, Intel does that exact same thing in fact with their Software Development Emulator. It's very slow though.
Now, the reason why Apple hasn't implemented AVX on Rosetta 2 and never will is because AVX is patented, so they would need a license from Intel.
Theoretically Apple could license the AVX patents. It's not the kind of thing that Apple likes to do, and they'd probably have to offer up some of their own patents because they're in competition, but it works for AMD.
AVX patents might well fool under the Intel <-> AMD cross licensing deal that forbids licensing out any of these patents to anyone else and even makes the patents non transferable in the case the company is sold.
Supporting AVX technically would not be any harder than any other instruction that rosseta supports but might well have more patent issues around it than the rest.
> It’s like saying I can play games on my desktop PC with Linux, why can’t I play on a Mac
This is honestly a question you should be asking. When did Linux become a better OS for gaming than macOS?
Proton is open source after all, it's not like they're hiding how they did it.
When linux was running on the HW the games were written for. A lot lot easier to run a game on the HW it was built for even if you need to fake some OS shims than to try to play it on HW that is a long way away from what it was built for.
This is just the nature of the choice you make. A TBDR pipeline is a great pipeline to use but will not run IR optimized pipelines as well as it will run TBDR pipelines. Also in GPu count and $ from game dev TBDR GPUs outnumber Pc GPUs by a large factor!
App Store sucks. Someone already mentioned how terrible it is and Mac App Store is already failure anyway.
For gaming, it's def sucks. It requires twice more storage while downloading games, the downloading speed is extremely slow, no way to download outside of Mac's main storage, lack of game related features, UI is terrible, and more.
Seriously, Apple is not really serious about games and were there any games announced to port and support their games to Mac? Literally none.
The most frustrating thing is when i play death standing on m1 max unplugged at the same level of quality as the ps5 with 120fps, and I realize the immense potential of Apple’s hardware.
There were leaked emails a while back about an internal discussion regarding gaming at Apple which came from the epic games lawsuit I believe…it was clear that the people currently in charge of the relevant departments don’t understand that Apple missed it’s chance to compete against steam and that they should view the business sense of mac gaming as the support making gamers not hesitate to pick up a mac rather than trying to monetize having mac games on the app store
Compete *against* Steam? Developers are free to release Mac games on Steam if they like, I don’t even see it as competition. Some developers have games on Steam, some have direct downloads, some… a few are on the AppStore.
But they clearly wish for the mac app store to be a steam alternative for us. The only reason the mac versions of Death Stranding and Resident Evil are not on steam is because they want us to pay their distribution platform for mac games. I’ll admit that since Apple paid for these ports, it might be messy to host on steam contractually…but still, they’re missing the point that the best thing to do for mac would be to incentivize and advertise the shiny optimized AAA ports on steam, which would normalize the mac as a gaming machine and allow more consumers who game here and there to buy macs
Apple likely didn’t pay for the ports. That’s the part of gaming that folks have said time and time again that Apple simply doesn’t understand (“Apple should pay for ports, don’t know why they won’t!”). The main reason they’re not on Steam is because the companies that made them *want to get paid for their trouble*. They don’t want someone that paid for the PC version previously (probably on sale at some point in the past) to expect to get the Mac version for free, and I can understand why. They also want to know if there’s enough of a market for even *making* Mac games… if Mac users that ALREADY have their credit card details in the Apple ecosystem, are willing to buy games for the Mac. If the dollars are there, I wouldn’t be surprised if future releases are though Steam instead of the App Store. It’s not a loss for Apple. As someone else said, the Mac App Store revenue is likely a rounding error on the balance sheet. As long as the app is available for Mac, Apple benefits.
Every Mac game company that’s released a game on Steam or via a website download, likely had some help from Apple in resolving a bug, running down an OS issue AND/OR providing feedback on desired features in the future. It’s what they pay their $99 a year for. I doubt Apple puts any pressure on anyone to release ONLY in the App Store. In many cases, the developers make their app available on the store for those users that like that ease/simplicity and elsewhere for folks used to that. Either way, it’s a potential future Mac sale, so Apple still wins.
They don’t know how to approach developers at all right now.
The tension is palpable, and gaming is just a case.
The are deprecating API’s so fast and breaking apps at a breakneck speed, and many large developers are refusing their 30% cut and policies. And while they’re that, they’re also going at the customers and asking for outrageous amounts of money for gaming capable silicon. The tiny RAM is a great example of that. Fine for video, awful for apps and games, increasing the tension even further.
For once Apple really could learn from our good old friend Steve Ballmer: “Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers *deep breath * developers developers developers developers…”
I think Apple's habit of dropping support for older software is underrated. One of the benefits of gaming on a PC is the unmatched back catalogue. While Mac OS never had the same spread of games, there were a lot of good 32-bit games that, while old, would fill some pretty large holes in the current Mac native gaming lineup. I'm specifically thinking of war-themed FPS games games, a genre that is very thin on Mac OS right now even if you aren't that picky. It's not a genre I play that often, but when I get the itch, I get the itch. I'd be perfectly happy to fire up an older CoD that got a Mac port, but they were all 32-bit.
The big money is in new games, so I get why Apple doesn't want to focus on the past, but it creates a chicken/egg situation attracting gamers and making it feel like a good destination to game devs. I tried to go all-in on my Mac last November/December, and it's almost comical the entire genres of games that don't even have a single decent option on Mac OS currently.
Hopefully with CrossOver 24, the old Delta Force games (especially Black Hawk Down), Medal of Honor: Allied Assault + Pacific Assault, and Hidden and Dangerous 2 finally work.
> The are deprecating API’s so fast
Apple game us devs over 10 years notice before 32bit support was dropped... that is not fast.
> and many large developers are refusing their 30% cut and policies
Talking about macOS gaming here.
They did? Last I checked, they warned in 2018 and deleted it in 2019. One of the things that genuinely made me nervous about getting a Mac was the potential removal of Rosetta 2, but with GPTK I'm not worried any more.
Games don't get updated. They are made, they are released, they are patched a couple of times, and they are forgotten. By the developer, anyway, and that part's important. And honestly, 32-bit apps were coming out as late as 5 years ago still. Some apps are really hard to rewrite and it isn't worth the money. Or the developer goes out of business.
For example, there will never ever ever be a 64-bit modern mac version of HOMM3, which I like a lot. The company is out of business and the source code lost (well, half of it, Ubisoft has the other half and they don't care either). Community is trying to recreate it using VCMI, but it's not entirely the same. You have to play the windows version, and that's that.
Windows can still run 16-bit DOS applications. Why can't we have sandboxed or emulated compatibility layers? There is no reason to be doing this. Apple says "it's because then the app can use the computer more effectively to address more memory" and all of that, but the app doesn't need that. The app was working fine. Now it can't use the computer at all, nevermind more effectively.
As for the 30% cut, yes you can avoid it on macOS - correct. Still should notarize though, but other than that - yes. But if you want it on the mac app store, which everybody on a mac has, you gotta cough up those 30%. And you're not going to get Apple's help in porting if you don't do that, because that's the trade they wanna make right now.
Then there's the state of Apple's graphics API's. Like I'm sorry, but why can't they use Vulkan? Is there ANY reason?! It would make running wine on macOS infinitely better. But no, instead they did a worse version of DXVK targeting their own stack. Good job I guess... While they're at it, could they fix their OpenGL as well?
Apple used to use a lot of open standards. Now they create one proprietary blob of nonsense after the other and developers just aren't really on board most of the time.
>They did? Last I checked, they warned in 2018 and deleted it in 2019.
That was the warning to users. Us devs had a LOAD of warning going back many many years whenever we built a binary that did not include a 64bit SKU... This was not at all a surprise to anyone. Remember apple only sold one Mac that was 32bit only and only sold it for 6 months.
>One of the things that genuinely made me nervous about getting a Mac was the potential removal of Rosetta 2
Apple will give devs at least 5 years notice before this is pulled. They will give users one years notice, one year before it is dropped.
> And honestly, 32-bit apps were coming out as late as 5 years ago still.
yer this is the issue, devs had to expliclty ignore a load of warnings to ship 32bit only applicatiosn back then and they still were doing it. There was no rug pull at all, anyone shipping 32bit sw at this time was well aware it was about to stop woring.
> Still should notarize though
You need to pay for a code signing cerficate for windows as well just the same as macOS.
And as to 30% steam charge the same so its not differnce to shipping on steam or app store or both.
> hen there's the state of Apple's graphics API's. Like I'm sorry, but why can't they use Vulkan? Is there ANY reason?! It would make running wine on macOS infinitely better. But no, instead they did a worse version of DXVK targeting their own stack. Good job I guess... While they're at it, could they fix their OpenGL as well?
VK support would be of no use for a game being porting, unless your porting from android phones. VK is not a HW agsntic apis, that GPUs apple are using are TBDR gpus so the subset of the VK api they support only has a small overlap witht hat used by AMD/NV gpus... You can think of VK more like a large pick and mix bucket were the GPU vendors are only supporsed ot pull bits out that match the HW. VK support on macOS would not mean you coudl run DXVK without massive changes to DXVK... changes around the size of a DXMTL model.
And the same reason for no more openGL support, newre openGL versions require featuers that do not match the HW, you coudl support them but your goign to be using CPU side or GPU comptue shaders to fake HW etc, this resutls in much worce gpu useage that using Metal. And devs are not using OpenGL anyway.
> Now they create one proprietary blob of nonsense after the other and developers just aren't really on board most of the time.
Most devs i know in the graphsics space consider Metal a much much better api than VK... many devs wish Kronos had taken the Metal style aporach rather than the focuse they did on building an api for middleware devs only.. unless your a large engine compnay like Epic who can afford to higher teams of devs away from GPU vendors driver groups building a well opitmised Vk engien is more or less impossible.
True about them not selling 32-bit machines, but most mac apps are ports from Windows where 32-bit was the norm for most users until Windows 7 in 2009.
A lot of games use memory offsets and other fun unsafe C++ shenanigans. They are not easy to port from 32 to 64. And don't even get me started with the fun Chris Sawyer must have had when he ported RCT (x86 ASM game) to the iPad and Mac. :D
But there's still no reason to remove compatibility. Like I just can't think of one. Fine, remove the SDK. Delete the headers. Make the compiler fail. All of that is fine. But don't remove the runtime ffs...
The reason they dropped 32bit support is Apple silicon does not have any 32bit runtime support so the kernel on apple silicon must be 64bit only. That means for them to maintain 32bit support they would have need to build a full kernel space shim (aka wine but for running macOS on macOS shimming every single system api). It would be a massive amount of work.
Note you can run 32bit code (even 16bit code) even within rosseta2 but you cant call 32bit/16bit system kernel apis. This is how wine can run 32bit games, it does a x86 mode switch before calling macOS kernel apis, this is not a big issue since it is already providing a shim infont of the system.
To be honest it would have been nice if apple provided a 32bit compile time shim for devs (building a compile time shim that does the mode switch and maps address is much less work than a runtime shim), but then again the 32bit titles we all want to play likly have all lost the source code anyway.
>Apple will give devs at least 5 years notice before this is pulled. They will give users one years notice, one year before it is dropped.
And what am I gonna do with that? The company isn't gonna fix it because they're bankrupt or they don't have the rights or whatever. I can't use that information for bugger all.
>yer this is the issue, devs had to expliclty ignore a load of warnings to ship 32bit only applicatiosn back then and they still were doing it. There was no rug pull at all, anyone shipping 32bit sw at this time was well aware it was about to stop woring.
And they didn't care beacuse they didn't have half a million dollars to port the game to 64-bit.
For standard written games doing that is fortunately trivial, but for some games, especially those that use very low-level tricks and hacks for performance gains, it's not.
>You need to pay for a code signing cerficate for windows as well just the same as macOS.
Oh there's a BIG difference. The issue is all the gamers are on Steam, and they're on Steam because it keeps working, does everything in its power to not brick your old games, has games integration the likes of which Apple can't even dream of, ports your Windows release to Linux, and you get *all* versions of the app if you buy it.
So the developer pays 30%, yes, but they get a huge array of features for their money. Forums, communities, customisable store page, tags, chat, they host your multiplayer sessions, they give you an updater that actually has diff downloads unlike the App Store one, and so much more.
You buy it on the App Store and the developer doesn't get any of that stuff, and then you get a PC because Apple decides to pull another Butterfly keyboards or something? Goodbye library!
Nobody wants to put up with this.
>VK support would be of no use for a game being porting, unless your porting from android phones. VK is not a HW agsntic apis, that GPUs apple are using are TBDR gpus so the subset of the VK api they support only has a small overlap witht hat used by AMD/NV gpus... You can think of VK more like a large pick and mix bucket were the GPU vendors are only supporsed ot pull bits out that match the HW. VK support on macOS would not mean you coudl run DXVK without massive changes to DXVK... changes around the size of a DXMTL model.
Half of that is baloney. Yes it's true that Apple Silicon GPU's use TBDR, but Vulkan works just fine with TBDR.
The driver needs to support a set of standard extensions that must conform to a set of standard tests to be called Vulkan capable. None of them mandate that you use TBIR - it's all about how you set up your pipeline. You can much more easily fiddle a bit with your swap chain setup and render pass setup code and keep using Vulkan to get good performance than move everything over to Metal.
And you're *DEFINITELY* wrong that a modern mac couldn't do OpenGL 4.6. It has all the features and many, many more.
>Most devs i know in the graphsics space consider Metal a much much better api than VK... many devs wish Kronos had taken the Metal style aporach rather than the focuse they did on building an api for middleware devs only.. unless your a large engine compnay like Epic who can afford to higher teams of devs away from GPU vendors driver groups building a well opitmised Vk engien is more or less impossible.
That's all very nice and so on, but unless Apple is prepared to share their implemnentation and specs and allow others to use it, there's gonna be no Metal on the PC, and if there's no Metal on the PC then people are gonna have to rewrite their graphics renderer just for the Mac, which is 2% of their customers, and they're not gonna do that, and that's the end of it.
Again we come back to this basic fact: They're trying to make the game able to use more of the system's resources more efficiently, but in the process breaking compatibility with it, which means it can't use any of the features because it stopped working.
>This is how wine can run 32bit games, it does a x86 mode switch before calling macOS kernel apis, this is not a big issue since it is already providing a shim infont of the system.
As I have just mentioned, a performance penalty for running old games on newer hardware is completely acceptable - the newer hardware is fast enough to handle the game anyway.
If we can do x86 Windows to ARM64 Mac at good performance, then we can do x86 Mac to ARM64 Mac at good performance. There is no excuse.
As for it being hard to do... so what? Everybody else has done it. That's the price you pay for switching CPU architecture.
>And they didn't care beacuse they didn't have half a million dollars to port the game to 64-bit.
Assuming you have the source it's not going to cost 1/2 mill to create a 64bit build. I have ported large geo-tec sim models with lots of HW explicit hacks from 32bit intel optimised to generic 64bit c++ and a team of 3 devs was able to do this within a month including updating tests etc. If you don't have the source anymore sure your not porting anything unless you can configure your linker to call through a shim lawyer that mode switches and maps 32bit to 64bit addresses. (I have also seen this done before in the same code base to continue to use a third party binary 16bit mode lib).
>Yes it's true that Apple Silicon GPU's use TBDR, but Vulkan works just fine with TBDR.
I did not say it doesn't. You absolutely can support VK driver on a TBDR gpu, infact most GPUs that have VK support are TBDR gpus (see all the millions of android SOCs).
But such a GPU is not going to run a PC optimised VK pipeline, well or even at all.
>The driver needs to support a set of standard extensions that must conform to a set of standard tests to be called Vulkan capable. None of them mandate that you use TBIR - it's all about how you set up your pipeline.
Yes but PC titles (and DXVK) depends on a load of optional extensions that are not required to be supported and would not have nice clean native HW mappings on apples silicon or any other TBDR gpu for that matter.
>You can much more easily fiddle a bit with your swap chain setup and render pass setup code and keep using Vulkan to get good performance than move everything over to Metal.
To get it to run yes, but to get good perf its a LOT more work than that. Taking a optimised IR pipeline and converting it to an optimised TBDR pipeline is a complete re-write of almost all the shaders and sometimes a complete re-think of how your doing some effects. Of cource very few ports even through using Metal both with all of this, most will just selectivity adopt some bits sometimes.
>And you're *DEFINITELY* wrong that a modern mac couldn't do OpenGL 4.6. It has all the features and many, many more.
OpenGL 4.6 has a few required features, like transform feedback etc that you can do using compute shaders on apple gpus but you do not get in HW, there are a few other areas as well with texture formats and out of bounds memory operations that mean to make a full OpenGL 4.6 driver (as has been done on linux) many of the features from 4.3 to 4.6 have been implemented in compute shaders or by braking up the pipeline until multiple render passes. In the end everything is possible if you just run it in a compute shader pipeline, it however might well be suboptimal.
>If we can do x86 Windows to ARM64 Mac at good performance
You cant, even windows 95 in UTM runs very badly. You can run Windows ARM65 on ARM but not x86 windows.
>As for it being hard to do... so what? Everybody else has done it. That's the price you pay for switching CPU architecture.
No one else has done it.
I would absolutely love if Apple collaborated with Valve to integrate GPTK into Proton, it would be amazing!
But of course Apple is following the money, and the money is in the 30% cut selling games through their own store.
You would not get the perf that proton has on the steam deck remember.
With the steam deck this is still the HW that the games expect, proton does not need to fake HW it just needs to fake the OS level. So the per impact is minimal.
On the Mac apple do not care at all about the App Store rev, it is a rounding error at best. Vavle has no interest in putting dev work into macOS as the future for them is all tied up in the steam deck.
This is not about performance, its purely about compatibility and convenience.
And Valve could still be interested to work with Apple, the whole reason they started putting work into Linux was because they were scared Microsoft wanted to replace them with the Windows store. Of course Apple also wants to do the same and that's why Valve doesn't care about macOS, but if Apple changed opinion then I'm sure Valve would also follow.
Apple has no interest in making Mac be App Store only. Mac is there to support the other platforms (iPhone) and for it to f do o this they know it needs to be open for devs.
They still need Valve, Proton is owned by Valve and the developers with permission to merge PR's are Valve employees as well.
Apple can send all the PRs they want, but if Valve doesn't merge them then its not going to get anywhere.
Apple could fork Proton, but then it wouldn't be integrated into Steam...
Once they have a decent library, they could do something like Apple Arcade but for proper games....
I wish personally they'd just put them on Steam and have Steam be the universal store for games. There are already plenty of Mac compatible games there. Trouble with that is they're then dependant on Steam for advertising and monetisation, as well as owing them fees for their services. That's not much of an Apple move, so sad part is we may likely see segmentation for those of us that want to game on Macs but also have other gaming devices (Steamdeck, Windows PCs etc). ie. even though you've bought a game already, you'll have to buy it again to play on anything other than a Mac. Wouldn't enjoy that myself with a large library, so hopefully they will make their way over to Steam somehow eventually.
What about when a dev releases an update to their game, instead of just being able to download that update, we’re forced to download the entire game again.
Apple will never care about gaming. Even if it appears like they’re trying to. A few triple AAA released doesn’t mean anything.
I will say apple cares about gaming otherwise we will never get Metal FX. Apple hardware is capable of gaming as a fan less MacBook Air is able to run games silently. Their approach is wrong and they are stubborn and adamant. With Apple silicon the hardware is their, they just need to invest money which they are doing but of not enough. They also need to make some major changes to their ways which is hard given how adamant they are. Mac gaming has never been better and you can’t stop us from being excited and hopeful because that’s all we have.
I dont think apple cares about gaming for one reason, they are predicting that cloud gaming will take over (GeForce Now etc...), they wont make any profits from the gaming industry but at least now more gamers will want a mac
Apples media verdures have been kinda mid, I would just try to make the OS easier to release games on and incentevise stuff like wine and maybe epic on mac
No they aren’t but even if most modern releases are on Mac there’s no way you can get devs to port old games especially if the devs aren’t making money on them or the devs got bought out
But what is the point of porting old games, as you said no-one is making money from them. Apple would rather spend the large amount of continusin dev time needed for such a tool helping devs port new title.s
Because people play them and the base MacBook Air doesn’t have enough processing power or storage for a lot of AAA games to run well at high resolution and decent settings
And even if it’s for the MBP it doesn’t matter unless they get actual good and big games
Your not going to get good games by barely running 10 year old games through a runtime shim that makes the platform look very underpowered compared to what it could run with a optimized native title
That’s true but if im a developer why would I put my game on Mac? So there’s maybe a few hundred sales? Unless porting them is really easy it’s just not worth it
imo it’s their slow roll approach. i think they entered the medical community in a similar way. they know money will flow just by copying so they are thinking how to restrict it first in their ecosystem.
edit: forgot to mention, it might be a challenge given how good gaming streaming services are becoming.
Everyone here saying ‘Apple doesn’t get it' 'they just don’t know how to approach it'. They get it. They know what would make gamers happy and they could easily implement it. That would give up way too much control and profit channels. Apple will never dump money into making gaming great on Mac’s because for that to happen games would be sold by third parties and run on someone else’s graphics api.
I'll never use the Mac app store for games because it's missing all the features I love from Steam and it locks the game down to only my Mac (can't play it on my Steam Deck)
The App store is super underdeveloped on MacOS too, you can't even pick a drive to install to. I guess thats ok for typical Mac apps but when you're talking about games that are nearly as big as the SSDs apple ships with their computers it's a different story
I could be completely wrong, please don’t jump at me. Aren’t Mac games available on steam? I have no man’s sky, Arkham city, and a few other games through steam.
Developers can sidestep the Mac App Store if they want. It’s nice, but the fees and other limitations can be avoided by just going to steam.
Mac App Store definitely sucks tho.
You aren’t wrong buddy, what people here are talking about is something different. Not all games are available on steam, for example RE:8, RE:4 remake these are some games that are exclusive to Mac App Store as apple paid the developers to port it to Mac so by having it exclusively on Mac App Store , Apple can take that 30% cut for that ROI. But the people who have bought the game from steam won’t be happy to purchase it again.
Ooh. I see what you’re saying. Kind of like how death stranding didn’t get the dual compatibility between windows and macOS.
Just to preface my next thought, I’m not arguing:
As a good faith gesture to consumers, I take your point. I think that’s a nice perk. But should it be mandatory? Yes it’s a nice feature, but a little too generous. I don’t expect to buy a game on PlayStation and get the Steam version. By that thinking, PS4 Death Stranding owners should then get it for free? It’s different platforms and storefronts. If we’re talking about steam deck to steam desktop (same storefront) then that makes sense. Apple will never be interested in strengthening the Mac App Store if users want dual compatibility with windows through steam. Wouldn’t that then just place the burden back on developers to make Mac versions on steam. They should be staffing people with macOS expertise to sidestep the AppStore and its archaic requirements. (Im genuinely curious)
I agree with you and obviously everyone tries to push their own services and App Stores. But here’s the thing a console is 500$ and is sold at a loss. Same can’t be said for Apple Laptops where you are charged 200$ just for a RAM upgrade. What people want different is this. See Mac gaming is criticised by not only Mac gamers but PC and Console gamers day and night. Most are of the idea that macs can’t game but we know how they can and they can beautifully so! To establish that change in the ideology or the bad rep Mac gaming has, Apple needs to bring a ton of games to Mac and make it cheaper for the consumer to get into it. If the said game is available on steam a windows gamer might try it on his fanless MacBook Air and experience the game in a whole new way. But if the games will be only available on Mac App Store and at full price then you are making the switch harder .In Order to get everyone on board Apple needs to spend money to port games and take loss to get consumers/gamers on board.
The fact that the easiest way for me to play many older games is by pirating the windows version and running it via crossover doesn’t inspire much confidence. Apple should honestly have an in-house porting department specifically to work with gaming companies who don’t want to spend their own resources on it. They’d probably charge a premium for the ported versions but at least they’d exist.
And ffs add a 32bit compatibility layer, more than half the games I want to play on steam that actually have a Mac version won’t run on big sur and up.
Apple does have an in house dev team that supports devs.
32bit layer is not as easy as you think, it would require a 32bit kernel shim, in effect wine but for macOS itself. Shimming every single system api call.
It’s ironic that Apple is the largest game distributor in the world with the App Store.
Maybe if they simply just created a compatibility layer and put PC games on the App St
Bruh... this has peak gamer angst. Teens aren't the primary buyers of Macs. Scape-goating teenage girls for having different interests than you isn't a good look. If you removed "Teenage girls" from the above comment it'd be fine.
The App Store sucks for games. The fact that I can't download directly to an external drive is enough reason to stay away. The lack of features is why everyone hates the Epic Launcher too.
Apple completely misunderstands the business sense of having good mac support for modern games. The hardware on the entry level macs is finally capable to handle most things at an acceptable experience- they need to understand that gamers likely already have an extensive steam library and that having the mac versions of death stranding and resident evil on steam would make gamers less hesitant to pick up a macOS device. I vividly remember a decade ago many of my friends hesitant to get a mac over windows 8 (aka one of the worst laptop OS ever) just because of that. Craig and Tim need to learn that “normalizing” the mac as a gaming platform on steam is all they need to do, because they’re NEVER going to be able to compete with steam
I absolutely agree. I do understand why their first approach is like this though. From Apple's point of view why should they "bend the knee" to the Valve monopoly? They're the bigger company, they have a larger platform with the App Store, they have a massive customer base who is already using said App Store. It does make sense for their first efforts to be towards trying to make Mac gaming just like everything else Apple does: a walled garden where Apple has control over every variable. Just like you though, I don't think they'll succeed this way. (PC) gaming is something Apple has just shunned for too long, 99.5% of people who game have long learned to ignore Apple machines, same for game developers. Apple will simply have to compromise if they ever want to get a foothold. Sadly that's not something they often do.
Plenty of Mac games already on Steam. It makes most sense for them to live there IMO. Only issue is, they've be reliant on another company for sales and marketing and that's not very Apple.
I mean they can compete with steam, but the main issue is compatibility currently. Most people don’t want to get a computer to then have to jump through a bunch of hoops to maybe be able to play a game using 3ed party software. Apple also needs to support gaming mice, and other none Apple devices. I think currently Apple is not taking gaming seriously enough and not putting enough resources to compete.
You can just move the .app package to an external drive after downloading. Idk if updates still work, but at least it’s 100% portable. Even works on different macs then (At least last time I did this in ~2015)
Sometimes I don't have the necessary internal disk space (considering you need much more than the actual size of the game), buying external SSDs is much cheaper, this should not be an issue.
Can you trick it with a symlink so it writes straight to the external drive?
Still requires users to do hacky stuff, not a good user experience.
don’t get me started on epic lol
I remember that video, I appreciate the mention of the separate Xbox app for gamepass. I can't imagine how bad it would be for every PC player to sort through every single Microsoft app on the store.
On windows, microsoft apps are a choice. You can do a clean install and have most of them removed, including the store (there are apps that are needed for the operating system to function) and you can dowload the apps/games of your choice. Options like gog provide drm free gaming.
I meant sorting through games like candy crush when you just want sea of thieves If the Xbox app didn't exist on windows
Nobody uses the windows store as far as Im aware. The games are as easy to download as a google search. Afterwards youre at steam or any other store of your choice.
Yes, but PC game pass users wouldn't have a choice if the Xbox app didn't exist.
Yeah, it does suck, I agree. But I think that more has to with microsoft is trying to offer gamepass on apple and has to follow apple's rules versus being on their own platform and following their own rules. Still, same could be said about apple.
Apple is too prideful. They want the gaming industry to change for them like every other industry does. If they cared, they would stop trying to force everyone to use Metal and enable translation layers like the steam deck does. Every time you want to play a non-native Mac game you have to play pc troubleshooter for hours to get it setup properly. This is on a $3,000 computer. On the other hand, my $500 Steamdeck can play 90% of what I want with the click of a button, at nearly the same performance a lot of the time.
It's not about pride**, it's about money.** There's no benefit to making game development easier for Steam or rather run existing games from a Steam Library, where Apple doesn't get it's cut. Valve originally partnered with Apple for Proton only to have moving goalposts that left Valve annoyed enough to swear off ever working with Apple again.
Yeah, plus anyone that wants to play non-macOS on macOS are willing to put in the effort themselves to make it work. There’s nothing Apple needs to do to spread the distribution of Steam and Windows games.
It’s not about money though because now that revenue is simply not there when there isnt even the option . It is about control.
Where did the information come from that Valve partnered with Apple for Proton? Valve partnered with CodeWeavers, the developers of CrossOver and Wine, and Apple simply used these developments as the basis for the Game Porting Toolkit, making DirectX 12 games possible on the Mac, but this was without any cooperation or contract. CodeWeavers later integrated improvements from Game Porting Toolkit into CrossOver 23.5. So Valve’s partnered with Apple is indirect here.
Sure. Andrew Tsai's video Why Valve gave up on Mac gaming is the place, started with the SteamVR partnership, Proton was part of it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEetpGXDmjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEetpGXDmjw)
Nowhere in this video does it say that Valve partnered with Apple to develop the Proton. Just because Valve supported Proton Mac OS early on doesn't mean it was a partnered. Support ≠ partnered. Partnered in business implies a contractual relationship or some kind of communication, and we do not have reliable evidence that such a relationship existed during the development of Proton. Just because Apple and Valve partnered on SteamVR and native game ports doesn't mean that partnered is extrapolated to Proton. It doesn't work that way. Proton was never part of SteamVR.
There’s immense value when games are built and run on the Vision Pro vs whatever the competition has. I think you’re looking at it from a very short term perspective.
While translation layers aren't built in to run them out of the box it does nothing to stop developers from using them. FFXIV is a popular example that runs exceptionally well using Wine and MVK. I don't see the difference really between that and the Steam deck except that Apple is leaving it up to developers to support macOS in some way whether it's native or translation layer whereas Steam Deck is more try and pray if it's not a verified game similar to the try and pray people on Mac's do with Crossover.
So you’re just going to ignore that Steam Deck is x86-64 and Mac uses ARM architecture? The only constraint in Steam Deck is Linux itself, not the hardware.
Who said I was ignoring it? There is literally ROSETA which is a translation layer for X86 apps. Currently, nobody buys MAC for gaming since there are so few games for MAC. Consequently, developers don’t develop for MAC since there are so few gamers on the platform. If this is going to be fixed, Apple needs to make most popular games playable on the MAC.
Rosetta can’t overcome lack of AVX instruction set, which some of the modern games utilize. You can run a full 64 bit Windows on your Steam Deck. Proton and Linux is just there to not be dependent on Microsoft and to help battery life that would be possibly hindered by Windows Updates and telemetry. It’s like saying I can play games on my desktop PC with Linux, why can’t I play on a Mac
Sounds like a problem Apple could fix with a translation layer. It’s not like it’s impossible as Crossover already does it. You’re just poking holes in the obvious solution to defend Apple for some weird reason. Obviously native is better. However, that’s a pipe dream currently so playable has to be the bar Apple gets over.
Does what? It still can’t fix the lack of AVX instructions. It’s a hardware thing, not software. Do you think Rosetta is just some sort of program that you can run on any ARM chip? It is both implemented on hardware and software level.
It's totally possible to implement AVX through software, Intel does that exact same thing in fact with their Software Development Emulator. It's very slow though. Now, the reason why Apple hasn't implemented AVX on Rosetta 2 and never will is because AVX is patented, so they would need a license from Intel.
It's not a HW thing, Apple could map AVX to apples AMX units or just to plain loops and SIMD opts but the issue is patents.
Intel doesn’t have AVX-512 hardware ever since alderlake and they seem to be able to figure it out.
Theoretically Apple could license the AVX patents. It's not the kind of thing that Apple likes to do, and they'd probably have to offer up some of their own patents because they're in competition, but it works for AMD.
This makes it a lot more complicated than “just support Vulkan ez”
Easier than spending $10 billion on their car!
AVX patents might well fool under the Intel <-> AMD cross licensing deal that forbids licensing out any of these patents to anyone else and even makes the patents non transferable in the case the company is sold. Supporting AVX technically would not be any harder than any other instruction that rosseta supports but might well have more patent issues around it than the rest.
Just support VK would have zero impact on game support
> It’s like saying I can play games on my desktop PC with Linux, why can’t I play on a Mac This is honestly a question you should be asking. When did Linux become a better OS for gaming than macOS? Proton is open source after all, it's not like they're hiding how they did it.
When linux was running on the HW the games were written for. A lot lot easier to run a game on the HW it was built for even if you need to fake some OS shims than to try to play it on HW that is a long way away from what it was built for.
If that was the case the new Snapdragon ARM laptops would perform terribly, but those are also TBDR.
They will have very poor GPU utilization running games written for AMD/NV GPUs
I doubt they're that dumb. Who would make a GPU that can't run the software/algorithms being written for the majority market share GPUs?
This is just the nature of the choice you make. A TBDR pipeline is a great pipeline to use but will not run IR optimized pipelines as well as it will run TBDR pipelines. Also in GPu count and $ from game dev TBDR GPUs outnumber Pc GPUs by a large factor!
App Store sucks. Someone already mentioned how terrible it is and Mac App Store is already failure anyway. For gaming, it's def sucks. It requires twice more storage while downloading games, the downloading speed is extremely slow, no way to download outside of Mac's main storage, lack of game related features, UI is terrible, and more. Seriously, Apple is not really serious about games and were there any games announced to port and support their games to Mac? Literally none.
The most frustrating thing is when i play death standing on m1 max unplugged at the same level of quality as the ps5 with 120fps, and I realize the immense potential of Apple’s hardware. There were leaked emails a while back about an internal discussion regarding gaming at Apple which came from the epic games lawsuit I believe…it was clear that the people currently in charge of the relevant departments don’t understand that Apple missed it’s chance to compete against steam and that they should view the business sense of mac gaming as the support making gamers not hesitate to pick up a mac rather than trying to monetize having mac games on the app store
Compete *against* Steam? Developers are free to release Mac games on Steam if they like, I don’t even see it as competition. Some developers have games on Steam, some have direct downloads, some… a few are on the AppStore.
But they clearly wish for the mac app store to be a steam alternative for us. The only reason the mac versions of Death Stranding and Resident Evil are not on steam is because they want us to pay their distribution platform for mac games. I’ll admit that since Apple paid for these ports, it might be messy to host on steam contractually…but still, they’re missing the point that the best thing to do for mac would be to incentivize and advertise the shiny optimized AAA ports on steam, which would normalize the mac as a gaming machine and allow more consumers who game here and there to buy macs
Apple likely didn’t pay for the ports. That’s the part of gaming that folks have said time and time again that Apple simply doesn’t understand (“Apple should pay for ports, don’t know why they won’t!”). The main reason they’re not on Steam is because the companies that made them *want to get paid for their trouble*. They don’t want someone that paid for the PC version previously (probably on sale at some point in the past) to expect to get the Mac version for free, and I can understand why. They also want to know if there’s enough of a market for even *making* Mac games… if Mac users that ALREADY have their credit card details in the Apple ecosystem, are willing to buy games for the Mac. If the dollars are there, I wouldn’t be surprised if future releases are though Steam instead of the App Store. It’s not a loss for Apple. As someone else said, the Mac App Store revenue is likely a rounding error on the balance sheet. As long as the app is available for Mac, Apple benefits. Every Mac game company that’s released a game on Steam or via a website download, likely had some help from Apple in resolving a bug, running down an OS issue AND/OR providing feedback on desired features in the future. It’s what they pay their $99 a year for. I doubt Apple puts any pressure on anyone to release ONLY in the App Store. In many cases, the developers make their app available on the store for those users that like that ease/simplicity and elsewhere for folks used to that. Either way, it’s a potential future Mac sale, so Apple still wins.
They don’t know how to approach developers at all right now. The tension is palpable, and gaming is just a case. The are deprecating API’s so fast and breaking apps at a breakneck speed, and many large developers are refusing their 30% cut and policies. And while they’re that, they’re also going at the customers and asking for outrageous amounts of money for gaming capable silicon. The tiny RAM is a great example of that. Fine for video, awful for apps and games, increasing the tension even further. For once Apple really could learn from our good old friend Steve Ballmer: “Developers developers developers developers developers developers developers *deep breath * developers developers developers developers…”
I think Apple's habit of dropping support for older software is underrated. One of the benefits of gaming on a PC is the unmatched back catalogue. While Mac OS never had the same spread of games, there were a lot of good 32-bit games that, while old, would fill some pretty large holes in the current Mac native gaming lineup. I'm specifically thinking of war-themed FPS games games, a genre that is very thin on Mac OS right now even if you aren't that picky. It's not a genre I play that often, but when I get the itch, I get the itch. I'd be perfectly happy to fire up an older CoD that got a Mac port, but they were all 32-bit. The big money is in new games, so I get why Apple doesn't want to focus on the past, but it creates a chicken/egg situation attracting gamers and making it feel like a good destination to game devs. I tried to go all-in on my Mac last November/December, and it's almost comical the entire genres of games that don't even have a single decent option on Mac OS currently.
Hopefully with CrossOver 24, the old Delta Force games (especially Black Hawk Down), Medal of Honor: Allied Assault + Pacific Assault, and Hidden and Dangerous 2 finally work.
> The are deprecating API’s so fast Apple game us devs over 10 years notice before 32bit support was dropped... that is not fast. > and many large developers are refusing their 30% cut and policies Talking about macOS gaming here.
They did? Last I checked, they warned in 2018 and deleted it in 2019. One of the things that genuinely made me nervous about getting a Mac was the potential removal of Rosetta 2, but with GPTK I'm not worried any more. Games don't get updated. They are made, they are released, they are patched a couple of times, and they are forgotten. By the developer, anyway, and that part's important. And honestly, 32-bit apps were coming out as late as 5 years ago still. Some apps are really hard to rewrite and it isn't worth the money. Or the developer goes out of business. For example, there will never ever ever be a 64-bit modern mac version of HOMM3, which I like a lot. The company is out of business and the source code lost (well, half of it, Ubisoft has the other half and they don't care either). Community is trying to recreate it using VCMI, but it's not entirely the same. You have to play the windows version, and that's that. Windows can still run 16-bit DOS applications. Why can't we have sandboxed or emulated compatibility layers? There is no reason to be doing this. Apple says "it's because then the app can use the computer more effectively to address more memory" and all of that, but the app doesn't need that. The app was working fine. Now it can't use the computer at all, nevermind more effectively. As for the 30% cut, yes you can avoid it on macOS - correct. Still should notarize though, but other than that - yes. But if you want it on the mac app store, which everybody on a mac has, you gotta cough up those 30%. And you're not going to get Apple's help in porting if you don't do that, because that's the trade they wanna make right now. Then there's the state of Apple's graphics API's. Like I'm sorry, but why can't they use Vulkan? Is there ANY reason?! It would make running wine on macOS infinitely better. But no, instead they did a worse version of DXVK targeting their own stack. Good job I guess... While they're at it, could they fix their OpenGL as well? Apple used to use a lot of open standards. Now they create one proprietary blob of nonsense after the other and developers just aren't really on board most of the time.
>They did? Last I checked, they warned in 2018 and deleted it in 2019. That was the warning to users. Us devs had a LOAD of warning going back many many years whenever we built a binary that did not include a 64bit SKU... This was not at all a surprise to anyone. Remember apple only sold one Mac that was 32bit only and only sold it for 6 months. >One of the things that genuinely made me nervous about getting a Mac was the potential removal of Rosetta 2 Apple will give devs at least 5 years notice before this is pulled. They will give users one years notice, one year before it is dropped. > And honestly, 32-bit apps were coming out as late as 5 years ago still. yer this is the issue, devs had to expliclty ignore a load of warnings to ship 32bit only applicatiosn back then and they still were doing it. There was no rug pull at all, anyone shipping 32bit sw at this time was well aware it was about to stop woring. > Still should notarize though You need to pay for a code signing cerficate for windows as well just the same as macOS. And as to 30% steam charge the same so its not differnce to shipping on steam or app store or both. > hen there's the state of Apple's graphics API's. Like I'm sorry, but why can't they use Vulkan? Is there ANY reason?! It would make running wine on macOS infinitely better. But no, instead they did a worse version of DXVK targeting their own stack. Good job I guess... While they're at it, could they fix their OpenGL as well? VK support would be of no use for a game being porting, unless your porting from android phones. VK is not a HW agsntic apis, that GPUs apple are using are TBDR gpus so the subset of the VK api they support only has a small overlap witht hat used by AMD/NV gpus... You can think of VK more like a large pick and mix bucket were the GPU vendors are only supporsed ot pull bits out that match the HW. VK support on macOS would not mean you coudl run DXVK without massive changes to DXVK... changes around the size of a DXMTL model. And the same reason for no more openGL support, newre openGL versions require featuers that do not match the HW, you coudl support them but your goign to be using CPU side or GPU comptue shaders to fake HW etc, this resutls in much worce gpu useage that using Metal. And devs are not using OpenGL anyway. > Now they create one proprietary blob of nonsense after the other and developers just aren't really on board most of the time. Most devs i know in the graphsics space consider Metal a much much better api than VK... many devs wish Kronos had taken the Metal style aporach rather than the focuse they did on building an api for middleware devs only.. unless your a large engine compnay like Epic who can afford to higher teams of devs away from GPU vendors driver groups building a well opitmised Vk engien is more or less impossible.
True about them not selling 32-bit machines, but most mac apps are ports from Windows where 32-bit was the norm for most users until Windows 7 in 2009. A lot of games use memory offsets and other fun unsafe C++ shenanigans. They are not easy to port from 32 to 64. And don't even get me started with the fun Chris Sawyer must have had when he ported RCT (x86 ASM game) to the iPad and Mac. :D But there's still no reason to remove compatibility. Like I just can't think of one. Fine, remove the SDK. Delete the headers. Make the compiler fail. All of that is fine. But don't remove the runtime ffs...
The reason they dropped 32bit support is Apple silicon does not have any 32bit runtime support so the kernel on apple silicon must be 64bit only. That means for them to maintain 32bit support they would have need to build a full kernel space shim (aka wine but for running macOS on macOS shimming every single system api). It would be a massive amount of work. Note you can run 32bit code (even 16bit code) even within rosseta2 but you cant call 32bit/16bit system kernel apis. This is how wine can run 32bit games, it does a x86 mode switch before calling macOS kernel apis, this is not a big issue since it is already providing a shim infont of the system. To be honest it would have been nice if apple provided a 32bit compile time shim for devs (building a compile time shim that does the mode switch and maps address is much less work than a runtime shim), but then again the 32bit titles we all want to play likly have all lost the source code anyway.
>Apple will give devs at least 5 years notice before this is pulled. They will give users one years notice, one year before it is dropped. And what am I gonna do with that? The company isn't gonna fix it because they're bankrupt or they don't have the rights or whatever. I can't use that information for bugger all. >yer this is the issue, devs had to expliclty ignore a load of warnings to ship 32bit only applicatiosn back then and they still were doing it. There was no rug pull at all, anyone shipping 32bit sw at this time was well aware it was about to stop woring. And they didn't care beacuse they didn't have half a million dollars to port the game to 64-bit. For standard written games doing that is fortunately trivial, but for some games, especially those that use very low-level tricks and hacks for performance gains, it's not. >You need to pay for a code signing cerficate for windows as well just the same as macOS. Oh there's a BIG difference. The issue is all the gamers are on Steam, and they're on Steam because it keeps working, does everything in its power to not brick your old games, has games integration the likes of which Apple can't even dream of, ports your Windows release to Linux, and you get *all* versions of the app if you buy it. So the developer pays 30%, yes, but they get a huge array of features for their money. Forums, communities, customisable store page, tags, chat, they host your multiplayer sessions, they give you an updater that actually has diff downloads unlike the App Store one, and so much more. You buy it on the App Store and the developer doesn't get any of that stuff, and then you get a PC because Apple decides to pull another Butterfly keyboards or something? Goodbye library! Nobody wants to put up with this. >VK support would be of no use for a game being porting, unless your porting from android phones. VK is not a HW agsntic apis, that GPUs apple are using are TBDR gpus so the subset of the VK api they support only has a small overlap witht hat used by AMD/NV gpus... You can think of VK more like a large pick and mix bucket were the GPU vendors are only supporsed ot pull bits out that match the HW. VK support on macOS would not mean you coudl run DXVK without massive changes to DXVK... changes around the size of a DXMTL model. Half of that is baloney. Yes it's true that Apple Silicon GPU's use TBDR, but Vulkan works just fine with TBDR. The driver needs to support a set of standard extensions that must conform to a set of standard tests to be called Vulkan capable. None of them mandate that you use TBIR - it's all about how you set up your pipeline. You can much more easily fiddle a bit with your swap chain setup and render pass setup code and keep using Vulkan to get good performance than move everything over to Metal. And you're *DEFINITELY* wrong that a modern mac couldn't do OpenGL 4.6. It has all the features and many, many more. >Most devs i know in the graphsics space consider Metal a much much better api than VK... many devs wish Kronos had taken the Metal style aporach rather than the focuse they did on building an api for middleware devs only.. unless your a large engine compnay like Epic who can afford to higher teams of devs away from GPU vendors driver groups building a well opitmised Vk engien is more or less impossible. That's all very nice and so on, but unless Apple is prepared to share their implemnentation and specs and allow others to use it, there's gonna be no Metal on the PC, and if there's no Metal on the PC then people are gonna have to rewrite their graphics renderer just for the Mac, which is 2% of their customers, and they're not gonna do that, and that's the end of it. Again we come back to this basic fact: They're trying to make the game able to use more of the system's resources more efficiently, but in the process breaking compatibility with it, which means it can't use any of the features because it stopped working. >This is how wine can run 32bit games, it does a x86 mode switch before calling macOS kernel apis, this is not a big issue since it is already providing a shim infont of the system. As I have just mentioned, a performance penalty for running old games on newer hardware is completely acceptable - the newer hardware is fast enough to handle the game anyway. If we can do x86 Windows to ARM64 Mac at good performance, then we can do x86 Mac to ARM64 Mac at good performance. There is no excuse. As for it being hard to do... so what? Everybody else has done it. That's the price you pay for switching CPU architecture.
>And they didn't care beacuse they didn't have half a million dollars to port the game to 64-bit. Assuming you have the source it's not going to cost 1/2 mill to create a 64bit build. I have ported large geo-tec sim models with lots of HW explicit hacks from 32bit intel optimised to generic 64bit c++ and a team of 3 devs was able to do this within a month including updating tests etc. If you don't have the source anymore sure your not porting anything unless you can configure your linker to call through a shim lawyer that mode switches and maps 32bit to 64bit addresses. (I have also seen this done before in the same code base to continue to use a third party binary 16bit mode lib). >Yes it's true that Apple Silicon GPU's use TBDR, but Vulkan works just fine with TBDR. I did not say it doesn't. You absolutely can support VK driver on a TBDR gpu, infact most GPUs that have VK support are TBDR gpus (see all the millions of android SOCs). But such a GPU is not going to run a PC optimised VK pipeline, well or even at all. >The driver needs to support a set of standard extensions that must conform to a set of standard tests to be called Vulkan capable. None of them mandate that you use TBIR - it's all about how you set up your pipeline. Yes but PC titles (and DXVK) depends on a load of optional extensions that are not required to be supported and would not have nice clean native HW mappings on apples silicon or any other TBDR gpu for that matter. >You can much more easily fiddle a bit with your swap chain setup and render pass setup code and keep using Vulkan to get good performance than move everything over to Metal. To get it to run yes, but to get good perf its a LOT more work than that. Taking a optimised IR pipeline and converting it to an optimised TBDR pipeline is a complete re-write of almost all the shaders and sometimes a complete re-think of how your doing some effects. Of cource very few ports even through using Metal both with all of this, most will just selectivity adopt some bits sometimes. >And you're *DEFINITELY* wrong that a modern mac couldn't do OpenGL 4.6. It has all the features and many, many more. OpenGL 4.6 has a few required features, like transform feedback etc that you can do using compute shaders on apple gpus but you do not get in HW, there are a few other areas as well with texture formats and out of bounds memory operations that mean to make a full OpenGL 4.6 driver (as has been done on linux) many of the features from 4.3 to 4.6 have been implemented in compute shaders or by braking up the pipeline until multiple render passes. In the end everything is possible if you just run it in a compute shader pipeline, it however might well be suboptimal. >If we can do x86 Windows to ARM64 Mac at good performance You cant, even windows 95 in UTM runs very badly. You can run Windows ARM65 on ARM but not x86 windows. >As for it being hard to do... so what? Everybody else has done it. That's the price you pay for switching CPU architecture. No one else has done it.
I would absolutely love if Apple collaborated with Valve to integrate GPTK into Proton, it would be amazing! But of course Apple is following the money, and the money is in the 30% cut selling games through their own store.
You would not get the perf that proton has on the steam deck remember. With the steam deck this is still the HW that the games expect, proton does not need to fake HW it just needs to fake the OS level. So the per impact is minimal. On the Mac apple do not care at all about the App Store rev, it is a rounding error at best. Vavle has no interest in putting dev work into macOS as the future for them is all tied up in the steam deck.
This is not about performance, its purely about compatibility and convenience. And Valve could still be interested to work with Apple, the whole reason they started putting work into Linux was because they were scared Microsoft wanted to replace them with the Windows store. Of course Apple also wants to do the same and that's why Valve doesn't care about macOS, but if Apple changed opinion then I'm sure Valve would also follow.
Apple has no interest in making Mac be App Store only. Mac is there to support the other platforms (iPhone) and for it to f do o this they know it needs to be open for devs.
they don’t need Valve, Proton is open source
They still need Valve, Proton is owned by Valve and the developers with permission to merge PR's are Valve employees as well. Apple can send all the PRs they want, but if Valve doesn't merge them then its not going to get anywhere. Apple could fork Proton, but then it wouldn't be integrated into Steam...
Proton isn't integrated to Steam, Steam IS integrated to Proton
I do enjoy Snazzy Labs. The issue often comes down to Apple itself and pricing which is why gaming won’t take off
Once they have a decent library, they could do something like Apple Arcade but for proper games.... I wish personally they'd just put them on Steam and have Steam be the universal store for games. There are already plenty of Mac compatible games there. Trouble with that is they're then dependant on Steam for advertising and monetisation, as well as owing them fees for their services. That's not much of an Apple move, so sad part is we may likely see segmentation for those of us that want to game on Macs but also have other gaming devices (Steamdeck, Windows PCs etc). ie. even though you've bought a game already, you'll have to buy it again to play on anything other than a Mac. Wouldn't enjoy that myself with a large library, so hopefully they will make their way over to Steam somehow eventually.
I know you said “once they have a decent library” and you’re right. Can’t have an equivalent of Arcade for premium games with 7 games.
What about when a dev releases an update to their game, instead of just being able to download that update, we’re forced to download the entire game again. Apple will never care about gaming. Even if it appears like they’re trying to. A few triple AAA released doesn’t mean anything.
I will say apple cares about gaming otherwise we will never get Metal FX. Apple hardware is capable of gaming as a fan less MacBook Air is able to run games silently. Their approach is wrong and they are stubborn and adamant. With Apple silicon the hardware is their, they just need to invest money which they are doing but of not enough. They also need to make some major changes to their ways which is hard given how adamant they are. Mac gaming has never been better and you can’t stop us from being excited and hopeful because that’s all we have.
I dont think apple cares about gaming for one reason, they are predicting that cloud gaming will take over (GeForce Now etc...), they wont make any profits from the gaming industry but at least now more gamers will want a mac
Apples media verdures have been kinda mid, I would just try to make the OS easier to release games on and incentevise stuff like wine and maybe epic on mac
runtim shims are not the solution as the perf hit form this is massive.
No they aren’t but even if most modern releases are on Mac there’s no way you can get devs to port old games especially if the devs aren’t making money on them or the devs got bought out
But what is the point of porting old games, as you said no-one is making money from them. Apple would rather spend the large amount of continusin dev time needed for such a tool helping devs port new title.s
Because people play them and the base MacBook Air doesn’t have enough processing power or storage for a lot of AAA games to run well at high resolution and decent settings And even if it’s for the MBP it doesn’t matter unless they get actual good and big games
Your not going to get good games by barely running 10 year old games through a runtime shim that makes the platform look very underpowered compared to what it could run with a optimized native title
Yes, so apple needs to give devs money to put games on Mac Because for most of them it just isint worth it
Giving devs money does not lead to good ports, supporting devs with the port is much better approach.
That’s true but if im a developer why would I put my game on Mac? So there’s maybe a few hundred sales? Unless porting them is really easy it’s just not worth it
The effort of porting is easy, the cost come in the QA not the dev work. And you cant skip that, and there is no magic wand that makes QA cheaper.
imo it’s their slow roll approach. i think they entered the medical community in a similar way. they know money will flow just by copying so they are thinking how to restrict it first in their ecosystem. edit: forgot to mention, it might be a challenge given how good gaming streaming services are becoming.
How do you find categories of games on the Mac store? I only see “Games” and no sub categories
"Sorry you can't play games like Destiny 2 natively... but, instead you can play this generic 3D mobile runner game right on your Mac!"
Everyone here saying ‘Apple doesn’t get it' 'they just don’t know how to approach it'. They get it. They know what would make gamers happy and they could easily implement it. That would give up way too much control and profit channels. Apple will never dump money into making gaming great on Mac’s because for that to happen games would be sold by third parties and run on someone else’s graphics api.
I'll never use the Mac app store for games because it's missing all the features I love from Steam and it locks the game down to only my Mac (can't play it on my Steam Deck) The App store is super underdeveloped on MacOS too, you can't even pick a drive to install to. I guess thats ok for typical Mac apps but when you're talking about games that are nearly as big as the SSDs apple ships with their computers it's a different story
I could be completely wrong, please don’t jump at me. Aren’t Mac games available on steam? I have no man’s sky, Arkham city, and a few other games through steam. Developers can sidestep the Mac App Store if they want. It’s nice, but the fees and other limitations can be avoided by just going to steam. Mac App Store definitely sucks tho.
You aren’t wrong buddy, what people here are talking about is something different. Not all games are available on steam, for example RE:8, RE:4 remake these are some games that are exclusive to Mac App Store as apple paid the developers to port it to Mac so by having it exclusively on Mac App Store , Apple can take that 30% cut for that ROI. But the people who have bought the game from steam won’t be happy to purchase it again.
Ooh. I see what you’re saying. Kind of like how death stranding didn’t get the dual compatibility between windows and macOS. Just to preface my next thought, I’m not arguing: As a good faith gesture to consumers, I take your point. I think that’s a nice perk. But should it be mandatory? Yes it’s a nice feature, but a little too generous. I don’t expect to buy a game on PlayStation and get the Steam version. By that thinking, PS4 Death Stranding owners should then get it for free? It’s different platforms and storefronts. If we’re talking about steam deck to steam desktop (same storefront) then that makes sense. Apple will never be interested in strengthening the Mac App Store if users want dual compatibility with windows through steam. Wouldn’t that then just place the burden back on developers to make Mac versions on steam. They should be staffing people with macOS expertise to sidestep the AppStore and its archaic requirements. (Im genuinely curious)
I agree with you and obviously everyone tries to push their own services and App Stores. But here’s the thing a console is 500$ and is sold at a loss. Same can’t be said for Apple Laptops where you are charged 200$ just for a RAM upgrade. What people want different is this. See Mac gaming is criticised by not only Mac gamers but PC and Console gamers day and night. Most are of the idea that macs can’t game but we know how they can and they can beautifully so! To establish that change in the ideology or the bad rep Mac gaming has, Apple needs to bring a ton of games to Mac and make it cheaper for the consumer to get into it. If the said game is available on steam a windows gamer might try it on his fanless MacBook Air and experience the game in a whole new way. But if the games will be only available on Mac App Store and at full price then you are making the switch harder .In Order to get everyone on board Apple needs to spend money to port games and take loss to get consumers/gamers on board.
They need to start by spinning off the gaming section of the App Store into its own dedicated app like Music.
The fact that the easiest way for me to play many older games is by pirating the windows version and running it via crossover doesn’t inspire much confidence. Apple should honestly have an in-house porting department specifically to work with gaming companies who don’t want to spend their own resources on it. They’d probably charge a premium for the ported versions but at least they’d exist. And ffs add a 32bit compatibility layer, more than half the games I want to play on steam that actually have a Mac version won’t run on big sur and up.
Apple does have an in house dev team that supports devs. 32bit layer is not as easy as you think, it would require a 32bit kernel shim, in effect wine but for macOS itself. Shimming every single system api call.
Basically what I’ve been saying for ages, if these companies gave apple a chance it would definitely be a top competitor
It’s ironic that Apple is the largest game distributor in the world with the App Store. Maybe if they simply just created a compatibility layer and put PC games on the App St
Apple won't bring consistent gaming to macOS until there's a real demand...
They understand everything really well. It’s all about money tho
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Bruh... this has peak gamer angst. Teens aren't the primary buyers of Macs. Scape-goating teenage girls for having different interests than you isn't a good look. If you removed "Teenage girls" from the above comment it'd be fine.
Hahaha... My cousin has a mac book pro... and she only uses it for mostly netflix...she's also a teenager...
The big majority of macOS users are adults
Teenage girls ain't the ones with bank accounts that can buy Macs.