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Apple's poor support for serious gaming in the past makes me doubt that they understand gamer's needs (casual and serious). They failed over and over to offer p

Apple's poor support for serious gaming in the past makes me doubt that they understand gamer's needs (casual and serious). They failed over and over to offer proper "gaming" 3D graphics in Mac OS, they failed to grow GameCenter into something useful, they failed offering good gaming support for Apple TV. Too many broken promises. It's the same thing with music: Apple claim for years they have "Music in their DNA", but neither understand anything about classical music nor are able to build a good version of iTunes. I bet that this Gaming service will fail, as did Ping and Apple Musics "Connect".

miohtama 8y ago
The ad, sounds like it is geared towards indie game developers, not players. They do not want to do current mainstream games, but capture some niche market outside them. My guess is they are throwing a lot of money on this, to get exclusive launch titles. It would be nice to know from the early vendors what are the attached strings.
fsloth 8y ago
Casual gamers and kids. My kids enjoy tremendously Minecraft, Roblox and the Lego franchise games. None of those require top-end graphics, yet offer engaging gameplay for a large audience.
- bsamuels 8y ago
  Parent commenter is likely referring to MacOS's trash fire opengl support and zero Vulcan support. It's not about getting spectacular graphics on MacOS, it's about even getting your renderer to work.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    This is really fighting the last war, though. Metal exists, and any game that is running on iOS (which it has to, to be in this) targets Metal. Who cares about anything else?
    - rleigh 8y ago
      Everyone who doesn't develop exclusively for MacOS X, which is most of us. Am I going to rewrite my OpenGL application to use Metal. No. I might update it to use Vulkan, and see if it works with the MoltenVK shim for MacOS X. But I'm afraid that Metal itself is a complete non-starter.
    - pcwalton 8y ago
      Android has much greater worldwide market share than iOS does (not to mention PCs, consoles, etc.) None of those support Metal. So yes, we graphics programmers do care about "anything else".
      - lilyball 8y ago
        If you're targeting multiple platforms you're likely using an engine rather than directly programming the GPU anyway. So you don't actually care about vulcan vs metal, you care about e.g. "Unity".
        pcwalton 8y ago
        Some of us write the engines. :)
        fsloth 8y ago
        Even then the graphical fidelity of the above games is approachable with a pretty simple set of "standard" shaders and rendering tricks that allow to limit the graphics api specific code to a manageable chunk. It's not nice, but it's not like one needs to port the entire engine. And then there are cross api interfaces like bgfx that allow more or less to share a common data interface with all of the API backends. I'm not saying that I like the fragmentation, but on the other hand I'll happily use win32 system calls when programming windows and posix stuff if programming unixen. So it's not entirely cut and dried what is the expected amount of platform specific customization one is expected to be able to deal with.
      - cwyers 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

miohtama 8y ago

The ad, sounds like it is geared towards indie game developers, not players. They do not want to do current mainstream games, but capture some niche market outside them. My guess is they are throwing a lot of money on this, to get exclusive launch titles. It would be nice to know from the early vendors what are the attached strings.

fsloth 8y ago

Casual gamers and kids. My kids enjoy tremendously Minecraft, Roblox and the Lego franchise games. None of those require top-end graphics, yet offer engaging gameplay for a large audience.

bsamuels 8y ago
Parent commenter is likely referring to MacOS's trash fire opengl support and zero Vulcan support. It's not about getting spectacular graphics on MacOS, it's about even getting your renderer to work.
- cwyers 8y ago
  This is really fighting the last war, though. Metal exists, and any game that is running on iOS (which it has to, to be in this) targets Metal. Who cares about anything else?
  - rleigh 8y ago
    Everyone who doesn't develop exclusively for MacOS X, which is most of us. Am I going to rewrite my OpenGL application to use Metal. No. I might update it to use Vulkan, and see if it works with the MoltenVK shim for MacOS X. But I'm afraid that Metal itself is a complete non-starter.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    Android has much greater worldwide market share than iOS does (not to mention PCs, consoles, etc.) None of those support Metal. So yes, we graphics programmers do care about "anything else".
    - lilyball 8y ago
      If you're targeting multiple platforms you're likely using an engine rather than directly programming the GPU anyway. So you don't actually care about vulcan vs metal, you care about e.g. "Unity".
      - pcwalton 8y ago
        Some of us write the engines. :)
        fsloth 8y ago
        Even then the graphical fidelity of the above games is approachable with a pretty simple set of "standard" shaders and rendering tricks that allow to limit the graphics api specific code to a manageable chunk. It's not nice, but it's not like one needs to port the entire engine. And then there are cross api interfaces like bgfx that allow more or less to share a common data interface with all of the API backends. I'm not saying that I like the fragmentation, but on the other hand I'll happily use win32 system calls when programming windows and posix stuff if programming unixen. So it's not entirely cut and dried what is the expected amount of platform specific customization one is expected to be able to deal with.
    - cwyers 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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