10 ms·

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's li

Funny thing about games: most revenue happens soon after release. It's like movies. A game from several years ago usually has low ongoing revenue, so there's little profit in updating it for a new OS. Many Mac games will just die. Especially indies, where the creator might have already moved on. Do you own any nice but not very successful Mac games? They'll die. This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine. I'm so happy now that Steam purchases aren't tied to platform and that most gamedevs don't target Mac exclusively. I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. Probably lots of people will do the same.

golergka 7y ago
Only true for the game-as-a-product games. Games that are created as a service are usually soft-launched and increase in revenue after launch (if they're about to be profitable at all).
skybrian 7y ago
On the hand, most people stop playing most games pretty quickly after purchase, too. And the good ones often get remade. So, while this will disappoint some people, I think "destroys the reputation" is a bit much. Many game buyers don't care that much.
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago. TF2 was made in 2007 and is still in the top 10. There’s also a huge number of gamers who played older games. In my friends list I’d say roughly half at any given time are imaging non-AA games that are at least 5 years old, and more than half at least regularly play older games. Going back and playing favourites is an absolutely integral part of gaming as a hobby. I game on both Mac and PC and I absolutely would abandon gaming on Mac if it stopped supporting older games. Why would I invest in games on Mac if I can’t be sure I can play it later, when I KNOW it’ll work “forever” on PC?
  - toyg 7y ago
    In fact, the move towards internet-based multiplayer action has significantly extended game longevity. In the pre-Internet world, very few games ever achieved the sort of long-running activity you now get almost routinely with any moderately-successful production.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - novok 7y ago
    Those games with active revenue streams and playerbases will probably get OS updates.
  - avar 7y ago
    Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games. It says more about how some publishers have moved from releasing new games to incremental updates as part of a subscription model than it does about people playing "old" games.
    - shakna 7y ago
      > Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games. The original Halflife just got a number of security, AI, and other bugfixes. Does that mean it no longer counts as a game made in 1998?
      - avar 7y ago
        For the purposes of a discussion about older games not being playable on modern OSes? Yeah, maybe. In fact it could have no code changes whatsoever, but just be recompiled against newer tooling to accomplish that goal. But I'm talking about games that are getting extensive updates through their lifecycle. It's quite possible that some of these "same" games will be playable in 50 years via slow process of incremental updates. There's no reason to suspect those are any less supporting of modern hardware & OSs than newly released games. There's already been some unconfirmed talk of GTAV being the last ever GTA, with a hypothetical major update just being a new paid-for area that'll appear in-game one day, as opposed to being a new shrink-wrapped game under a different title like you'd get in the 90s.
- zeristor 7y ago
  I imagine quite a few games never get played once bought.
- washadjeffmad 7y ago
  This is kind of pedantic, but I feel like you should specify video games here. Perhaps the consumer home platform personal computer video game market, even. People have been playing cards, mahjong, chess, and catch greater than a century, so it's not some inherent ephemerality of games that's the problem here. And even amongst the retro video game market, people are still playing console and arcade games that are decades old. There's certainly a trend here, but I don't think it's something we should blame on the players.
ahbyb 7y ago
>This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform You can't destroy what never existed.
- fortran77 7y ago
  My first thought too. Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. I can't think of any Mac games other than "Myst"
  - Cyberdog 7y ago
    If by “Mac games” you mean Mac-first games… Marathon! Frog blast the vent core, baby. Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?
    - braindeath 7y ago
      > Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive? Where the hell did you hear that? In any event, it isn’t true. Quake 3 was released shortly after Jobs was turning them around from circling the drain. They’re lucky somebody was porting it at all.
      - sgerenser 7y ago
        Maybe he was thinking of Halo? Originally shown at a MacWorld Expo as a Mac exclusive then very shortly thereafter Bungie was bought out by Microsoft (obviously turning it into an XBox exclusive), leading to much outcry among the Mac faithful. But it was never actually released in playable form on the Mac.
        danaris 7y ago
        ...Until much later, ported back from the XBox.
      - radmarshallb 7y ago
        This may interest you. https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/04/25/register.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...
greggman2 7y ago
Time to run them in a VM with and old OS the same as older games?
- bsamuels 7y ago
  Can you imagine a world where someone who wants to play old Mac games has half a dozen VM containers with different versions of MacOS on them for each game that's compatible with each version? I can't
  - _jal 7y ago
    This is probably more common than you might think. I don't play games much, but I do need some software that only runs on Windows, and do this. One VM is Win7, the other is Win10. Neither get network access, so I don't worry about either surveillance or updates. I also have a VM that runs a really old version of Debian, because I have a couple UPSes that don't support modern ssh. I suspect we'll also see phone emulation for compatibility becoming more of a thing. Granted, the vast bulk of that software is garbage that nobody cares about, but there are things seeing increasing enterprise use. Someone will go out of business and orphan something people count on at some point.
  - deergomoo 7y ago
    Realistically, I'd be willing to bet the only old Mac games people are going to want to play are for classic Mac OS, in which case you already need to use a VM and have done for at least a decade. I'm struggling to think of any games in OS X era where the Mac would be even close to the easiest or best place to play them. I appreciate the notion that if you've bought the software you want to be able to keep using it for as long as possible, but we're talking about the niche-est of niches here.
  - basementcat 7y ago
    Isn't this how node.js works now?
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware. Not that I care, and note the DMCA/property law has a specific exemption for defeating copy protection if you bought the thing. But it is more work than you make it out to be.
MereInterest 7y ago
This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not, you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.
- reggintoggaf 7y ago
  Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.
  - Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
    Are there any actual escrows that do that?
    - reggintoggaf 7y ago
      Nope, and it wont happen unleds mandated by law.
- xhruso00 7y ago
  Having app that heavily relies on 32-bit Carbon Api open sourced is useless. You can't replace those Api call with newer because they simply don't exist or have no alternative. It's not going to help much
  - shakna 7y ago
    Having access to the source makes it much easier for the community to do what they already do - create an open source re-implementation of the engine.
- ratww 7y ago
  For games, I think it's feasible to make at least the code that interfaces with the OS into a separate, re-linkable, open-source library. Translations between the APIs (Carbon to Cocoa, OpenGL to DirectX) might be very hard, but at least upgrades would be possible.
flohofwoe 7y ago
IME that's mostly true for traditional single player games, while even mildly successful multiplayer games may have an incredibly long tail (at east a decade or so?) where they are "paying the bills" very comfortably even though they're long past their heyday.
opn7d7 7y ago
This happens on PC too but it attracts so much more development we don’t notice. Personally to avoid the problem on any platform, I took to making my own pipeline for rapidly iterating on games. Currently able to quickly cut and paste together a variety of experiments in my editor, play a bit to feed my urge for novelty, and happily save money not buying them. I have one passion project which is a mix of isometric graphics, kotor group based single player, a “neverending” procedural world. Currently working on a system to have a chat bot feed NPCs dialog, as an experiment in “never ending” story building. I’m having more fun imagining and building it, I don’t even care if I finish it. Way more engaging than yet another “Skyrim clone with tits” or COD 19: Farting Dust Like you said the major interest in a game is at launch, there’s not the same long lived community building the games used to have. Other than prettier graphics, there’s been little interesting going on, especially in the AAA space. Even much of the indie scene is nostalgia dripping pixel graphics and same old design. I am done spending on the business friendly view of what my hobby should look like. It’s generating too little new information of interest to me.
ratww 7y ago
> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine. But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator. And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases. On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  But at least dropping PowerPC support was predicated on a legit hardware architecture change. And that new architecture actually made porting from PC much easier. This change, by contrast, feels entirely unnecessary. The amd64 architecture natively supports i386 code. I realize it makes Apple's maintenance burden lower, but, they can deal with that.
  - josephg 7y ago
    We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible. And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.
dillonmckay 7y ago
The original Halo?
- pazimzadeh 7y ago
  Yep. And Age of Empires II from Wine bottle (i.e. http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/ http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/ I wonder if selling Mojave disk images with games pre-installed would be profitable.
countryqt30 7y ago
At the same time, it will also WEED OUT a lot of crapware. Only the best and best-cared-for software will remain :D.
- longnguyen 7y ago
  Probably true for apps. But most games are in full screen and do not use OS UI elements anyway. So I'm not sure how OS upgrade can weed out crap games
Razengan 7y ago
> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform Apple Arcade rescues that somewhat. I'm not a fan of not owning games or not being able to play them offline whenever I want in the future, but Apple Arcade is actually kinda nice so far.
p7IDD243 7y ago
> I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. A small nitpick, you don't _own_ the games in your Steam library.
- nightfly 7y ago
  You don't own _any_ video games, you have a license and might happen to have physical media.
  - blub 7y ago
    A pedantically correct, but ultimately pointless observation. One can install and play a game bought from gog.com any time one wants, unlike with games bought from Steam, which have DRM, have to be activated online and must ping the Steam servers periodically.
    - sjwright 7y ago
      Technically correct is the best kind of correct. Your example is valid, but there are plenty of other examples pushing in the opposite direction—for example PS4 and XB1 games delivered on physical media. Yes they'll play out of the box "forever" ... but in order to download important (occasionally critical) software patches you need the explicit blessing of Sony or Microsoft servers. And you could lose these for reasons that are wholly unrelated to your legitimate ownership of physical game media.
      - blub 7y ago
        The PS, Xbox and Steam are all different incarnations of cloud services. They are very convenient, but ultimately don't offer any guarantees that one can play the games even a week from now. At least consoles work without issue in offline mode, although MS wanted to disable that a few years ago, were confronted massive backlash and had to cancel their plans. A big and relatively recent problem with consoles is that even offline games now more or less require a patch, because they're launched with major bugs.
  - deleted 7y ago
therealmarv 7y ago
Really sad I cannot play Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded on Catalina. I bought this game. Same for my old scanner. Both 32bit only. Seems I won't update to Catalina or I need to find a longterm solution with VMs.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  Is your scanner supported by SANE on linux? Some people have put a surprising amount of work creating Linux drivers for scanners

golergka 7y ago

Only true for the game-as-a-product games. Games that are created as a service are usually soft-launched and increase in revenue after launch (if they're about to be profitable at all).

skybrian 7y ago

On the hand, most people stop playing most games pretty quickly after purchase, too. And the good ones often get remade. So, while this will disappoint some people, I think "destroys the reputation" is a bit much. Many game buyers don't care that much.

Sendotsh 7y ago
Top 2 games being played worldwide in steam right now were made 7 years ago. TF2 was made in 2007 and is still in the top 10. There’s also a huge number of gamers who played older games. In my friends list I’d say roughly half at any given time are imaging non-AA games that are at least 5 years old, and more than half at least regularly play older games. Going back and playing favourites is an absolutely integral part of gaming as a hobby. I game on both Mac and PC and I absolutely would abandon gaming on Mac if it stopped supporting older games. Why would I invest in games on Mac if I can’t be sure I can play it later, when I KNOW it’ll work “forever” on PC?
- toyg 7y ago
  In fact, the move towards internet-based multiplayer action has significantly extended game longevity. In the pre-Internet world, very few games ever achieved the sort of long-running activity you now get almost routinely with any moderately-successful production.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- novok 7y ago
  Those games with active revenue streams and playerbases will probably get OS updates.
- avar 7y ago
  Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games. It says more about how some publishers have moved from releasing new games to incremental updates as part of a subscription model than it does about people playing "old" games.
  - shakna 7y ago
    > Does TF2 really count as a game made in 2007? Same for GTAV, WOW etc. These games have all gotten extensive updates, almost nobody is playing the gold master version of these games. The original Halflife just got a number of security, AI, and other bugfixes. Does that mean it no longer counts as a game made in 1998?
    - avar 7y ago
      For the purposes of a discussion about older games not being playable on modern OSes? Yeah, maybe. In fact it could have no code changes whatsoever, but just be recompiled against newer tooling to accomplish that goal. But I'm talking about games that are getting extensive updates through their lifecycle. It's quite possible that some of these "same" games will be playable in 50 years via slow process of incremental updates. There's no reason to suspect those are any less supporting of modern hardware & OSs than newly released games. There's already been some unconfirmed talk of GTAV being the last ever GTA, with a hypothetical major update just being a new paid-for area that'll appear in-game one day, as opposed to being a new shrink-wrapped game under a different title like you'd get in the 90s.
zeristor 7y ago
I imagine quite a few games never get played once bought.
washadjeffmad 7y ago
This is kind of pedantic, but I feel like you should specify video games here. Perhaps the consumer home platform personal computer video game market, even. People have been playing cards, mahjong, chess, and catch greater than a century, so it's not some inherent ephemerality of games that's the problem here. And even amongst the retro video game market, people are still playing console and arcade games that are decades old. There's certainly a trend here, but I don't think it's something we should blame on the players.

ahbyb 7y ago

>This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform You can't destroy what never existed.

fortran77 7y ago
My first thought too. Nobody buys a Mac for gaming. I can't think of any Mac games other than "Myst"
- Cyberdog 7y ago
  If by “Mac games” you mean Mac-first games… Marathon! Frog blast the vent core, baby. Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive?
  - braindeath 7y ago
    > Also, wasn’t Quake III very briefly a Mac exclusive? Where the hell did you hear that? In any event, it isn’t true. Quake 3 was released shortly after Jobs was turning them around from circling the drain. They’re lucky somebody was porting it at all.
    - sgerenser 7y ago
      Maybe he was thinking of Halo? Originally shown at a MacWorld Expo as a Mac exclusive then very shortly thereafter Bungie was bought out by Microsoft (obviously turning it into an XBox exclusive), leading to much outcry among the Mac faithful. But it was never actually released in playable form on the Mac.
      - danaris 7y ago
        ...Until much later, ported back from the XBox.
    - radmarshallb 7y ago
      This may interest you. https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zdnet.com/1999/04/25/register.html https://web.archive.org/web/20000229083216/http://macweek.zd...

greggman2 7y ago

Time to run them in a VM with and old OS the same as older games?

bsamuels 7y ago
Can you imagine a world where someone who wants to play old Mac games has half a dozen VM containers with different versions of MacOS on them for each game that's compatible with each version? I can't
- _jal 7y ago
  This is probably more common than you might think. I don't play games much, but I do need some software that only runs on Windows, and do this. One VM is Win7, the other is Win10. Neither get network access, so I don't worry about either surveillance or updates. I also have a VM that runs a really old version of Debian, because I have a couple UPSes that don't support modern ssh. I suspect we'll also see phone emulation for compatibility becoming more of a thing. Granted, the vast bulk of that software is garbage that nobody cares about, but there are things seeing increasing enterprise use. Someone will go out of business and orphan something people count on at some point.
- deergomoo 7y ago
  Realistically, I'd be willing to bet the only old Mac games people are going to want to play are for classic Mac OS, in which case you already need to use a VM and have done for at least a decade. I'm struggling to think of any games in OS X era where the Mac would be even close to the easiest or best place to play them. I appreciate the notion that if you've bought the software you want to be able to keep using it for as long as possible, but we're talking about the niche-est of niches here.
- basementcat 7y ago
  Isn't this how node.js works now?
snagglegaggle 7y ago
Except this is explicitly against the TOS of macOS/OSX. This may be ok if you virtualize it on Apple hardware. Not that I care, and note the DMCA/property law has a specific exemption for defeating copy protection if you bought the thing. But it is more work than you make it out to be.

MereInterest 7y ago

This is also why all programs should be distributed with source code. If not, you are at the mercy of the platform not to break what you have bought.

reggintoggaf 7y ago
Not workable. But the source should be placed in escrow that releases it once the program is no longer supported.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
  Are there any actual escrows that do that?
  - reggintoggaf 7y ago
    Nope, and it wont happen unleds mandated by law.
xhruso00 7y ago
Having app that heavily relies on 32-bit Carbon Api open sourced is useless. You can't replace those Api call with newer because they simply don't exist or have no alternative. It's not going to help much
- shakna 7y ago
  Having access to the source makes it much easier for the community to do what they already do - create an open source re-implementation of the engine.
ratww 7y ago
For games, I think it's feasible to make at least the code that interfaces with the OS into a separate, re-linkable, open-source library. Translations between the APIs (Carbon to Cocoa, OpenGL to DirectX) might be very hard, but at least upgrades would be possible.

flohofwoe 7y ago

IME that's mostly true for traditional single player games, while even mildly successful multiplayer games may have an incredibly long tail (at east a decade or so?) where they are "paying the bills" very comfortably even though they're long past their heyday.

opn7d7 7y ago

This happens on PC too but it attracts so much more development we don’t notice. Personally to avoid the problem on any platform, I took to making my own pipeline for rapidly iterating on games. Currently able to quickly cut and paste together a variety of experiments in my editor, play a bit to feed my urge for novelty, and happily save money not buying them. I have one passion project which is a mix of isometric graphics, kotor group based single player, a “neverending” procedural world. Currently working on a system to have a chat bot feed NPCs dialog, as an experiment in “never ending” story building. I’m having more fun imagining and building it, I don’t even care if I finish it. Way more engaging than yet another “Skyrim clone with tits” or COD 19: Farting Dust Like you said the major interest in a game is at launch, there’s not the same long lived community building the games used to have. Other than prettier graphics, there’s been little interesting going on, especially in the AAA space. Even much of the indie scene is nostalgia dripping pixel graphics and same old design. I am done spending on the business friendly view of what my hobby should look like. It’s generating too little new information of interest to me.

ratww 7y ago

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform, compared to Windows which can run decades old games fine. But this has happened before. Pretty much every pre-2007 Mac game stopped working in 2012 after they removed Rosetta, their PPC emulator. And 64-bit Intel has been available since Leopard, released in 2007. So that leaves a tiny window of 32-bit only releases. On the other hand, the removal of OpenGL, if/when that ever happens, might have worse consequences.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
But at least dropping PowerPC support was predicated on a legit hardware architecture change. And that new architecture actually made porting from PC much easier. This change, by contrast, feels entirely unnecessary. The amd64 architecture natively supports i386 code. I realize it makes Apple's maintenance burden lower, but, they can deal with that.
- josephg 7y ago
  We’ve heard rumours for a few years that Apple is considering shipping MacBooks which use the Ax ARM chips that power their phones and iPad pros. Those CPUs have excellent performance per watt, and decent performance overall. If they’re planning on repeating the Rosetta play that they pulled off during the PowerPC -> Intel transition, it might make a lot of sense to deprecate i386 applications first so there is less surface area they need to emulate. The x86 instruction set is way too complicated as it is without having architecture modes to worry about.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Apple has the ability to both support i386 software on x86 machines, and choose to not emulate that software on future ARM machines. If your supposition is correct, Apple is effectively crippling their current products in order to make their future products seem less bad by comparison. That's horrible. And in the process, Apple is asking developers to rewrite i386 code for an amd64 architecture which they ultimately intend to abandon anyway.

dillonmckay 7y ago

The original Halo?

pazimzadeh 7y ago
Yep. And Age of Empires II from Wine bottle (i.e. http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/ http://portingkit.com/en/http://portingkit.com/en/ I wonder if selling Mojave disk images with games pre-installed would be profitable.

countryqt30 7y ago

At the same time, it will also WEED OUT a lot of crapware. Only the best and best-cared-for software will remain :D.

longnguyen 7y ago
Probably true for apps. But most games are in full screen and do not use OS UI elements anyway. So I'm not sure how OS upgrade can weed out crap games

Razengan 7y ago

> This move destroys the reputation of Mac as a game platform Apple Arcade rescues that somewhat. I'm not a fan of not owning games or not being able to play them offline whenever I want in the future, but Apple Arcade is actually kinda nice so far.

p7IDD243 7y ago

> I can just move to PC and keep the games I own. A small nitpick, you don't _own_ the games in your Steam library.

nightfly 7y ago
You don't own _any_ video games, you have a license and might happen to have physical media.
- blub 7y ago
  A pedantically correct, but ultimately pointless observation. One can install and play a game bought from gog.com any time one wants, unlike with games bought from Steam, which have DRM, have to be activated online and must ping the Steam servers periodically.
  - sjwright 7y ago
    Technically correct is the best kind of correct. Your example is valid, but there are plenty of other examples pushing in the opposite direction—for example PS4 and XB1 games delivered on physical media. Yes they'll play out of the box "forever" ... but in order to download important (occasionally critical) software patches you need the explicit blessing of Sony or Microsoft servers. And you could lose these for reasons that are wholly unrelated to your legitimate ownership of physical game media.
    - blub 7y ago
      The PS, Xbox and Steam are all different incarnations of cloud services. They are very convenient, but ultimately don't offer any guarantees that one can play the games even a week from now. At least consoles work without issue in offline mode, although MS wanted to disable that a few years ago, were confronted massive backlash and had to cancel their plans. A big and relatively recent problem with consoles is that even offline games now more or less require a patch, because they're launched with major bugs.
- deleted 7y ago

therealmarv 7y ago

Really sad I cannot play Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded on Catalina. I bought this game. Same for my old scanner. Both 32bit only. Seems I won't update to Catalina or I need to find a longterm solution with VMs.

jdnenej 7y ago
Is your scanner supported by SANE on linux? Some people have put a surprising amount of work creating Linux drivers for scanners