10 ms·

I feel this is a horrible anti-consumer practice, but their ROI must be incredibly low. I don't remember the last time I played a game on a Mac. I wonder how Ap

I feel this is a horrible anti-consumer practice, but their ROI must be incredibly low. I don't remember the last time I played a game on a Mac. I wonder how Apple Arcade is doing.

criddell 7y ago
What's a better solution? Charge more for Linux and Mac versions?
- cbhl 7y ago
  Dedicated consoles. The Nintendo Switch runs Rocket League just fine. Once it's on there, you don't really have to worry about constant breaking changes from the operating system changing its audio subsystem or weird graphics drivers.
  - nobleach 7y ago
    The NVidia Shield runs it beautifully as well. (Same Tegra chip as the Switch).
- paxys 7y ago
  There is no better solution. For Mac - Apple has to make gaming a bigger priority, and that's clearly not going to happen. A ~$1000 upgradable Apple machine with a powerful graphics card that can run the latest games is a pipe dream. For Linux - It's the same problem as building any software for Linux that caters to the non-server non-developer segment. There just isn't enough of a business justification.
  - Nightshaxx 7y ago
    Acctually there were recently strong rumors Apple is going to do just that. Makes sense that Apple sees the growing gaming market and wants to get in on it. Them entering the market would be the incentive devs need to make their games work for Mac (and hopefully therefore Linux)
  - redwall_hp 7y ago
    Honestly, recent Macs are running contemporary titles more than well enough. Not everyone cares about turning the graphics sliders up. On Windows or otherwise. I've been playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided just fine lately, and Overwatch works well if I boot Windows, for example. Most MMOs and popular "e-sports titles" (pretty much the core of PC gaming, by numbers) like Counter-Strike, the MOBAs and such are all there on the Mac side. Most AAA games are designed with the trash hardware of consoles in mind, so laptops with more powerful GPUs handle them just fine. Apple's desktop offerings are abominable in terms of value and sticker price, but they pretty much own the non-Walmart-quality laptop market...
    - p1necone 7y ago
      I wouldn't consider Overwatch and Deus Ex contemporary titles, they both released in 2016.
ogre_codes 7y ago
Apple Arcade & iOS gaming is a whole different ballpark from Mac gaming. More and more it's becoming clear that Macs are limited to being work tools. I suspect most people with Macs and want to game on a big screen either own a Windows PC or have a console.
- teamspirit 7y ago
  Bootcamp is the only real answer on macOS right now when it comes to 3D - that includes more than just gaming. Now I just have wait and see which one will happen first, AMD actually comes out with a high end video card or nvidia and apple work out their differences.
  - JimmyAustin 7y ago
    If the rumours of Apple moving macOS to ARM pan out, Boot Camp will be dead.
    - mantap 7y ago
      Those rumours will not pan out. Apple just made a big deal of releasing a Xeon-powered work station. Chances of them going ARM-only are zero. They may release an ARM-powered notebook.
      - DevKoala 7y ago
        As someone who owns a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, it wouldn't surprise me if my next MacBook Pro is ARM based. They are just different tools for different purposes.
      - oarsinsync 7y ago
        Either your comment or mine will not age well :-D
  - smallstepforman 7y ago
    Unless a recent Windows 10 update screws up the UEFI bootloader and points the loader to the second partition which is incidently used by OSX and prevents booting Windows (well, it fixed an issue on Dell laptops with Windows, which suprise suprise is where most Microsoft PC’s are supplied from). The silly recovery tool wont allow you to mount the eFI boot partition in R/W mode so you cannot fix it yourself (EFI boot requires correct partition UUID). Windows 10 update killed bootcamp option for me, now I triple boot with Linux and Haiku.
makecheck 7y ago
Realistically the 32-bit abandonment in macOS Catalina significantly damaged the Mac gaming market (however “justified” it may be from an engineering standpoint, with many years of warning, etc.). There is simply no good way to tell people that the vast majority of games they probably acquired in the last few years are unlikely to run on any recent hardware. Some games do move forward to 64-bit but it will certainly require several years for the Mac game market (such as it is) to recover even to the point it had reached.
- least 7y ago
  I suspect Apple's intent is to leverage the massive interest in game development on their other platform, iOS, to spur game development on Mac. This feels fairly evident with the Apple Arcade push and Catalyst allowing for relatively easy porting from iOS. I doubt that Epic would have bothered targeting Metal in UE4 if it were macOS only. With it, building games for Macintosh for a great deal of developers is fairly trivial. Unity also targets Metal, as far as I am aware.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the last major version to support 32 it, it's been deprecated since 2009!
  - jseliger 7y ago
    Adobe. Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Once upon a time, I would have suggested Aperture as a Lightroom substitute, but funny thing about that...
    - 7y ago
3pt14159 7y ago
I play Starcraft 2 multiplayer a couple of times a week on a Mac and it's still great, just as it was almost a decade ago. It's not hard to make games work on a Mac. Linux, on the other hand, I've had very poor experiences with. It was my former default OS which I now run in a VM for development and I could never get games to operate properly without a heavy time investment.
- jeroenhd 7y ago
  From my experiments with Lutris and Proton, getting games to work has been quite easy as long as the games don't require ancient Windows APIs and such. The biggest difficulty I experience with gaming on Linux is Nvidia and their atrocious drivers. Getting games to run isn't very hard these days as long as you can manage to get your GPU to render an image. I should've bought AMD...
- 9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
  I still play quite a bit of SC2, but using bootcamp, the performance on my 15" MBP 2016 is wayyyyyy better than macos. (I've tried fiddling with settings on macOS, tried the Metal rendering API, and still it's not close).
SteveGoob 7y ago
> their ROI must be incredibly low. Not according to [this reddit user's analysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/dgvmkk/crazy_idea_what_if_valve_is_supporting_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/dgvmkk/crazy_...).
- paxys 7y ago
  > Obviously, there are a lot of caveats here. Numbers such as the DLC Revenue Percentage (relative to non-DLC revenue) and profit margin are completely made up by me LOL. Even otherwise, without factoring in the percentage of operating expenses devoted to supporting Linux, trying to calculate profit numbers is meaningless.
- Jasper_ 7y ago
  A Linux fan making up numbers for their favorite platform is meaningless. I've shipped Linux games. It's never been worth the ROI.

I feel this is a horrible anti-consumer practice, but their ROI must be incredibly low. I don't remember the last time I played a game on a Mac. I wonder how Apple Arcade is doing.

criddell 7y ago

What's a better solution? Charge more for Linux and Mac versions?

cbhl 7y ago
Dedicated consoles. The Nintendo Switch runs Rocket League just fine. Once it's on there, you don't really have to worry about constant breaking changes from the operating system changing its audio subsystem or weird graphics drivers.
- nobleach 7y ago
  The NVidia Shield runs it beautifully as well. (Same Tegra chip as the Switch).
paxys 7y ago
There is no better solution. For Mac - Apple has to make gaming a bigger priority, and that's clearly not going to happen. A ~$1000 upgradable Apple machine with a powerful graphics card that can run the latest games is a pipe dream. For Linux - It's the same problem as building any software for Linux that caters to the non-server non-developer segment. There just isn't enough of a business justification.
- Nightshaxx 7y ago
  Acctually there were recently strong rumors Apple is going to do just that. Makes sense that Apple sees the growing gaming market and wants to get in on it. Them entering the market would be the incentive devs need to make their games work for Mac (and hopefully therefore Linux)
- redwall_hp 7y ago
  Honestly, recent Macs are running contemporary titles more than well enough. Not everyone cares about turning the graphics sliders up. On Windows or otherwise. I've been playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided just fine lately, and Overwatch works well if I boot Windows, for example. Most MMOs and popular "e-sports titles" (pretty much the core of PC gaming, by numbers) like Counter-Strike, the MOBAs and such are all there on the Mac side. Most AAA games are designed with the trash hardware of consoles in mind, so laptops with more powerful GPUs handle them just fine. Apple's desktop offerings are abominable in terms of value and sticker price, but they pretty much own the non-Walmart-quality laptop market...
  - p1necone 7y ago
    I wouldn't consider Overwatch and Deus Ex contemporary titles, they both released in 2016.

ogre_codes 7y ago

Apple Arcade & iOS gaming is a whole different ballpark from Mac gaming. More and more it's becoming clear that Macs are limited to being work tools. I suspect most people with Macs and want to game on a big screen either own a Windows PC or have a console.

teamspirit 7y ago
Bootcamp is the only real answer on macOS right now when it comes to 3D - that includes more than just gaming. Now I just have wait and see which one will happen first, AMD actually comes out with a high end video card or nvidia and apple work out their differences.
- JimmyAustin 7y ago
  If the rumours of Apple moving macOS to ARM pan out, Boot Camp will be dead.
  - mantap 7y ago
    Those rumours will not pan out. Apple just made a big deal of releasing a Xeon-powered work station. Chances of them going ARM-only are zero. They may release an ARM-powered notebook.
    - DevKoala 7y ago
      As someone who owns a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, it wouldn't surprise me if my next MacBook Pro is ARM based. They are just different tools for different purposes.
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      Either your comment or mine will not age well :-D
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  Unless a recent Windows 10 update screws up the UEFI bootloader and points the loader to the second partition which is incidently used by OSX and prevents booting Windows (well, it fixed an issue on Dell laptops with Windows, which suprise suprise is where most Microsoft PC’s are supplied from). The silly recovery tool wont allow you to mount the eFI boot partition in R/W mode so you cannot fix it yourself (EFI boot requires correct partition UUID). Windows 10 update killed bootcamp option for me, now I triple boot with Linux and Haiku.

makecheck 7y ago

Realistically the 32-bit abandonment in macOS Catalina significantly damaged the Mac gaming market (however “justified” it may be from an engineering standpoint, with many years of warning, etc.). There is simply no good way to tell people that the vast majority of games they probably acquired in the last few years are unlikely to run on any recent hardware. Some games do move forward to 64-bit but it will certainly require several years for the Mac game market (such as it is) to recover even to the point it had reached.

least 7y ago
I suspect Apple's intent is to leverage the massive interest in game development on their other platform, iOS, to spur game development on Mac. This feels fairly evident with the Apple Arcade push and Catalyst allowing for relatively easy porting from iOS. I doubt that Epic would have bothered targeting Metal in UE4 if it were macOS only. With it, building games for Macintosh for a great deal of developers is fairly trivial. Unity also targets Metal, as far as I am aware.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
I don't game on Mac, but I did develop for MacOS for a number of years. Who was releasing 32 bit binaries on MacOS in the last 10 years? Snow Leopard was the last major version to support 32 it, it's been deprecated since 2009!
- jseliger 7y ago
  Adobe. Lightroom 6 is the last standalone version that doesn't require subscriptions. It won't run on Catalina and has no good substitute on MacOS (I know about http://darktable.org/ http://darktable.org/ but it is not performant or Mac-like on MacOS).
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Once upon a time, I would have suggested Aperture as a Lightroom substitute, but funny thing about that...
  - 7y ago

3pt14159 7y ago

I play Starcraft 2 multiplayer a couple of times a week on a Mac and it's still great, just as it was almost a decade ago. It's not hard to make games work on a Mac. Linux, on the other hand, I've had very poor experiences with. It was my former default OS which I now run in a VM for development and I could never get games to operate properly without a heavy time investment.

jeroenhd 7y ago
From my experiments with Lutris and Proton, getting games to work has been quite easy as long as the games don't require ancient Windows APIs and such. The biggest difficulty I experience with gaming on Linux is Nvidia and their atrocious drivers. Getting games to run isn't very hard these days as long as you can manage to get your GPU to render an image. I should've bought AMD...
9935c101ab17a66 7y ago
I still play quite a bit of SC2, but using bootcamp, the performance on my 15" MBP 2016 is wayyyyyy better than macos. (I've tried fiddling with settings on macOS, tried the Metal rendering API, and still it's not close).

SteveGoob 7y ago

> their ROI must be incredibly low. Not according to [this reddit user's analysis](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/dgvmkk/crazy_idea_what_if_valve_is_supporting_linux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/dgvmkk/crazy_...).

paxys 7y ago
> Obviously, there are a lot of caveats here. Numbers such as the DLC Revenue Percentage (relative to non-DLC revenue) and profit margin are completely made up by me LOL. Even otherwise, without factoring in the percentage of operating expenses devoted to supporting Linux, trying to calculate profit numbers is meaningless.
Jasper_ 7y ago
A Linux fan making up numbers for their favorite platform is meaningless. I've shipped Linux games. It's never been worth the ROI.