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Reading gamedev subs on reddit, I got a very strong impression that Macs are generally being looked down upon and not considered worthy of porting to. In part

Reading gamedev subs on reddit, I got a very strong impression that Macs are generally being looked down upon and not considered worthy of porting to. In part due to a significantly weaker hardware compared to Windows machines, in part due to constantly changing API surface and breaking backwards compatibility, and in part due to historical game-hostile stance of the company stemming from Jobs' personal dislike towards having games on Mac. Is this off or did I get the sentiments right?

izacus 6y ago
Well, the 3D performance is very poor in general - my 2018 MacBook Pro 15" is about 30% slower under macOS than on Bootcamp Windows on the same hardware with the same app. And that comes on top of the fact that the GPUs in these MacBooks aren't really all that good and can't really run games at native screen resolution with any kind of decent performance. The Windows world has made huge strides - e.g. laptops like Razer Blade Stealth 13" pack in faster GPU which is actually usable in a MacBook Pro 13" sized chasis.
jan_Inkepa 6y ago
Basically. Also, amusingly in this context, they have bad joypad support (No built-in support for xbox controllers is pretty grim, you have to rely on fan drivers. [Rumble stopped working last year]). Maybe they'll improve it, but maybe not. I'm very skeptical. Also on iOS they totally let gamecenter rot. They're a bit more positive now now, but for a long time in their conference talks they tend to up productivity tools and downplay games, which are a biig source of app store money IIRC. They're ashamed of games a bit (their original theming for gamecenter was a casino, which I think accurately reflects their distaste for games). And that's a position you can have, but it makes it less appealing if you're a game developer. [honestly, raw hardware performance\value for money is the least of the issues].
- joshvm 6y ago
  The linked video gives a code example and describes haptic support specifically with xbox controllers, but perhaps it's only the newest ones?
  - akmarinov 6y ago
    They added support for PS and Xbox controllers last year, but it’s a bit too late at this point. They added support for the pro Xbox controller this year.
  - jan_Inkepa 6y ago
    (Acknowledgement: I didn't watch the video...). Huh, I guess my knowledge is out of date - last year I had to give up on mac rumble support from a game because the drivers people use didn't support it any more - https://github.com/360Controller/360Controller/issues/978 https://github.com/360Controller/360Controller/issues/978 Abstractly, it's good to see they're supporting it, but they're so inconsistent with game-related stuff that I can't muster enthusiasm. [edit: I tried to find a list of supported controllers for macOS, but couldn't]
- Vomzor 6y ago
  macOS 10.15 has built-in xbox controller support.
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
It is spot on. Macs are less than 5% of the Steam audience, software now needs notarization, developer tools cost money in the form of hardware, GPU drivers are buggy (unless you use Metal and buy into Apple ecosystem), modern OpenGL was abandoned years ago, etc. So developers only target macOS if the game gets big enough. From the point of view of gamers, it is annoying. The recent 32-bit support drop killed a huge amount of macOS games. Now I have to bootcamp to play some of my favorite games. The GPU performance is also quite bad due their fight with NVIDIA.
- abjKT26nO8 6y ago
  > GPU drivers are buggy (unless you use Metal Metal drivers are buggy as well and it's sometimes even better to use OpenGL: https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255250372215611397 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255250372215611397 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255571085304541184 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255571085304541184 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1267962397722988545 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1267962397722988545 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1260636769852157954 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1260636769852157954
  - ksec 6y ago
    Those were on Intel Metal Drivers. Hopefully drivers quality will improve once Apple take full control of their GPU as well.
- w0utert 6y ago
  I'm wondering if any of this will change now that Apple is going all-in on vertical integration, basically unifying their platforms so you can write a game once and run it on Mac, AppleTV, iPad and iPhone with (almost) no changes. Their hardware will all run comparable Apple CPU's & GPU's, same API's, appear to fully support game controllers etc, and the development and deployment platform are pretty much the same thing. This makes a small step towards a unified platform for light gaming. I get that MacBooks and AppleTV's will never be anywhere near the performance of PC, Xbox or PlayStation, but Nintendo has shown that doesn't have to matter. I'm pretty sure any Apple SoC used in the last ~2 years already beats the Nintendo Switch for example. All Apple needs to do is put some effort towards getting more 'real' games in their store, ie: games like you would play on switch with traditional controls, and not glorified mobile games that also have to work with the ridiculous AppleTV remote. My feeling has been for a long time already that Apple is really leaving a huge opportunity on the table here. But the vibe I got from WWDC keynote and platform state of the union was that they seem to have more focus on this now, showing unity, maya and some other tools that can be used for game dev, running on their Apple Silicon. So who knows what they are planning...
jasonsync 6y ago
I mean my 2019 Mac Mini can just barely run StarCraft (1998) ...
numpad0 6y ago
Unless your definition of “game” primarily covers Japanese or Chinese apps you play to build a deck of playing cards by collecting spent $100 App Store prepaid cards through the process of paying iAP to collect digital arts of featureless girls with superbright skin made of raw springroll wrap, difference between Japanese and Chinese being either the girls consists of those {are FTM, has absolute flat chests, are chemically castrated men} or {has breasts larger than a sack of football, has breast larger than a sack of football and hair made of bare optical fibers}, then you’re spot on. As for “games” that falls into this category Apple loves them.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> due to constantly changing API surface and breaking backwards compatibility Interesting that those same problems exist in Linux Desktop, and Ubuntu nearly pulled an Apple and dropped 32bit support on x64. The fact that Valve maintains a platform for devs to target that is relatively independent of distribution shenanigans, and that you can run Linux without paying for it or buying new hardware (probably), are the only reasons it gets any attention at all.
jbob2000 6y ago
Apple isn't doing this for Macs primarily, this is for the iPhone and iPads. With Nintendo starting to bring a lot of titles to the app store, Apple probably expects other big publishers to start using it as well. They are going to want good controller support. Dark Souls on the iPhone 13? Yeah, I'm going to need a controller. Fortnite is huge and more titles that offer mobile experiences are coming. There's also an entire generation of children growing up right now who gamed mostly on their mobile devices. One of my friend's kids actually made fun of me for still playing games on my desktop. Think about what a Nintendo Switch is. It's an iPad with controllers stuck to the side. I can imagine a future where Nintendo might say "why are we building hardware, Apple does it better and cheaper than us, let's just be a publisher". From what I understand, most hardware is sold at a loss anyways, so what's preventing gaming from consolidating around a few devices?
- bathtub365 6y ago
  Nintendo will not give up control of their distribution to a company that takes a 30% cut of software licenses. The expectations of people who play Switch games and people who play mobile games are also vastly different. You can see this by looking at the types of games Nintendo publishes on the respective platforms. Their mobile games are free to play, chock-full of mobile game style in-app purchase garbage, whereas their console games are much more traditional premium titles with an up-front purchase price. These are 2 different markets with different audiences. They also typically don’t sell their consoles at a loss, unlike the other manufacturers and stated they wouldn’t sell the Switch at a loss.[1] 1: https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch-at-a-loss-plans-to-ship-2-million-units-in-march/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch...
matt_s 6y ago
You said weaker hardware but really it comes down to cost and modular builds with PC's are a huge factor from a game player perspective. You can piece-meal together a decent gaming system for half the cost of a Mac and the most useful upgrade is a new graphics card. You can't upgrade Macs.
faet 6y ago
There is also the extra development fees and/or needing a mac if you want to do any testing. Most engines (Gamemaker/Unity/and epic soon) will port to iOS/Mac so it isn't a huge 'step'.
saturdaysaint 6y ago
Power really isn't an excuse these days. There's a huge library of great games on Steam that run beautifully on a $600 laptop. Look at how many great games are on the Switch, which is about as powerful as an iPhone 6S. It's just ridiculous that a leading software company can't support such a wildly popular class of software, but Apple game support has such a long history of tragic incompetence that any handwringing is a waste of time.
lynndotpy 6y ago
For hobbyists, a big blocker is that one needs a Mac just to export for it. This probably isn't an issue for profitable companies, but $400+ for a MacOS device is a big ask for indie devs making games in their free time.

izacus 6y ago

Well, the 3D performance is very poor in general - my 2018 MacBook Pro 15" is about 30% slower under macOS than on Bootcamp Windows on the same hardware with the same app. And that comes on top of the fact that the GPUs in these MacBooks aren't really all that good and can't really run games at native screen resolution with any kind of decent performance. The Windows world has made huge strides - e.g. laptops like Razer Blade Stealth 13" pack in faster GPU which is actually usable in a MacBook Pro 13" sized chasis.

jan_Inkepa 6y ago

Basically. Also, amusingly in this context, they have bad joypad support (No built-in support for xbox controllers is pretty grim, you have to rely on fan drivers. [Rumble stopped working last year]). Maybe they'll improve it, but maybe not. I'm very skeptical. Also on iOS they totally let gamecenter rot. They're a bit more positive now now, but for a long time in their conference talks they tend to up productivity tools and downplay games, which are a biig source of app store money IIRC. They're ashamed of games a bit (their original theming for gamecenter was a casino, which I think accurately reflects their distaste for games). And that's a position you can have, but it makes it less appealing if you're a game developer. [honestly, raw hardware performance\value for money is the least of the issues].

joshvm 6y ago
The linked video gives a code example and describes haptic support specifically with xbox controllers, but perhaps it's only the newest ones?
- akmarinov 6y ago
  They added support for PS and Xbox controllers last year, but it’s a bit too late at this point. They added support for the pro Xbox controller this year.
- jan_Inkepa 6y ago
  (Acknowledgement: I didn't watch the video...). Huh, I guess my knowledge is out of date - last year I had to give up on mac rumble support from a game because the drivers people use didn't support it any more - https://github.com/360Controller/360Controller/issues/978 https://github.com/360Controller/360Controller/issues/978 Abstractly, it's good to see they're supporting it, but they're so inconsistent with game-related stuff that I can't muster enthusiasm. [edit: I tried to find a list of supported controllers for macOS, but couldn't]
Vomzor 6y ago
macOS 10.15 has built-in xbox controller support.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

It is spot on. Macs are less than 5% of the Steam audience, software now needs notarization, developer tools cost money in the form of hardware, GPU drivers are buggy (unless you use Metal and buy into Apple ecosystem), modern OpenGL was abandoned years ago, etc. So developers only target macOS if the game gets big enough. From the point of view of gamers, it is annoying. The recent 32-bit support drop killed a huge amount of macOS games. Now I have to bootcamp to play some of my favorite games. The GPU performance is also quite bad due their fight with NVIDIA.

abjKT26nO8 6y ago
> GPU drivers are buggy (unless you use Metal Metal drivers are buggy as well and it's sometimes even better to use OpenGL: https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255250372215611397 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255250372215611397 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255571085304541184 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1255571085304541184 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1267962397722988545 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1267962397722988545 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1260636769852157954 https://twitter.com/pcwalton/status/1260636769852157954
- ksec 6y ago
  Those were on Intel Metal Drivers. Hopefully drivers quality will improve once Apple take full control of their GPU as well.
w0utert 6y ago
I'm wondering if any of this will change now that Apple is going all-in on vertical integration, basically unifying their platforms so you can write a game once and run it on Mac, AppleTV, iPad and iPhone with (almost) no changes. Their hardware will all run comparable Apple CPU's & GPU's, same API's, appear to fully support game controllers etc, and the development and deployment platform are pretty much the same thing. This makes a small step towards a unified platform for light gaming. I get that MacBooks and AppleTV's will never be anywhere near the performance of PC, Xbox or PlayStation, but Nintendo has shown that doesn't have to matter. I'm pretty sure any Apple SoC used in the last ~2 years already beats the Nintendo Switch for example. All Apple needs to do is put some effort towards getting more 'real' games in their store, ie: games like you would play on switch with traditional controls, and not glorified mobile games that also have to work with the ridiculous AppleTV remote. My feeling has been for a long time already that Apple is really leaving a huge opportunity on the table here. But the vibe I got from WWDC keynote and platform state of the union was that they seem to have more focus on this now, showing unity, maya and some other tools that can be used for game dev, running on their Apple Silicon. So who knows what they are planning...

jasonsync 6y ago

I mean my 2019 Mac Mini can just barely run StarCraft (1998) ...

numpad0 6y ago

Unless your definition of “game” primarily covers Japanese or Chinese apps you play to build a deck of playing cards by collecting spent $100 App Store prepaid cards through the process of paying iAP to collect digital arts of featureless girls with superbright skin made of raw springroll wrap, difference between Japanese and Chinese being either the girls consists of those {are FTM, has absolute flat chests, are chemically castrated men} or {has breasts larger than a sack of football, has breast larger than a sack of football and hair made of bare optical fibers}, then you’re spot on. As for “games” that falls into this category Apple loves them.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> due to constantly changing API surface and breaking backwards compatibility Interesting that those same problems exist in Linux Desktop, and Ubuntu nearly pulled an Apple and dropped 32bit support on x64. The fact that Valve maintains a platform for devs to target that is relatively independent of distribution shenanigans, and that you can run Linux without paying for it or buying new hardware (probably), are the only reasons it gets any attention at all.

jbob2000 6y ago

Apple isn't doing this for Macs primarily, this is for the iPhone and iPads. With Nintendo starting to bring a lot of titles to the app store, Apple probably expects other big publishers to start using it as well. They are going to want good controller support. Dark Souls on the iPhone 13? Yeah, I'm going to need a controller. Fortnite is huge and more titles that offer mobile experiences are coming. There's also an entire generation of children growing up right now who gamed mostly on their mobile devices. One of my friend's kids actually made fun of me for still playing games on my desktop. Think about what a Nintendo Switch is. It's an iPad with controllers stuck to the side. I can imagine a future where Nintendo might say "why are we building hardware, Apple does it better and cheaper than us, let's just be a publisher". From what I understand, most hardware is sold at a loss anyways, so what's preventing gaming from consolidating around a few devices?

bathtub365 6y ago
Nintendo will not give up control of their distribution to a company that takes a 30% cut of software licenses. The expectations of people who play Switch games and people who play mobile games are also vastly different. You can see this by looking at the types of games Nintendo publishes on the respective platforms. Their mobile games are free to play, chock-full of mobile game style in-app purchase garbage, whereas their console games are much more traditional premium titles with an up-front purchase price. These are 2 different markets with different audiences. They also typically don’t sell their consoles at a loss, unlike the other manufacturers and stated they wouldn’t sell the Switch at a loss.[1] 1: https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch-at-a-loss-plans-to-ship-2-million-units-in-march/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/10/26/nintendo-wont-sell-switch...

matt_s 6y ago

You said weaker hardware but really it comes down to cost and modular builds with PC's are a huge factor from a game player perspective. You can piece-meal together a decent gaming system for half the cost of a Mac and the most useful upgrade is a new graphics card. You can't upgrade Macs.

faet 6y ago

There is also the extra development fees and/or needing a mac if you want to do any testing. Most engines (Gamemaker/Unity/and epic soon) will port to iOS/Mac so it isn't a huge 'step'.

saturdaysaint 6y ago

Power really isn't an excuse these days. There's a huge library of great games on Steam that run beautifully on a $600 laptop. Look at how many great games are on the Switch, which is about as powerful as an iPhone 6S. It's just ridiculous that a leading software company can't support such a wildly popular class of software, but Apple game support has such a long history of tragic incompetence that any handwringing is a waste of time.

lynndotpy 6y ago

For hobbyists, a big blocker is that one needs a Mac just to export for it. This probably isn't an issue for profitable companies, but $400+ for a MacOS device is a big ask for indie devs making games in their free time.