5 ms·

> Games perhaps? It's very hard to conclude Apple care much about breaking a bunch of games on the Mac when they cut off 80% of the Macs gaming library a year

> Games perhaps? It's very hard to conclude Apple care much about breaking a bunch of games on the Mac when they cut off 80% of the Macs gaming library a year earlier by removing 32bit execution, presumably mostly to ease the use of Rosetta 2. And, y'know, literally every other action Apple has taken for twenty years.

andy_ppp 4y ago
I think the issue is probably games devs don’t want to use Xcode so they don’t get simple upgrades. If you use Xcode almost every change Apple make there is a path to be supported by these changes.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  I think it's little a bit more complicated than that. Game devs don't actually update their old games very often, if at all. 32 -> 64 is not a trivial upgrade if you have external dependencies; you might even need to pay new license fees.
  - philistine 4y ago
    It’s clear Apple dropped 32-bit to make the transition to ARM go smoothly. It also highlighted the issue with game development on Mac. Most of the time, it’s done by a subcontractor who’s paid to deliver it once. No one is there to keep the lights on and maintain development, with a few exceptions like Civ 5.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    And why should they? Did the games suddenly have new bugs? Are the game companies going to get more money for basically porting to a new OS? People here complain about software subscription models, but then also like to complain about OS's that maintain backwards compatibility. I mean someone has to pay for engineers to spend their days keeping up with all that frequently pointless churn. Why would a game that works perfectly well with a 32-bit address space need 64 bits? There isn't any reason for old programs to suddenly stop working because someone in the OS/library chain was to lazy to provide backwards compatible ABIs.

5 ms·

> Games perhaps? It's very hard to conclude Apple care much about breaking a bunch of games on the Mac when they cut off 80% of the Macs gaming library a year

by Mindwipe 4y ago

andy_ppp 4y ago
I think the issue is probably games devs don’t want to use Xcode so they don’t get simple upgrades. If you use Xcode almost every change Apple make there is a path to be supported by these changes.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  I think it's little a bit more complicated than that. Game devs don't actually update their old games very often, if at all. 32 -> 64 is not a trivial upgrade if you have external dependencies; you might even need to pay new license fees.
  - philistine 4y ago
    It’s clear Apple dropped 32-bit to make the transition to ARM go smoothly. It also highlighted the issue with game development on Mac. Most of the time, it’s done by a subcontractor who’s paid to deliver it once. No one is there to keep the lights on and maintain development, with a few exceptions like Civ 5.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    And why should they? Did the games suddenly have new bugs? Are the game companies going to get more money for basically porting to a new OS? People here complain about software subscription models, but then also like to complain about OS's that maintain backwards compatibility. I mean someone has to pay for engineers to spend their days keeping up with all that frequently pointless churn. Why would a game that works perfectly well with a 32-bit address space need 64 bits? There isn't any reason for old programs to suddenly stop working because someone in the OS/library chain was to lazy to provide backwards compatible ABIs.