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There has arguably been no market for Mac games. Until M1, Macs didn't have good enough GPUs for many games. There were no "Gamer macs" (Macs with good enough G

by gernb 4y ago

There has arguably been no market for Mac games. Until M1, Macs didn't have good enough GPUs for many games. There were no "Gamer macs" (Macs with good enough GPUs to run top end games) And, AFAIK, there's very little market even for games that don't require a high end GPU on Mac. My guess is the majority people who want to play games on a desktop/laptop just know to get a Windows PC.

Forgeties79 4y ago
Hasn’t stopped Blizzard from supporting Mac for 25+ years.
- mjamesaustin 4y ago
  Except they have stopped. Overwatch is not for Mac, and Diablo 4 isn't coming to Mac either.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    I stand corrected!
treeman79 4y ago
On a 2019 MacBook Pro. I use boot camp. Load up windows and games run fine.
bzzzt 4y ago
There are lots of Intel macs with good GPU's, but most of the base consumer models didn't. (Macbook pro has reasonable Radeon graphics, Mac pro even better but that's a lot of money to play games and beside that some games are broken on Xeon CPU's). There are lots of simple games in the App store, some ported from iOS, some indie games built on generic engines (Unity etc). The problem was Mac titles have to be continuously supported. Apple killed compatibility with older 32-bit games with Catalina which decimated my Steam library. I presume that's one of the reasons developers are not exactly flocking to mac en masse...
bombcar 4y ago
3% of steam is macs: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... That’s not nothing, and arguably if you have a good game, you’ll be one of the shining few on the Max.
bnralt 4y ago
~2009 until ~2019 (when Apple dropped 32 bit support) was actually a pretty good time for gaming on the Mac. AAA games like Human Revolution and Witcher 2 were being released about a year after their PC counterparts, lots of Unity games were coming over, GOG was supporting old games on the Mac (bundled with DosBox), and Bootcamp was available for people who needed more. If you were a casual gamer, you'd be pretty satisfied on a Mac for that decade. Things got significantly worse since the 32 bit support was dropped. Most companies aren't interested in going back to update a decades old game to support Mac gamers, so a ton of games that were available suddenly became unavailable. And with the M1, Bootcamp no longer works. We'll have to see what the future brings. I never would have guessed things would have been as good as they were from 2009-2019, or that things would suddenly reverse as quickly as they did after 2019. So who knows what's around the next corner for Mac gaming.
chongli 4y ago
I feel like at this point you can no longer afford to generalize about the market this way if you're a game developer or publisher. The gaming industry is so big and so incredibly over-saturated with games that it is better to evaluate the market for your game, individually, rather than gaming as a whole. For example, games like Factorio are incredibly niche and loved by people with builder/engineer mindsets (not necessarily working as engineers). Now you've got to ask yourself whether potential Factorio players are more or less likely to own a Mac, compared to the 3% (cited by another commenter) of all Steam users on Macs. Also I wonder how this 3% figure was calculated. Is it based on monthly active users? I am a Mac user and I have Steam installed but I don't leave it running all the time because application itself is a dumpster-fire battery hog. I only start it up when I want to play a specific game, then I shut it down. Some games don't even require Steam to be running so I launch them directly without bothering to start Steam. Am I excluded from the monthly active users because I might go months without launching Steam, despite playing games regularly?
Varloom 4y ago
Developers aren't interested when Apple keeps dropping APIs. Develop your game for x86_32, suddenly Apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for x86_64. Develop your game for OpenCL/GL, suddenly Apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for Metal. Develop your game for x86_64, suddenly apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for ARM64. That's without counting the fact that most games developed nowadays developed using Vulcan or DX12 which has to be rewritten to Metal. People are installing Windows on their Macs to play games that used to run natively on MacOS. Imagine how bad the backlash if this happened on Windows.
- robertoandred 4y ago
  Dropping 32-but was telegraphed for a decade, OpenGL still works fine on the newest Macs, and Rosetta has zero issue running x64 games.

by gernb 4y ago

Forgeties79 4y ago

Hasn’t stopped Blizzard from supporting Mac for 25+ years.

mjamesaustin 4y ago
Except they have stopped. Overwatch is not for Mac, and Diablo 4 isn't coming to Mac either.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  I stand corrected!

treeman79 4y ago

On a 2019 MacBook Pro. I use boot camp. Load up windows and games run fine.

bzzzt 4y ago

There are lots of Intel macs with good GPU's, but most of the base consumer models didn't. (Macbook pro has reasonable Radeon graphics, Mac pro even better but that's a lot of money to play games and beside that some games are broken on Xeon CPU's). There are lots of simple games in the App store, some ported from iOS, some indie games built on generic engines (Unity etc). The problem was Mac titles have to be continuously supported. Apple killed compatibility with older 32-bit games with Catalina which decimated my Steam library. I presume that's one of the reasons developers are not exactly flocking to mac en masse...

bombcar 4y ago

3% of steam is macs: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... That’s not nothing, and arguably if you have a good game, you’ll be one of the shining few on the Max.

bnralt 4y ago

~2009 until ~2019 (when Apple dropped 32 bit support) was actually a pretty good time for gaming on the Mac. AAA games like Human Revolution and Witcher 2 were being released about a year after their PC counterparts, lots of Unity games were coming over, GOG was supporting old games on the Mac (bundled with DosBox), and Bootcamp was available for people who needed more. If you were a casual gamer, you'd be pretty satisfied on a Mac for that decade. Things got significantly worse since the 32 bit support was dropped. Most companies aren't interested in going back to update a decades old game to support Mac gamers, so a ton of games that were available suddenly became unavailable. And with the M1, Bootcamp no longer works. We'll have to see what the future brings. I never would have guessed things would have been as good as they were from 2009-2019, or that things would suddenly reverse as quickly as they did after 2019. So who knows what's around the next corner for Mac gaming.

chongli 4y ago

I feel like at this point you can no longer afford to generalize about the market this way if you're a game developer or publisher. The gaming industry is so big and so incredibly over-saturated with games that it is better to evaluate the market for your game, individually, rather than gaming as a whole. For example, games like Factorio are incredibly niche and loved by people with builder/engineer mindsets (not necessarily working as engineers). Now you've got to ask yourself whether potential Factorio players are more or less likely to own a Mac, compared to the 3% (cited by another commenter) of all Steam users on Macs. Also I wonder how this 3% figure was calculated. Is it based on monthly active users? I am a Mac user and I have Steam installed but I don't leave it running all the time because application itself is a dumpster-fire battery hog. I only start it up when I want to play a specific game, then I shut it down. Some games don't even require Steam to be running so I launch them directly without bothering to start Steam. Am I excluded from the monthly active users because I might go months without launching Steam, despite playing games regularly?

Varloom 4y ago

Developers aren't interested when Apple keeps dropping APIs. Develop your game for x86_32, suddenly Apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for x86_64. Develop your game for OpenCL/GL, suddenly Apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for Metal. Develop your game for x86_64, suddenly apple drops support and you have to rewrite your entire game again for ARM64. That's without counting the fact that most games developed nowadays developed using Vulcan or DX12 which has to be rewritten to Metal. People are installing Windows on their Macs to play games that used to run natively on MacOS. Imagine how bad the backlash if this happened on Windows.

robertoandred 4y ago
Dropping 32-but was telegraphed for a decade, OpenGL still works fine on the newest Macs, and Rosetta has zero issue running x64 games.