7 ms·

Apple insists on making everything difficult. No support of opengl or vulkan. You can use moltenVK, but you own the issues and bugs that arise from that layer,

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• wronglebowski 3y ago
  100% this, Apple wants complete control over the distribution and tooling used on their platforms. While it does provide advantages for their hardware development I think it just ties back to them wanting 30% of any application or gaming revenue.
  • CharlesW 3y ago
    I don't see the connection. If Apple unveils a Game Porting Toolkit with Vulkan support, that won't affect the 30%/15% App Store fee.
    • giancarlostoro 3y ago
      PC games that could be ported to Mac and published on the App Store are less likely to do so since there's a lack of support from Apple's side. They care more about mobile games it seems.
  • JimDabell 3y ago
    > them wanting 30% of any application or gaming revenue. 15%. They only charge 30% to people making more than a million dollars a year through the App Store.
    • dkasper 3y ago
      So 30% for Valve
      • Macha 3y ago
        To be fair, 30% is what Valve as a distributor charges (glass houses and all that). Valve the game developer is a hobby project subsidised by Valve the distributor.
      • JimDabell 3y ago
        No, 0% for Valve because they publish through Steam not the Mac App Store.
  • nostromo 3y ago
    The answer is pretty simple: Apple doesn't care about gaming. This goes back to Steve Jobs who didn't like gaming and apparently saw it as a waste of time. John Carmack mentioned this from his time working with Jobs. Apple is now a leading gaming company -- not because they want to be, but because they're in a billion pockets and lots of those people enjoy gaming. The reason the tooling and developer experience sucks is because Apple doesn't have an advocate for gaming at the VP or C-suite level.
• pjmlp 3y ago
  Just like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.
  • mlinhares 3y ago
    The difference is that these 3 companies already have a market, Apple doesn't even bother trying to convince people to get games on the platform, other than iOS. I don't think they care about gaming on macs at all.
    • WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
      You are just spreading FUD at this point, they do care, devs just don't want to bother, that's different https://developer.apple.com/games/ https://developer.apple.com/games/
      • millzlane 3y ago
        I just checked out their forum and I can only wonder why. There seem to be multiple cries for help from devs with no comments.
        • Spivak 3y ago
          Have you checked the developer forums for any product made by a large company? I promise you they're they exact same. There are plenty of reasons to not support macOS for your game, but this one isn't it.
          • millzlane 3y ago
            I just meant, that if the process to get help isn't helpful. A lot of new comers won't try.
        • WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
          Making games is already difficult, nobody wants to do extra mile to support a platform, Valve made the right choice with proton, unfortunately, that means less incentives to have a native gaming experience on Linux.. I'd say the tradeoff is worth it Apple should do something similar, but they'll never do since their users expect quality over anything else, wich is why they market Game Porting Toolkit as a testing platform, as opposed to a shipping platform for Valve's Proton, even thought it's basically the same project, 2 different culture, Valve doesn't care if the experience is worse
• ryandrake 3y ago
  I've never seen an API get as much hate from big tech as OpenGL got over decades. It started with Microsoft trying to kill it, and now Apple. The proprietary alternatives are not really even that much better. Just vendor lock-in for the sake of vendor lock-in.
  • Ericson2314 3y ago
    It's fine to deprecate OpenGL. What is not fine is not supporting Vulkan.
    • diath 3y ago
      Why? OpenGL works just fine and there are plenty of resources about OpenGL programming all over the internet, unless you're a triple A studio, you don't need what Vulkan has to offer, it will only slow down your development by adding needless complexity.
      • MegaDeKay 3y ago
        It isn't just triple A studios moving to Vulkan. Emulator development, for one, is moving there too. RPCS3, Dolphin, etc all see big time benefits to moving to Vulkan. OpenGL drivers are well known for being buggy as well. For a very long time, AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows were terrible and saw little love given that DirectX on Windows is where most of their effort went. It seems that Vulkan drivers are more performant, less buggy, and treated more as a first class citizen across both Windows and Linux. And OFC, Apple deprecated OpenGL and they are stuck at 4.1 from 2011. At least with MoltenVK, you get Vulkan->Metal and a modern-day API to talk to without having to deal with Metal directly.
      • snuxoll 3y ago
        OpenGL doesn't necessarily vanish, it becomes a higher level abstraction instead of something graphics drivers must natively speak. I think we are all better off if graphics vendors stick with supporting primitives and let higher level tools be built on top.
    • 3y ago
• doctorpangloss 3y ago
  Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones. Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience. What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.
  • itishappy 3y ago
    Macs aren't just for super serious professionals, they're also for their kids. That audience will buy skins.
  • yobert 3y ago
    I don't think people play counterstrike because they are cheap. A lot of my money goes to computers, and I still end up playing a lot of counterstrike. It's because it's fun.
  • threatofrain 3y ago
    That audience will buy skins, because that's how a lot of the winners in iOS gaming makes money.
  • sam0x17 3y ago
    they should make it paid for $80 when on mac os :O
  • junon 3y ago
    The thing is, is that CS2 replaced CSGO (which at one point was pay-to-play, which means people were required to sink money into a title which is now completely upended), removed a lot of content (whole game modes are missing and there's no plan on adding them back into the new version; maps have been removed, and to an extent some of the customization has been removed), and removed Mac support, which was previously very much supported with CSGO. They've also changed the game mechanics when it comes to determining when gunshots "register", which has very much changed the dynamic of the game and has vastly raised the bar for casual players to win even a single round. Further, ranked matches are handled differently now. It used to be that even losses contributed to your initial rank after a couple of placement matches. Now, you must win 10 games before you get a rank. Since placement games (games you play before you get a rank) are more or less randomly matchmade, it means that less skilled players are going to be up against impossibly difficult opponents to the point that even a single win is impossible, thus you're trapped in this unranked loop and will never achieve meaningful matchmaking with people of your own skill level. Further, "Prime" status was originally a barrier for cheaters since you had to buy it, and it made it such that prime status players were only matchmade with other prime status players. Since cheaters run the risk of getting permanently banned, they'd have to buy Prime over and over again - something Valve betted would be a way to filter out a large percentage of cheaters. However, they started to grant Prime status to people who had leveled up enough, which removed the cost barrier. Since cheaters level up quickly, it's become sort of a moot mechanic now. And no, Steam won't refund Prime status purchases, which are around $15. Couple the matchmaking differences with the shot registration differences, the removed content, and the dropping of support, and you have what is essentially a completely unique game that Valve replaced CSGO with. People are rightfully very upset. Many people bought CSGO for e.g. MacOS support. Now that game has been removed from their libraries with little to no recourse. Steam said they're issuing refunds for a few select Mac users but I've yet to see anyone say they've been granted such a refund. It's a messy situation that Valve has handled in one of the worst ways possible, learning no lessons from the Overwatch 2 debacle that did much the same thing (and was received equally as poorly) or from Ubisoft's repeated similar behavior.
• scruple 3y ago
  Dealing with code signing bullshit at work this week. I hate that we support Apple at this point. We have like 5-6 engineers who are even capable of doing this work across a massive organization. It's a total nightmare and I'm never surprised that game devs don't want to deal with the constant headache.
• karmakaze 3y ago
  I used to wish for the day that macOS gaming could become a thing. Now I seem wiser or more understanding of larger issues. The mac desktop/os is great. It would be great if many games supported it natively. However for the game makers where's the payoff? It's been long enough of Apple by their actions making it not a suitable platform as a gaming target. Even if it was today, there's little reassurance that there won't be some tech/policy change that impacts the publishers and gamers in an undesired way. Today I use Apple hw/sw products in a commodity manner. Most apps/tools I use can or could easily be run elsewhere. I'm not interested in walling myself into anyone's garden.
  • xaerowalk 3y ago
    I have been using a MacBook Air for less than a year and I don't see the greatness. Screen is okay, touchpad is a bit better but a lot bigger than at my HP Elitebook, battery time was twice better but it was degraded faster than elitebook, it is 3 hours vs 5 now for the same regular devops tasks (it was 4/8). Mac OS... It is horrible. I can't actually describe this, maybe I'm just a linux binded user and gonna prefer Manjaro KDE forever.
• fastball 3y ago
  While Apple does indeed make things difficult, they're not actually the problem in this case. The reason mac users are complaining is because Valve released this as an update to CS:GO rather than a separate game. I don't think mac players would really care that much about CS2 not being mac compatible if Valve hadn't done that. They would've shrugged and said "ok, I'll keep playing CS:GO then". But they can't do that, and that is 100% on Valve.
  • mehlmao 3y ago
    Valve could have handled it better, but you can still play CS:GO. Right click > Properties > Betas. I've used it to play a mod that hasn't been updated for CS2. There's very little playercount though.
• meltyness 3y ago
  It's forward-looking! The 90% consumer will be able to afford the "Apple Vision Pro" by 2039 adjusted for inflation!
• bitwize 3y ago
  Nobody cares about 3D APIs anymore. If you're serious about publishing a game you use whatever API the vendor gives you, including all the idiosyncratic ones provided by console manufacturers (NONE of which use OpenGL or Vulkan). If you're serious about publishing a game in 2023 you will be using a commercial engine -- either your own (if you're big like Valve) or someone else's -- and that wraps and abstracts away the 3D API details. Besides which, Metal is a fantastic API, at least as capable as Vulkan and less cumbersome to use.
• api 3y ago
  Apple does seem pretty determined to keep games off their platform. PSA for all OS vendors: nobody is going to write software for your walled garden anymore. Nobody. The more you try to force this, the more you will simply repel developers from your platform. The OS graphics/app API wars are over and everyone lost. For GUI people are going to use Electron, Tauri, or maybe Qt. For games they're going to use OpenGL or Vulkan. Even big companies are avoiding native development. What do Slack and Discord use? Electron.
  • astrange 3y ago
    You sound like a web developer, but that's not how games work. Console games are all developed for proprietary graphics APIs; if you're not touching one, it's because you're using someone else's engine. More importantly, Vulkan is low level and has to be written for a specific GPU brand for best results, so your code using the same API would not behave the same way.
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  This does seem so backwards. Apple is known for the fancy screens, the retina screens, high end graphics. But then what, falls down in gaming? It seems like a no-brainer they should have the best ports of games, and people would see them and be "wow, that looks great, I'm going to buy an apple".