Is this the same Apple whose new iPhone SOC has hardware ray tracing?
Apple has a gaming strategy. iPhone makes developers too much money to ignore, and since adopting in-house silicon across all product lines their handhelds, tablets, laptops and desktops all use the same APIs and CPU/GPU cores.
If you target iPhone, there is not much additional work to add a keyboard/mouse/gamepad UI to target the rest of their ecosystem.
We've started seeing Console games get ported to iPhone, which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
> Resident Evil Village on iOS Is Legit. I Forgot I Wasn't Playing on a Console
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-ios-is-legit-i-forgot-i-wasnt-playing-on-a-console/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...
iPhone? Who tf cares for iPhone gaming? Are you gonna play CS2 on an iPhone?
And it's the same Apple that was barely mantaining OpenGL (an outdated version) and REFUSED to support Vulkan for their Metal Graphics API. If I remember correctly Valve helped or asked the creator of MoltenVK to open-source the project, so they could work on it as well.
Yes, Apple didn't care about PC gaming AT ALL.
Now they release a modified version of Wine and hope that everyone starts using it.
>their ecosystem
and it truly is their ecosystem, because they refuse to support vulkan or OpenGL.
>which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
for sure, it's surprising to see a real AAA game get ported to phones instead of the usual cashgrab gacha/social garbage. on a technical level id be more impressed if it wasn't a game that already has to support consoles that came out in 2013.
> id be more impressed if it wasn't a game that already has to support consoles that came out in 2013
Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-ios-is-legit-i-forgot-i-wasnt-playing-on-a-console/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...
>Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.
I don't understand why you're replying to me with irrelevant facts?
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One came out in 2013. Resident Evil Village came out on Playstation 4 and Xbox One on 2021. Unlike wine, video game consoles do not improve with age.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
im not surprised that a layperson is unable to discern between the version of re8 he's playing now and the version of re8 he says he played two and a half years ago. It's also completely irrelevant to the fact that the most impressive game on iphone is a port of a game that also came out on PS4 and Xbox One.
Does Nintendo or PlayStation support Vulkan or OpenGL?
The VK_NN_vi_surface extension seems to imply that Nintendo does.
i wouldnt know, i don't have access to their SDKs.
consider this: Microsoft at the height of its monopoly in the 1990s could have ditched OpenGL support to lock developers into the DirectX ecosystem but they didn't.
No, but both of them have at least an order of magnitude (maybe two) more video game players on their flagship platforms (Switch and PS5) because it's solely for playing games, and the engines that are used have tooling to directly support the consoles.
Not so for macOS.
Apple cares games, in a Silicon Valley way, like Google. I feel they don't love games but accidentally become a big player.
> Is this the same Apple whose new iPhone SOC has hardware ray tracing?
IMG has had raytracing in powervr for like a decade, and they just did another "most advanced ever!!!" thing a few years ago ( https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-the-most-advanced-ray-tracing-gpu/ https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-launches-th... )
But it's mobile and so it's way too slow to be useful, so nobody cares. That's 99% likely to be the case with Apple's newest offering, just like it is with Qualcomm's and ARM's (that's right, literally every mobile GPU offers this now - Apple is one of the masses here)
Look at how hard it hits consoles and PCs, it's utterly pointless on a 6" display with a 5w SoC
more direct link to actual gameplay instead of a single screenshot on cnet: https://youtu.be/7LHJPSVR4Ek?t=135 https://youtu.be/7LHJPSVR4Ek?t=135
Apple's "gaming" strategy is a lot of microtransaction riddled games while they get 30% cut.
Everything that doesn't follow that pattern gets the boot.
I'm sorry but mobile gaming is a whole different "gaming" world. It's often not the same playerbase.
I'm assuming they are not trying to appeal to your parents playing bejeweled when showcasing Resident Evil 8.
Will it work? No clue. Historically premium games had absurd piracy rates which is why most premium games pulled out and why F2P games with servers holding to value rose. But IOS always had lower piracy rates than android, so Apple has a better foothold for trying to re-appeal to console games studio than Google.
That’s not the gaming department, that’s the gambling-but-with-extra-steps department.
In case you mean the games on iPhone on the App Store, they generate revenue for Apple via in game transactions and not by game sales necessary. What people typically play on PCs are not the same games. Most of the games, as you can see with CS2, aren’t even available on iOS or macOS which is a problem. Outside of that I think you can run the games for iPhone on Mac as well but even then optimisation is necessary.
> they generate revenue for Apple via in game transactions
Once upon a time, there were many iOS games that you paid for up front with no micro-transactions at all, for instance, XCom was about $20 a decade ago.
I have a feeling the console game ports will be pay up front, just like they are on a console.
I think Apple's angle on this either should be or already is synergies. Because of AI and their nascent push into AR/VR, it appears to me at least that promoting gaming is one worthwhile prong in the campaign.
To keep investment in the platform strong, they stand to benefit from stabilizing and recovering from some of their NIH brain damage.
Will the fixation on collecting their cut come to an end? Time will tell.
> Is this the same Apple whose new iPhone SOC has hardware ray tracing?
it's the same apple who said "please bring games to our system" followed immediately by "opengl is going away. also, fuck you."
It has ray tracing with touch screen controls for the masses to play a reskinned bejeweled with banner ads. It's not a real gaming platform. No keyboard and mouse support. No first party controller. They even took away 3d touch that would have helped a lot with the haptics of touch screen controls.
> a reskinned bejeweled with banner ads
I'm not sure this is a fair portrayal of gaming on iOS.
Now, a reskinned Bejeweled with in-game currency IAPs – that's more like it!
I mean, IOS supports K&M and oodles of Bluetooth controllers, including console ones. Dunno why you want Apple to sell you $150 iController anyway that locks you into their walled garden3.
I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
I don't believe you can make money on F-droid, and Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
Well yea, F Droid is made for mostly open source games and apps. Huge deal breaker for games using proprietary engines (since the lions share is on Unity) and doesn't want to make it's assets open source.
This theoretical "steam of Android" would work similarly to how desktop steam works. Allows sale of proprietary premium games, Bans f2p games in the beginning (inevitably opening up once it's culture is established), does some QA to ensure certain features (e.g. Input, compatibility, no viruses, etc.), has discovery algorithms for consumers, user reviews, forums, etc. It could even allow adult games like Steam, but it may also ban those for a while to establish culture (the porn black hole is a real, scary phenomenon).
>Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
I think it'd be fine in the beginning if you banned f2p apps (which most of google's revenue comes from), but yes. I'd wonder how big it'd get before we get the next Apple v. Epic debacle over such matters.