11 ms·

Don't blame developers Apple clearly never gave a shit about supporting a gaming friendly ecosystem. It's their way or the highway.

by Yeul 3y ago

Alupis 3y ago
People severely underestimate how powerful the gaming economy is. Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Gaming is what drives new hardware development, is what drives new personal computer ownership, and is what drives operating system preference. For everyone else - a 10 year old computer does the job just fine... and it doesn't really matter what OS it happens to run. Imagine if Apple had made it a point to dominate gaming too. Suddenly the folks spending $2-5K on a top of the line gaming machine would be forking it over for the latest generation of $5k Apple Desktops.
- enlyth 3y ago
  Agreed, I'm no stranger to Linux, and also use a MacBook for work, but when I come home I just want to play a bit of Diablo 4 or whatever and chill. I would have switched years and years ago. Got hooked on Microsoft as early as the DOS days by playing games as a kid. They earned a customer for life indirectly there. Maybe Adobe helped a bit too.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    I gave up windows the day i learned that minecraft ran perfectly well on linux. More than a decade later, i have never felt the need to go back, but it all depends on the types of games you play.
- Mengkudulangsat 3y ago
  If it were not for clunky game support, the day of the Linux desktop would have arrived decades ago.
  - phone8675309 3y ago
    It is a TON better than it was twenty years ago when I first played with no longer dual booting and running only Linux. Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough. So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.
- matteoraso 3y ago
  >Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Being the default OS is what made Windows dominate personal computing. The average person doesn't think about what OS they use at all, even when they're thinking about getting a Macbook.
  - fransje26 3y ago
    I suggest you go an read some of the blog post by Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, explaining why they were task with creating DirectX in the first place.. And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..
mr_toad 3y ago
IBM didn’t care about gaming, and neither did the early PC clone manufacturers. And early IBM compatible PCs were pretty shitty gaming machines compared to other PCs. And game companies used eye watering hacks to make their games work within the limits of the platform. PC dominance in gaming came after PCs became popular.
- NERD_ALERT 3y ago
  I don’t see how this is relevant. The PC gaming market was niche and immature at this point in time and developers were trying to gain traction. Today the market is massive and virtually all of the users and money is in the PC platform. There is no reason at all that Valve would waste money and developer time on supporting a platform that virtually nobody is going to use now or at any point in the near future. Valve is already doing great work with Proton and Steam Deck to get Linux gaming on par with Windows.
olliej 3y ago
You mean apple should only use x86 cpus still? or it should only use Nvidia or AMD gpus? Or maybe it should implement Direct3D? (oh wait, they've done that)
nickzelei 3y ago
Sure, it might be Apple - and maybe reading between the lines that is why Valve dropped the support. However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac. If it was easier, maybe it wouldn't be a huge deal for Valve to continue supporting it, but that isn't clear to me. I'm not a game developer though and don't closely follow this stuff, I'm just a person who occasionally likes to play CS on my macbook and can no longer do so. Note: I am aware of Apple not generally being very supportive of games on their platform. It's always been that way.
- kllrnohj 3y ago
  > However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac. I think you're missing the context here that CSGO was just replaced with CS2, and CS2 is an entirely new engine (it's Source 2 based whereas CSGO was still Source 1) So this is a switch from a DX9 engine from ~15 years ago to a modern, Vulkan-focused actively developed engine.
- ynx 3y ago
  Apple doesn't support Vulkan, obviously doesn't support DirectX, and barely supports OpenGL. Metal is a different beast, and the adapter layers are not adequate. It takes extra effort, and fairly deep and unique knowledge of rendering, shaders, and compilation to support Metal, and even engines which do (Unity, Unreal) face some amount of difficulty in doing so well. Apple's strategy of giving the middle finger to graphics APIs is patched over poorly by their partnership with Unity, and the fact that lower-end games can get away not needing a crazy amount of compatibility...but it's still on Apple to do better.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    There is a robust and widely-used Vulcan → Metal compatibility layer. It hurts performance, and that sucks and is absolutely Apple's fault, but it does mean developers can port games to Mac without worrying about Metal.
shpx 3y ago
Is it also Apple's fault that Steam takes 34 seconds to start up on my Mac with four 3.2 GHz cores?
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Does that run on ARM instruction directly or through the x86 emulation layer?
  - shpx 3y ago
    The latter
- jshier 3y ago
  Steam and Battle.net are so annoying here. Three years on and what are essentially web browsers still haven't be compiled for Apple Silicon. Bnet keeps getting worse and I don't even run Steam anymore, there's no point.
- superhuzza 3y ago
  Just tried this, 8 seconds with my 2020 MBP (2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, 16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hexo 3y ago
  yes
- kevingadd 3y ago
  It boots fast on Windows and Linux so probably?
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    Or Valve cares about it as much as about Counter-Strike on Mac? There is no technical reason for it to be that slow.
GeekyBear 3y ago
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...
- EatFlamingDeath 3y ago
  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.
- snickerbockers 3y ago
  >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.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > 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...

Don't blame developers Apple clearly never gave a shit about supporting a gaming friendly ecosystem. It's their way or the highway.

by Yeul 3y ago

Don't blame developers Apple clearly never gave a shit about supporting a gaming friendly ecosystem. It's their way or the highway.

Alupis 3y ago

People severely underestimate how powerful the gaming economy is. Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Gaming is what drives new hardware development, is what drives new personal computer ownership, and is what drives operating system preference. For everyone else - a 10 year old computer does the job just fine... and it doesn't really matter what OS it happens to run. Imagine if Apple had made it a point to dominate gaming too. Suddenly the folks spending $2-5K on a top of the line gaming machine would be forking it over for the latest generation of $5k Apple Desktops.

enlyth 3y ago
Agreed, I'm no stranger to Linux, and also use a MacBook for work, but when I come home I just want to play a bit of Diablo 4 or whatever and chill. I would have switched years and years ago. Got hooked on Microsoft as early as the DOS days by playing games as a kid. They earned a customer for life indirectly there. Maybe Adobe helped a bit too.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  I gave up windows the day i learned that minecraft ran perfectly well on linux. More than a decade later, i have never felt the need to go back, but it all depends on the types of games you play.
Mengkudulangsat 3y ago
If it were not for clunky game support, the day of the Linux desktop would have arrived decades ago.
- phone8675309 3y ago
  It is a TON better than it was twenty years ago when I first played with no longer dual booting and running only Linux. Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough. So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.
matteoraso 3y ago
>Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint. Being the default OS is what made Windows dominate personal computing. The average person doesn't think about what OS they use at all, even when they're thinking about getting a Macbook.
- fransje26 3y ago
  I suggest you go an read some of the blog post by Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, explaining why they were task with creating DirectX in the first place.. And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..

mr_toad 3y ago

IBM didn’t care about gaming, and neither did the early PC clone manufacturers. And early IBM compatible PCs were pretty shitty gaming machines compared to other PCs. And game companies used eye watering hacks to make their games work within the limits of the platform. PC dominance in gaming came after PCs became popular.

NERD_ALERT 3y ago
I don’t see how this is relevant. The PC gaming market was niche and immature at this point in time and developers were trying to gain traction. Today the market is massive and virtually all of the users and money is in the PC platform. There is no reason at all that Valve would waste money and developer time on supporting a platform that virtually nobody is going to use now or at any point in the near future. Valve is already doing great work with Proton and Steam Deck to get Linux gaming on par with Windows.

olliej 3y ago

You mean apple should only use x86 cpus still? or it should only use Nvidia or AMD gpus? Or maybe it should implement Direct3D? (oh wait, they've done that)

nickzelei 3y ago

Sure, it might be Apple - and maybe reading between the lines that is why Valve dropped the support. However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac. If it was easier, maybe it wouldn't be a huge deal for Valve to continue supporting it, but that isn't clear to me. I'm not a game developer though and don't closely follow this stuff, I'm just a person who occasionally likes to play CS on my macbook and can no longer do so. Note: I am aware of Apple not generally being very supportive of games on their platform. It's always been that way.

kllrnohj 3y ago
> However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac. I think you're missing the context here that CSGO was just replaced with CS2, and CS2 is an entirely new engine (it's Source 2 based whereas CSGO was still Source 1) So this is a switch from a DX9 engine from ~15 years ago to a modern, Vulkan-focused actively developed engine.
ynx 3y ago
Apple doesn't support Vulkan, obviously doesn't support DirectX, and barely supports OpenGL. Metal is a different beast, and the adapter layers are not adequate. It takes extra effort, and fairly deep and unique knowledge of rendering, shaders, and compilation to support Metal, and even engines which do (Unity, Unreal) face some amount of difficulty in doing so well. Apple's strategy of giving the middle finger to graphics APIs is patched over poorly by their partnership with Unity, and the fact that lower-end games can get away not needing a crazy amount of compatibility...but it's still on Apple to do better.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  There is a robust and widely-used Vulcan → Metal compatibility layer. It hurts performance, and that sucks and is absolutely Apple's fault, but it does mean developers can port games to Mac without worrying about Metal.

shpx 3y ago

Is it also Apple's fault that Steam takes 34 seconds to start up on my Mac with four 3.2 GHz cores?

littlestymaar 3y ago
Does that run on ARM instruction directly or through the x86 emulation layer?
- shpx 3y ago
  The latter
jshier 3y ago
Steam and Battle.net are so annoying here. Three years on and what are essentially web browsers still haven't be compiled for Apple Silicon. Bnet keeps getting worse and I don't even run Steam anymore, there's no point.
superhuzza 3y ago
Just tried this, 8 seconds with my 2020 MBP (2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5, 16 GB 3733 MHz LPDDR4X)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hexo 3y ago
yes
kevingadd 3y ago
It boots fast on Windows and Linux so probably?
- alpaca128 3y ago
  Or Valve cares about it as much as about Counter-Strike on Mac? There is no technical reason for it to be that slow.

GeekyBear 3y ago

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...

EatFlamingDeath 3y ago
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.
snickerbockers 3y ago
>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.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > 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...