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Developers are already dropping support for macos, at least game devs are after making a big deal of starting to support macs 15 years ago. Too bad considering

Developers are already dropping support for macos, at least game devs are after making a big deal of starting to support macs 15 years ago. Too bad considering how powerful the hardware is finally on these macs.

vaylian 3y ago
I'm out of the loop. What happened?
- drooopy 3y ago
  Blizzard hasn't released a new game for macOS since Heroes of the storm back in 2015 and valve has pulled support for Steam VR on mac and won't even bother updating most of their games to intel 64 bit binaries in order to get them working even under rosetta. Also, they won't release CSGO2 for macOS, proton is not supported on macos nor do they have any immediate plans to update steam to a universal binary for AS macs.
- incangold 3y ago
  This is a fairly typical example from 2 years ago: https://www.vintagestory.at/blog.html/news/dropping-official https://www.vintagestory.at/blog.html/news/dropping-official... [edit] although for context this team rolls their own engine. If you’re using Unity or Unreal > 5.2 (May 2023) things are slowly improving.
- shantara 3y ago
  Apple dropped support for 32 bit binaries, then migrated from Intel to ARM architecture, breaking backwards compatibility in major way. This led to the inability to run the absolute majority of the existing library of games on the recent Apple hardware and OS. Unlike the devs in the Apple ecosystem who are used to be on the constant treadmill of app updates to accommodate Apple constantly breaking and changing things with every release, this is incompatible with the gaming industry release model, where after the patch cycle the devs can move onto the next project and rely on the backwards compatibility to trust that their released games will keep running for years and decades into the future. So when Apple broke this unspoken agreement, the game devs have simply left their existing games in whatever broken state they were, and decided against releasing their future projects on macOS, supporting which wasn't financially viable in the long term, given the time needed and the relatively small percentage of playerbase which uses it.
  - robertoandred 3y ago
    Apple dropped 32-bit after a decade of warning. Game devs bitten by this have only themselves and their incompetence to blame. And Intel apps work fine on ARM.
    - nonsensikal 3y ago
      airtight logic "they are dumb and slow"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seec 3y ago
The powerful view of the hardware is a lot of hype and can only be applied to Macs costing largely over 2k which puts them in a category where they are in fact pretty weak hardware. And that's if we consider the benchmarks and take all the numbers as truth because in practice real world performance is really not great, even at a very high price. For example, a 24GB M2 MacBook Pro plays Dota 2 worse than a barely mid-tier AMD APU. Once you realize that, you understand that not only porting will be a lot of work, but porting to the majority of the userbase that is using bottom of the barrel Apple hardware, would be an optimisation nightmare for still a pretty low number of users all things considered. There is the Apple Silicon hyper and then there is the reality: outside of power consumption optimisation, not really interesting in itself.

vaylian 3y ago

I'm out of the loop. What happened?

drooopy 3y ago
Blizzard hasn't released a new game for macOS since Heroes of the storm back in 2015 and valve has pulled support for Steam VR on mac and won't even bother updating most of their games to intel 64 bit binaries in order to get them working even under rosetta. Also, they won't release CSGO2 for macOS, proton is not supported on macos nor do they have any immediate plans to update steam to a universal binary for AS macs.
incangold 3y ago
This is a fairly typical example from 2 years ago: https://www.vintagestory.at/blog.html/news/dropping-official https://www.vintagestory.at/blog.html/news/dropping-official... [edit] although for context this team rolls their own engine. If you’re using Unity or Unreal > 5.2 (May 2023) things are slowly improving.
shantara 3y ago
Apple dropped support for 32 bit binaries, then migrated from Intel to ARM architecture, breaking backwards compatibility in major way. This led to the inability to run the absolute majority of the existing library of games on the recent Apple hardware and OS. Unlike the devs in the Apple ecosystem who are used to be on the constant treadmill of app updates to accommodate Apple constantly breaking and changing things with every release, this is incompatible with the gaming industry release model, where after the patch cycle the devs can move onto the next project and rely on the backwards compatibility to trust that their released games will keep running for years and decades into the future. So when Apple broke this unspoken agreement, the game devs have simply left their existing games in whatever broken state they were, and decided against releasing their future projects on macOS, supporting which wasn't financially viable in the long term, given the time needed and the relatively small percentage of playerbase which uses it.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  Apple dropped 32-bit after a decade of warning. Game devs bitten by this have only themselves and their incompetence to blame. And Intel apps work fine on ARM.
  - nonsensikal 3y ago
    airtight logic "they are dumb and slow"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

seec 3y ago

The powerful view of the hardware is a lot of hype and can only be applied to Macs costing largely over 2k which puts them in a category where they are in fact pretty weak hardware. And that's if we consider the benchmarks and take all the numbers as truth because in practice real world performance is really not great, even at a very high price. For example, a 24GB M2 MacBook Pro plays Dota 2 worse than a barely mid-tier AMD APU. Once you realize that, you understand that not only porting will be a lot of work, but porting to the majority of the userbase that is using bottom of the barrel Apple hardware, would be an optimisation nightmare for still a pretty low number of users all things considered. There is the Apple Silicon hyper and then there is the reality: outside of power consumption optimisation, not really interesting in itself.