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> would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon Apple's dream is not to have AAA games land on Apple Silicon - they can do this with Proton-

> would impact Apple's dream of landing AAA games on Apple Silicon Apple's dream is not to have AAA games land on Apple Silicon - they can do this with Proton-like layer, like they did with GPTK. Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store. That is why the GPTK effort is only have assed (and the license prevents Valve integrating it into steam directly).

babypuncher 2y ago
> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store This is why their efforts are largely doomed. I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version. If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on my gaming desktop, I will choose the desktop every single time. It would be nice to take more of those games with me when I travel, but it's not a frequent enough use-case for me to give up all the benefits of real PC gaming.
- littlecranky67 2y ago
  > This is why their efforts are largely doomed I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon being "enough" gaming machines for 1080p@60) and wants to bring gaming over - that is probably the stream that made GPTK happen and give a licensing exception to crossover to be able to integrate it in their department. I'm in the later department, hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    > hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library. I would absolutely LOVE this! I also know a lot of people who would be a lot more interested in buying a Macbook if this were a thing.
    - littlecranky67 2y ago
      Well regarding the Macbook/Laptop case vs. Desktop: With me typing this on the MacMini M2 base model (8GB/256GB) retailed at 650€ I can assure you, it is a nice gaming machine hardware-wise. Not for latest and greatest AAA games of course, but I played through all the Tomb Raider reboot games on this machine (using Rosetta2 as they are non-native on Steam) on High details with 1080p. Now the major issue is software, there is just not enough games available. I do use Heroic+Crossover Wine to run some other games, but it is just finnicky and only for the pro user - not average casual gamers. Saying this, Apple could launch a 999€ Mac Mini with focus on gamers with a custom M4 design soon, if they had a proper Proton-like layer. Heck, size & noise wise, the Mac Mini beats the current PS5 and Xboxes. But they only treat GPTK as a solution for developers, not gamers. And I highly suspect, this is only due to the fact that they won't get any percentage from games sales, as Steam is the dominant player here.
- behnamoh 2y ago
  What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? I hate Windows with all my gut but at least I had a sense of freedom about the software I wanted to install on Windows, including games. On Mac, I'm constantly reminded that beyond this facade of user-friendly UI and nice visuals, there's a greedy company whose market cap is $3T but doesn't give a flying f* about the end-user because it wants to make even more money.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? Leave ... the ... ecosystem. This is the whole point of things like Asahi Linux. Take advantage of the hardware and escape from the software. If all the developers who slave over Apple devices spent 10% of their time improving the experience on something else, 24 months later Apple wouldn't have a market. I left. I got tired of fighting bugs in macOS given that Apple clearly no longer gives a damn about macOS. I just bought my second Lenovo Carbon X1 after leaving Land-Of-The-Fruit. This one is about $1700 + a Saumsung 4TB SSD. Note: I can actually upgrade the SSD. It has 32GB of RAM for half the price of anything equivalent in macOS. The OLED display is right about the equivalent macOS resolution, and it's a matte display. It has a useful set of ports--a goddamn HDMI port as well as 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A ports. And Lenovo's external dock actually freakin' works. Yeah, it probably doesn't get the performance or battery life as an M3. Given that I didn't notice on my previous Lenovo vs an M1/M2, I'm not likely to notice this time either. And, as a "bonus", I can run an actual Windows install if I absolutely must.
Almondsetat 2y ago
What has proton got to do with x86 -> ARM ?
- littlecranky67 2y ago
  x86 -> ARM is already done by apple (rosetta2). What they need is a wine layer to mimmick the Windows API to allow a large amount of existing games to run on macOS without the devs porting. Which DOES exist, it is called crossover (and uses wine and GPTK). But it is a 3rd party company.
snarfy 2y ago
Your comment puts it very succinctly. They don't care about your gaming experience on Mac. They care about money. I wish they weren't so short sighted here. They can't see through the trees that maybe they won't make money selling games through the app store, but they would make money selling more Macs.
- rched 2y ago
  Seems like the opposite is true. If their primary motivation was more App Store sales why not allow GPTK games only through the App Store?
- MBCook 2y ago
  They didn’t really care about it before the Mac App Store either. The OS and its libraries just aren’t designed for high performance gaming the way MS has put time into that on Windows. They have Metal, which is supposed to be nice. But that’s their Direct3D. Where is all the other DirectX equivalent? From what I’ve heard anecdotally that seems to be a big part of the problem. It’s not just that they don’t have Vulcan (which I think is a red herring). Or the GPUs were abysmal (they were on most models before Apple Silicon). There’s no whole-picture. Just pieces.
skrrtww 2y ago
This is a bit of a tangential rant, so I apologize. But I recently tried to update Death Stranding, the flagship AAA game that Apple landed on macOS and in the App Store. The game itself is 77.5 GB; it had required a little over 150 GB to install. I shrugged that off at the time; they haven't figured out how to decompress on the fly, whatever. I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes. (I would "just blame the developer" here, but Apple clearly invested a lot into having this game available on macOS, in the App Store, and got Hideo Kojima to show up at WWDC (a full year ago, remember) and brag about how nice the entire experience is. Some of Apple's engineers probably worked directly on this port.) It then sunk in that I didn't just need 75 GB of free space. I needed 150 GB. The App Store will completely download and completely decompress the entire game before replacing it. That is the patching process for the game. You need 231 GB free at all times on your machine to have and update a 77GB game. This is completely insulting given Apple's storage prices, and the fact that the App Store does not let you install apps on an external drive. Apple clearly doesn't get it. They act like they're nominally putting in the effort, but then it's still just completely half-assed even when things are played exactly like they want.
- coldpie 2y ago
  There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.
  - astrange 2y ago
    You don't need indoor hobbies when the weather is this nice.
    - talldayo 2y ago
rched 2y ago
This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.
- jandrese 2y ago
  For whatever reason Steam just doesn't seem very popular with Mac users. In the latest Hardware survey Mac users were outnumbered by Linux users by 50%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
  - jorvi 2y ago
    Apple killed support for legacy 32-bit applications a good while back, which killed support for virtually every Mac game port.
    - vanchor3 2y ago
      The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...
  - coldpie 2y ago
    It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.
    - robertoandred 2y ago
      32-bit is the only change that actually broke anything, and it had been deprecated for a decade. 64-bit OpenGL/x86 games work fine on ARM.
AltruisticGapHN 2y ago
I don't get it. They already make a ton of money on mobile games - why not embrace Steam and Proton on their platform? What's the money in AAA games on their platform? edit: this is to say if they had "wet dreams" about selling AAA games on Mac, we'd have seen the tides moving a long time ago.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Buying from Steam doesn't give them the appstore cut. And nobody buys Macs for gaming, so it doesn't drive hardware sales either.
- _carbyau_ 2y ago
  What I don't get is that games compete in the attention market and are a big money industry next to movies and TV. Apple is happy to produce its own movies and tv shows but not AAA games? Or maybe they have and I simply didn't see that blip, I am honestly not in sync with Apple gaming world.
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Apple wants to own the entire computing stack for the average Joe, for legitimate integration reasons and illegitimate monopolistic market capture reasons.
aurareturn 2y ago
Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store. This is implied already when I said Apple wants the AAA game to be on iPhone and iPad. By definition, the game has to be on the App Store.
jppittma 2y ago
The only way I can see that happening is with an EEE model. You'd go grab all of the non-steam publishers and come up with a standard format that'd mean that studios can push to every platform in a standardized way, then bank on nobody bothering to install steam because the app store already has all of the games you want, and it's installed by default.

babypuncher 2y ago

> Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store This is why their efforts are largely doomed. I'd love to play more AAA games on my Macbook, but too many of them require a separate purchase from the App Store to make that happen, rather than just putting the Mac versions on Steam alongside the Windows version. If you're going to make me choose between playing a game on my laptop and playing it on my gaming desktop, I will choose the desktop every single time. It would be nice to take more of those games with me when I travel, but it's not a frequent enough use-case for me to give up all the benefits of real PC gaming.

littlecranky67 2y ago
> This is why their efforts are largely doomed I'm not as certain about that as you are. I think there are - as always - different streams withing that mega corporation. It is probably sales-oriented people wanting nothing but AAA games on the App Store and be okay with the Mac not being a major choice for games if that doesn't happen. The other stream is probably more enthusiastic (especially with the Apple Silicon being "enough" gaming machines for 1080p@60) and wants to bring gaming over - that is probably the stream that made GPTK happen and give a licensing exception to crossover to be able to integrate it in their department. I'm in the later department, hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  > hoping we will see a proton-like GPTK that can run my steam library. I would absolutely LOVE this! I also know a lot of people who would be a lot more interested in buying a Macbook if this were a thing.
  - littlecranky67 2y ago
    Well regarding the Macbook/Laptop case vs. Desktop: With me typing this on the MacMini M2 base model (8GB/256GB) retailed at 650€ I can assure you, it is a nice gaming machine hardware-wise. Not for latest and greatest AAA games of course, but I played through all the Tomb Raider reboot games on this machine (using Rosetta2 as they are non-native on Steam) on High details with 1080p. Now the major issue is software, there is just not enough games available. I do use Heroic+Crossover Wine to run some other games, but it is just finnicky and only for the pro user - not average casual gamers. Saying this, Apple could launch a 999€ Mac Mini with focus on gamers with a custom M4 design soon, if they had a proper Proton-like layer. Heck, size & noise wise, the Mac Mini beats the current PS5 and Xboxes. But they only treat GPTK as a solution for developers, not gamers. And I highly suspect, this is only due to the fact that they won't get any percentage from games sales, as Steam is the dominant player here.
behnamoh 2y ago
What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? I hate Windows with all my gut but at least I had a sense of freedom about the software I wanted to install on Windows, including games. On Mac, I'm constantly reminded that beyond this facade of user-friendly UI and nice visuals, there's a greedy company whose market cap is $3T but doesn't give a flying f* about the end-user because it wants to make even more money.
- bsder 2y ago
  > What do we do as Apple users stuck in this ecosystem whose main goal is to extract more money from our pockets? Leave ... the ... ecosystem. This is the whole point of things like Asahi Linux. Take advantage of the hardware and escape from the software. If all the developers who slave over Apple devices spent 10% of their time improving the experience on something else, 24 months later Apple wouldn't have a market. I left. I got tired of fighting bugs in macOS given that Apple clearly no longer gives a damn about macOS. I just bought my second Lenovo Carbon X1 after leaving Land-Of-The-Fruit. This one is about $1700 + a Saumsung 4TB SSD. Note: I can actually upgrade the SSD. It has 32GB of RAM for half the price of anything equivalent in macOS. The OLED display is right about the equivalent macOS resolution, and it's a matte display. It has a useful set of ports--a goddamn HDMI port as well as 2 USB-C and 2 USB-A ports. And Lenovo's external dock actually freakin' works. Yeah, it probably doesn't get the performance or battery life as an M3. Given that I didn't notice on my previous Lenovo vs an M1/M2, I'm not likely to notice this time either. And, as a "bonus", I can run an actual Windows install if I absolutely must.

Almondsetat 2y ago

What has proton got to do with x86 -> ARM ?

littlecranky67 2y ago
x86 -> ARM is already done by apple (rosetta2). What they need is a wine layer to mimmick the Windows API to allow a large amount of existing games to run on macOS without the devs porting. Which DOES exist, it is called crossover (and uses wine and GPTK). But it is a 3rd party company.

snarfy 2y ago

Your comment puts it very succinctly. They don't care about your gaming experience on Mac. They care about money. I wish they weren't so short sighted here. They can't see through the trees that maybe they won't make money selling games through the app store, but they would make money selling more Macs.

rched 2y ago
Seems like the opposite is true. If their primary motivation was more App Store sales why not allow GPTK games only through the App Store?
MBCook 2y ago
They didn’t really care about it before the Mac App Store either. The OS and its libraries just aren’t designed for high performance gaming the way MS has put time into that on Windows. They have Metal, which is supposed to be nice. But that’s their Direct3D. Where is all the other DirectX equivalent? From what I’ve heard anecdotally that seems to be a big part of the problem. It’s not just that they don’t have Vulcan (which I think is a red herring). Or the GPUs were abysmal (they were on most models before Apple Silicon). There’s no whole-picture. Just pieces.

skrrtww 2y ago

This is a bit of a tangential rant, so I apologize. But I recently tried to update Death Stranding, the flagship AAA game that Apple landed on macOS and in the App Store. The game itself is 77.5 GB; it had required a little over 150 GB to install. I shrugged that off at the time; they haven't figured out how to decompress on the fly, whatever. I had about 50GB free on my (1 TB M1 Max) machine at the time of the update, and the App Store told me I didn't have enough free space to update. I balked and looked at the update description, which was just "Various minor bug fixes." The update size was...75 GB. They expect me to re-download the entire game for various minor bug fixes. (I would "just blame the developer" here, but Apple clearly invested a lot into having this game available on macOS, in the App Store, and got Hideo Kojima to show up at WWDC (a full year ago, remember) and brag about how nice the entire experience is. Some of Apple's engineers probably worked directly on this port.) It then sunk in that I didn't just need 75 GB of free space. I needed 150 GB. The App Store will completely download and completely decompress the entire game before replacing it. That is the patching process for the game. You need 231 GB free at all times on your machine to have and update a 77GB game. This is completely insulting given Apple's storage prices, and the fact that the App Store does not let you install apps on an external drive. Apple clearly doesn't get it. They act like they're nominally putting in the effort, but then it's still just completely half-assed even when things are played exactly like they want.

coldpie 2y ago
There's like, two guys at Apple who care about gaming. Everyone once in a while they manage to convince marketing to say something about it and rope in a couple more devs to half-assedly hammer out some tickets before they can go back to their normal tasking. There's no traction internally to taking PC gaming seriously at Apple.
- astrange 2y ago
  You don't need indoor hobbies when the weather is this nice.
  - talldayo 2y ago

rched 2y ago

This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.

jandrese 2y ago
For whatever reason Steam just doesn't seem very popular with Mac users. In the latest Hardware survey Mac users were outnumbered by Linux users by 50%. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- jorvi 2y ago
  Apple killed support for legacy 32-bit applications a good while back, which killed support for virtually every Mac game port.
  - vanchor3 2y ago
    The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...
- coldpie 2y ago
  It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.
  - robertoandred 2y ago
    32-bit is the only change that actually broke anything, and it had been deprecated for a decade. 64-bit OpenGL/x86 games work fine on ARM.

AltruisticGapHN 2y ago

I don't get it. They already make a ton of money on mobile games - why not embrace Steam and Proton on their platform? What's the money in AAA games on their platform? edit: this is to say if they had "wet dreams" about selling AAA games on Mac, we'd have seen the tides moving a long time ago.

viraptor 2y ago
Buying from Steam doesn't give them the appstore cut. And nobody buys Macs for gaming, so it doesn't drive hardware sales either.
_carbyau_ 2y ago
What I don't get is that games compete in the attention market and are a big money industry next to movies and TV. Apple is happy to produce its own movies and tv shows but not AAA games? Or maybe they have and I simply didn't see that blip, I am honestly not in sync with Apple gaming world.
Aerbil313 2y ago
Apple wants to own the entire computing stack for the average Joe, for legitimate integration reasons and illegitimate monopolistic market capture reasons.

aurareturn 2y ago

Apple's wet dream is to have AAA games land in the Apple App Store - not on Steam or Epic Game store. This is implied already when I said Apple wants the AAA game to be on iPhone and iPad. By definition, the game has to be on the App Store.

jppittma 2y ago

The only way I can see that happening is with an EEE model. You'd go grab all of the non-steam publishers and come up with a standard format that'd mean that studios can push to every platform in a standardized way, then bank on nobody bothering to install steam because the app store already has all of the games you want, and it's installed by default.