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OS coverage vs pure numbers is something for the game developer to be worried about, and by extension the game engine devs. You want to get into the iOS gaming

OS coverage vs pure numbers is something for the game developer to be worried about, and by extension the game engine devs. You want to get into the iOS gaming market, go Metal. By definition you've expressed you don't care about the other OS's. You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs - though I will be delighted to be proven wrong when a AAA iPhone game comes. If Apple want to change their "AAA game" attractiveness they need to address this. It's not that hard - the article took a month but even a year is fine. Apple just needs to get it done, but it doesn't seem like they care to make User<->GameDev relationship easy. Either the gamedev needs a whole other version of their game on Metal. Or the users have to do a lot of homework and fiddling to get a modern AAA game to run. I wonder if they have Vulkan internally and simply know their GPU won't look good in direct comparisons - which is fair; beating or even leveling with nVidia is hard. But if anyone can show AMD and Intel how to do it....

pjmlp 2y ago
AAA don't care about Vulkan, they care about Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft proprietary APIs.
- SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
  minor nitpick: did care when Google Stadia was in the list. But it did not worked out and everyone took a big L on that and now Vulkan support has been mostly purged already.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    The reason why Stadia is no more, is exactly because they don't care. Google was starting to offer a DirectX porting kit on the same year they decided to ramp down Stadia, there is even a GDC talk on it.
    - SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
      My opinion on the facts I saw don't agree with your interpretation. No one here on HN cares about it =) so I just drop it. My hot take is that when AAA games will be shipped on mac os they will not use porting kit in runtime and just call Metal. Imho API court battles are fun to watch from afar.
troupo 2y ago
> You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs Likewise you don't care about Vulkan. You care about DirectX and whatever Playstation has
- talldayo 2y ago
  > You care about DirectX ...exactly. Which is why, unless you're given a license to re-impliment DirectX, it makes so much more sense to use Vulkan and it's DX9 through DX12 translation layer. What am I missing here?
  - troupo 2y ago
    You're missing that people don't care about Vulkan at all: https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ And the translation layer exists largely due to Valve business decisions, not because "community came together or something". This glorious amazing support didn't even really exist until 2018 (when it was launched with official support of 27 games) 1. Apple has never truly cared about gaming on the Mac 2. iOS only supports Metal, and Metal serves Apple extremely well 3. Apple's dropping of 32-bit apps and switching to M* chips has hurt gaming on Macs much more than any perceived harm from not supporting Vulkan.

pjmlp 2y ago

AAA don't care about Vulkan, they care about Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft proprietary APIs.

SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
minor nitpick: did care when Google Stadia was in the list. But it did not worked out and everyone took a big L on that and now Vulkan support has been mostly purged already.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  The reason why Stadia is no more, is exactly because they don't care. Google was starting to offer a DirectX porting kit on the same year they decided to ramp down Stadia, there is even a GDC talk on it.
  - SleepyMyroslav 2y ago
    My opinion on the facts I saw don't agree with your interpretation. No one here on HN cares about it =) so I just drop it. My hot take is that when AAA games will be shipped on mac os they will not use porting kit in runtime and just call Metal. Imho API court battles are fun to watch from afar.

troupo 2y ago

> You want to make a AAA game, you probably don't go Metal if you want enough market coverage to recoup your costs Likewise you don't care about Vulkan. You care about DirectX and whatever Playstation has

talldayo 2y ago
> You care about DirectX ...exactly. Which is why, unless you're given a license to re-impliment DirectX, it makes so much more sense to use Vulkan and it's DX9 through DX12 translation layer. What am I missing here?
- troupo 2y ago
  You're missing that people don't care about Vulkan at all: https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ https://carette.xyz/posts/state_of_vulkan_2024/ And the translation layer exists largely due to Valve business decisions, not because "community came together or something". This glorious amazing support didn't even really exist until 2018 (when it was launched with official support of 27 games) 1. Apple has never truly cared about gaming on the Mac 2. iOS only supports Metal, and Metal serves Apple extremely well 3. Apple's dropping of 32-bit apps and switching to M* chips has hurt gaming on Macs much more than any perceived harm from not supporting Vulkan.