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It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much var

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

LtdJorge 1y ago
Metal is a very recent API compared to DirectX and OpenGL. Also, there’s very very little people on Mac, and even less that also play videogames. There are almost no libraries and tooling built around Metal and the Mac SDKs, and a very small audience, so it doesn’t make financial sense.
sosodev 1y ago
It's easier to develop a game for a mac in some ways but you reach a tiny fraction of gamers that way.
- hangonhn 1y ago
  I wonder how that might look once you factor in Apple TV devices. They're pretty weak devices now but future ones can come with M-class CPUs. That's a huge source of potential revenue for Apple.
  - amluto 1y ago
    The current Apple TV is, in many respects, unbelievably bad, and it has nothing to do with the CPU. Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It’s okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the middle of typing, the TV will decide you’re done typing and move focus to a search result, and the phone won’t notice, and it gets completely desynchronized.
    - ascagnel_ 1y ago
      The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech. More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and download them on-demand. It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes anything with significant storage requirements effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on tvOS as currently architected for that reason.
ProfessorZoom 1y ago
i think it depends on how easy it is for a dev to deploy to apple. M1 was great at running call of duty in a windows emulator. iPhone can run the newest resident evil. apple needs to do more to convince developers to deploy to mac
jayd16 1y ago
Mac dev sucks. You're forced to use macos and xcode (for the final build anyway). You're not able to virtualize the build machines. Apple is actively hostile to how you would build for Linux or PC or console.
- nasseri 1y ago
  This is simply not the case. Every major game framework/engine targets Mac natively. If you are building your engine/game from scratch, you absolutely do not need to use Xcode
  - jayd16 1y ago
    Why don't you look through the Unreal and Unity docs and see if you can make a build without a Mac and xcode.
    - nasseri 1y ago
      Yea you’re right I skipped over the part where you said the final build required it. Nonetheless that’s a small fraction of the time spent actually developing the game.
      - jayd16 1y ago
        Ideally, it's a continuous part of development because you're making daily (or more) builds and testing them. That makes it a continuous headache to keep your Mac builders up. It means you need to double dev hardware costs or more as you need a gaming PC to target your core audience and Macs handle the mac bugs. It means your mac build machines are special snowflakes because you can't just use VMs. The list goes on and on of Mac being actively hostile to the process. Just Rider running on a Mac is pleasant sure, but that's not the issue.
    - nasseri 1y ago
      I think I misunderstood your point as “developing a game on Mac sucks”, vs “developing for Mac without a Mac sucks” which I absolutely can’t disagree with
_vqpz 1y ago
- have to build using XCode on macOS - have to pay Apple to have your executable signed - poor Vulkan support The hardware has never been an issue, it's Apple's walled garden ecosystem.
- Klonoar 1y ago
  Apple is not the only platform where you effectively pay to have it signed. At some point people need to let this go and accept that the wider industry has started to go this way.
lazypenguin 1y ago
As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- neogodless 1y ago
  I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system? Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware. Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?
  - throwuxiytayq 1y ago
    > Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow. Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.
  - lazypenguin 1y ago
spogbiper 1y ago
you have to release major titles for windows and console, because there are tons of customers using them. so a mac port, even if simple, is additional cost. there you have the classic chicken and egg problem. the cost doesn't seem to be justified by the number of potential sales, so major studios ignore the platform. and as long as they do, gamers ignore the platform i've seen it suggested that Apple could solve this standoff by funding the ports, maybe they have done this a few times. but Apple doesn't seem to care much about it
leshenka 1y ago
I was very surprised, and pleasantly too, that Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain 60FPS (14", M4 Pro, 24gb RAM) with only occasional dips. Not with full resolution (actually around FullHD), but at least without "frame generation". Turning frame generation on, it now can output 90-100 FPS depending on environment, but VSync is disabled so dips become way more noticeable. It even has "for this mac" preset which is good enough that you don't need to tinker with settings to have decent experience. The game is paused, almost like becomes "frozen" if it's not visible on screen which helps with battery (it can be in the background without any noticeable impact on battery and temperature). Overall way better experience than I expected.
GTP 1y ago
Up to some years ago, it was common for gamers to assemble their own PC, something that you can't do with a Mac. Not sure if this is still common among gamers though.
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  The advent of silicon interposer technology has made modular memory and separate CPU/GPU soon to be obsolete IMO The communication bandwidth you can achieve by putting CPU, CPU, and memory together at the factory is much higher than having these components separate. Sad for enthusiasts, but practically inevitable
shantara 1y ago
The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. This works for apps, but it‘s completely antithetical to the way game development processes on any other platform are structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle, and move on. And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.
- astrange 1y ago
  > If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. IIRC developers literally got 15 years of warning about that one.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    IIRC that didn't convince many developers to revisit their software. I still have hard drives full of Pro Tools projects that open on Mojave but error on Catalina. Not to mention all the Steam games that launch fine on Windows/Linux but error on macOS...
    - astrange 1y ago
      Yes, game developers can't revisit old games because they throw out the dev environments when they're done, or their middleware can't get updated, etc. But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit forever. That's twice the code and it can't support a bunch of important security features, modern ABIs, etc. It would be better to run old programs in a VM of an old OS with no network access.
insraq 1y ago
I wrote a post (rant)[1] about my experience of releasing a game on macOS as an indie dev. tl;dr: Apples goes a long way to make the process as painful as possible with tons of paper cuts. [1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#macos-steam https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#...
Damogran6 1y ago
There's a cost/value calculation that just doesn't work well...I have a Ryzen9/rtx3070 PC ($2k over time) and my M4 Mini ($450) holds it's own for most all normal user stuff...sprinting ahead for specific tasks (Video CODEC)...but the 6 year old dedicated GPU on the PC annihilates the Mini in pushing pixels...You can spec an Apple that does better for gaming, but man, are you gonna pay for it, and still not keep up with current PC GPUS. Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine, especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz. Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.
yieldcrv 1y ago
It's kind of a myth though, Mac has many flagship games and everything in between If you identify as a "gamer" and are in those communities, then you'll see communities talking about things you can't natively play but if you leave niches you already have everything and with microtransactions, Apple ecosystem users are the whales. again, not something that people who identify as "gamers" wants to admit being actually okay with, but those people are not the revenue of game production. so I would say it is a missed opportunity for developers that are operating on antiquated calculations of MacOS deployment
- bigyabai 1y ago
  > It's kind of a myth though It's kinda not. Here's a rough list of the 10 most-played games currently on PC: https://steamdb.info/charts/ https://steamdb.info/charts/ macOS is supported by one title (DOTA 2). Windows supports all 10, Linux (the free OS, just so we're clear) runs 7 of the games and has native ports of 5 of them. If you want to go argue to them about missed revenue opportunities then be my guest, but something tells me that DOTA 2 isn't being bankrolled by Mac owners. If you have any hard figures that demonstrate "antiquated calculations" then now is the time to fetch them for us. I'm somewhat skeptical.
croes 1y ago
Doesn’t MacOS favor an 60Hz output? Gamers prefer much higher rates. And don’t forget they made an VR headset without controllers. Apple doesn’t care about games
- jsheard 1y ago
  > Doesn’t MacOS favor an 60Hz output? Kind of? It does support higher refresh rates, but their emphasis on "Retina" resolutions imposes a soft limit because monitors that dense rarely support much more than 60hz, due to the sheer bandwidth requirements.
  - 333c 1y ago
    The MacBook Pro has had a 120 Hz screen for nearly half a decade. And of course, external displays can support whatever resolution/refresh rate, regardless of the OS driving them.
mavbo 1y ago
I play a lot of World of Warcraft on my M3 MacBook Pro which has a native MacOS build. It's a CPU bottlenecked game with most users recommending the AMD X3D CPUs to achieve decent framerates in high end content. I'm able to run said content at high (7/10) graphics settings at 120fps with no audible fan noise for hours at a time on battery. It's been night and day compared to previous Windows machines.
viktorcode 1y ago
The porting is not straightforward; you must switch to Metal, you should adapt rendering pipeline to tiled deferred shading.
jajuuka 1y ago
Multiple solid reasons have been mentioned from ones created by Apple to ones enforced in software by Apple. One that hasn't been mentioned is the lack of marketshare. Macos market is just tiny and very limited. It's also not a growing market. PC gaming isn't blowing up either but the amount of players is just simply higher. Ports to macos have not done well from what I've heard. However you can see ports on PC do really well and have encouraged studios like Sony and SquareEnix to invest more in PC ports. Even much later after the console versions sell well. Just not a lot of reasons to add the tech debt and complexity of supporting mac as well. Even big publishers like Blizzard who have been mac devs for a long time axed the dedicate mac team and client and moved to a unified client. This has downfalls like mac specific issues. If those are not critical then they get put in the pile with the rest of the bugs.

LtdJorge 1y ago

Metal is a very recent API compared to DirectX and OpenGL. Also, there’s very very little people on Mac, and even less that also play videogames. There are almost no libraries and tooling built around Metal and the Mac SDKs, and a very small audience, so it doesn’t make financial sense.

sosodev 1y ago

It's easier to develop a game for a mac in some ways but you reach a tiny fraction of gamers that way.

hangonhn 1y ago
I wonder how that might look once you factor in Apple TV devices. They're pretty weak devices now but future ones can come with M-class CPUs. That's a huge source of potential revenue for Apple.
- amluto 1y ago
  The current Apple TV is, in many respects, unbelievably bad, and it has nothing to do with the CPU. Open up the YouTube app and try to navigate the UI. It’s okay but not really up to the Apple standard. Now try to enter text in the search bar. A nearby iPhone will helpfully offer to let you use it like a keyboard. You get a text field, and you can type, and keystrokes are slowly and not entirely reliably propagated to the TV, but text does not stay in sync. And after a few seconds, in the middle of typing, the TV will decide you’re done typing and move focus to a search result, and the phone won’t notice, and it gets completely desynchronized.
  - ascagnel_ 1y ago
    The YouTube app has never been good and never felt like a native app -- it's a wrapper around web tech. More importantly for games, though, is the awful storage architecture around the TV boxes. Games have to slice themselves up into 2GB storage chunks, which can be purged from the system whenever the game isn't actively running. The game has to be aware of missing chunks and download them on-demand. It makes open-world games nearly impossible, and it makes anything with significant storage requirements effectively impossible. As much as Apple likes to push the iOS port of Death Stranding, that game cannot run on tvOS as currently architected for that reason.

ProfessorZoom 1y ago

i think it depends on how easy it is for a dev to deploy to apple. M1 was great at running call of duty in a windows emulator. iPhone can run the newest resident evil. apple needs to do more to convince developers to deploy to mac

jayd16 1y ago

Mac dev sucks. You're forced to use macos and xcode (for the final build anyway). You're not able to virtualize the build machines. Apple is actively hostile to how you would build for Linux or PC or console.

nasseri 1y ago
This is simply not the case. Every major game framework/engine targets Mac natively. If you are building your engine/game from scratch, you absolutely do not need to use Xcode
- jayd16 1y ago
  Why don't you look through the Unreal and Unity docs and see if you can make a build without a Mac and xcode.
  - nasseri 1y ago
    Yea you’re right I skipped over the part where you said the final build required it. Nonetheless that’s a small fraction of the time spent actually developing the game.
    - jayd16 1y ago
      Ideally, it's a continuous part of development because you're making daily (or more) builds and testing them. That makes it a continuous headache to keep your Mac builders up. It means you need to double dev hardware costs or more as you need a gaming PC to target your core audience and Macs handle the mac bugs. It means your mac build machines are special snowflakes because you can't just use VMs. The list goes on and on of Mac being actively hostile to the process. Just Rider running on a Mac is pleasant sure, but that's not the issue.
  - nasseri 1y ago
    I think I misunderstood your point as “developing a game on Mac sucks”, vs “developing for Mac without a Mac sucks” which I absolutely can’t disagree with

_vqpz 1y ago

- have to build using XCode on macOS - have to pay Apple to have your executable signed - poor Vulkan support The hardware has never been an issue, it's Apple's walled garden ecosystem.

Klonoar 1y ago
Apple is not the only platform where you effectively pay to have it signed. At some point people need to let this go and accept that the wider industry has started to go this way.

lazypenguin 1y ago

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
neogodless 1y ago
I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system? Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or newer, and PS4 or newer, which are essentially PCs. And then builds get passed off to a team that has the hardware. Is anyone developing games for Windows on Apple hardware? Do they run Parallels and call it a day? How is the gaming performance? If the answers to those 3 questions are "yes, yes, great", then Apple supports PC game development better than they support Apple game development?
- throwuxiytayq 1y ago
  > Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation I don’t think anybody does this. I haven’t heard about official emulators for any of the mainstream consoles. Emulation would be prohibitively slow. Developers usually test on dedicated devkits which are a version of the target console (often with slightly better specs as dev builds need more memory and run more slowly). This is annoying, slow and difficult, but at least you can get these dev kits, usually for a decent price, and there’s a point to trying to ship on those platforms. Meanwhile, nobody plays games on macs, and Apple is making zero effort to bring in the developers or the gamers. It’s a no-chicken-and-no-egg situation, really.
- lazypenguin 1y ago

spogbiper 1y ago

you have to release major titles for windows and console, because there are tons of customers using them. so a mac port, even if simple, is additional cost. there you have the classic chicken and egg problem. the cost doesn't seem to be justified by the number of potential sales, so major studios ignore the platform. and as long as they do, gamers ignore the platform i've seen it suggested that Apple could solve this standoff by funding the ports, maybe they have done this a few times. but Apple doesn't seem to care much about it

leshenka 1y ago

I was very surprised, and pleasantly too, that Cyberpunk 2077 can maintain 60FPS (14", M4 Pro, 24gb RAM) with only occasional dips. Not with full resolution (actually around FullHD), but at least without "frame generation". Turning frame generation on, it now can output 90-100 FPS depending on environment, but VSync is disabled so dips become way more noticeable. It even has "for this mac" preset which is good enough that you don't need to tinker with settings to have decent experience. The game is paused, almost like becomes "frozen" if it's not visible on screen which helps with battery (it can be in the background without any noticeable impact on battery and temperature). Overall way better experience than I expected.

GTP 1y ago

Up to some years ago, it was common for gamers to assemble their own PC, something that you can't do with a Mac. Not sure if this is still common among gamers though.

LarsDu88 1y ago
The advent of silicon interposer technology has made modular memory and separate CPU/GPU soon to be obsolete IMO The communication bandwidth you can achieve by putting CPU, CPU, and memory together at the factory is much higher than having these components separate. Sad for enthusiasts, but practically inevitable

shantara 1y ago

The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. This works for apps, but it‘s completely antithetical to the way game development processes on any other platform are structured. You finish a project, release it, do a patch cycle, and move on. And that’s not even talking about porting the game to either Metal or an absolutely ancient OpenGL version that could be removed with any upcoming OS version. A significant effort just to address a tiny market.

astrange 1y ago
> If said fixing is even possible, like when Apple removed support for 32-bit binaries altogether, rendering 3/4 of macOS Steam libraries non-functional. IIRC developers literally got 15 years of warning about that one.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  IIRC that didn't convince many developers to revisit their software. I still have hard drives full of Pro Tools projects that open on Mojave but error on Catalina. Not to mention all the Steam games that launch fine on Windows/Linux but error on macOS...
  - astrange 1y ago
    Yes, game developers can't revisit old games because they throw out the dev environments when they're done, or their middleware can't get updated, etc. But it's not possible to keep maintaining 32-bit forever. That's twice the code and it can't support a bunch of important security features, modern ABIs, etc. It would be better to run old programs in a VM of an old OS with no network access.

insraq 1y ago

I wrote a post (rant)[1] about my experience of releasing a game on macOS as an indie dev. tl;dr: Apples goes a long way to make the process as painful as possible with tons of paper cuts. [1] https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#macos-steam https://ruoyusun.com/2023/10/12/one-game-six-platforms.html#...

Damogran6 1y ago

There's a cost/value calculation that just doesn't work well...I have a Ryzen9/rtx3070 PC ($2k over time) and my M4 Mini ($450) holds it's own for most all normal user stuff...sprinting ahead for specific tasks (Video CODEC)...but the 6 year old dedicated GPU on the PC annihilates the Mini in pushing pixels...You can spec an Apple that does better for gaming, but man, are you gonna pay for it, and still not keep up with current PC GPUS. Now...something like minecraft or SubNautica? The M4 is fine, especially if you're not pushing 4k 240hz. Apple has been pushing the gaming experience for years (iPhone 4s?) but it never REALLY seems to land, and when someone has a great gaming seperience in a modern AAA game, they always seem to be using a $4500 Studio or similar.

yieldcrv 1y ago

It's kind of a myth though, Mac has many flagship games and everything in between If you identify as a "gamer" and are in those communities, then you'll see communities talking about things you can't natively play but if you leave niches you already have everything and with microtransactions, Apple ecosystem users are the whales. again, not something that people who identify as "gamers" wants to admit being actually okay with, but those people are not the revenue of game production. so I would say it is a missed opportunity for developers that are operating on antiquated calculations of MacOS deployment

bigyabai 1y ago
> It's kind of a myth though It's kinda not. Here's a rough list of the 10 most-played games currently on PC: https://steamdb.info/charts/ https://steamdb.info/charts/ macOS is supported by one title (DOTA 2). Windows supports all 10, Linux (the free OS, just so we're clear) runs 7 of the games and has native ports of 5 of them. If you want to go argue to them about missed revenue opportunities then be my guest, but something tells me that DOTA 2 isn't being bankrolled by Mac owners. If you have any hard figures that demonstrate "antiquated calculations" then now is the time to fetch them for us. I'm somewhat skeptical.

croes 1y ago

Doesn’t MacOS favor an 60Hz output? Gamers prefer much higher rates. And don’t forget they made an VR headset without controllers. Apple doesn’t care about games

jsheard 1y ago
> Doesn’t MacOS favor an 60Hz output? Kind of? It does support higher refresh rates, but their emphasis on "Retina" resolutions imposes a soft limit because monitors that dense rarely support much more than 60hz, due to the sheer bandwidth requirements.
- 333c 1y ago
  The MacBook Pro has had a 120 Hz screen for nearly half a decade. And of course, external displays can support whatever resolution/refresh rate, regardless of the OS driving them.

mavbo 1y ago

I play a lot of World of Warcraft on my M3 MacBook Pro which has a native MacOS build. It's a CPU bottlenecked game with most users recommending the AMD X3D CPUs to achieve decent framerates in high end content. I'm able to run said content at high (7/10) graphics settings at 120fps with no audible fan noise for hours at a time on battery. It's been night and day compared to previous Windows machines.

viktorcode 1y ago

The porting is not straightforward; you must switch to Metal, you should adapt rendering pipeline to tiled deferred shading.

jajuuka 1y ago

Multiple solid reasons have been mentioned from ones created by Apple to ones enforced in software by Apple. One that hasn't been mentioned is the lack of marketshare. Macos market is just tiny and very limited. It's also not a growing market. PC gaming isn't blowing up either but the amount of players is just simply higher. Ports to macos have not done well from what I've heard. However you can see ports on PC do really well and have encouraged studios like Sony and SquareEnix to invest more in PC ports. Even much later after the console versions sell well. Just not a lot of reasons to add the tech debt and complexity of supporting mac as well. Even big publishers like Blizzard who have been mac devs for a long time axed the dedicate mac team and client and moved to a unified client. This has downfalls like mac specific issues. If those are not critical then they get put in the pile with the rest of the bugs.