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I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a

I’ve heard this kind of thing about Apple fairly regularly (the iTunes Remote app comes to mind). While there are issues to large teams, I feel like there is a middle ground that doesn’t result in a single point of failure. What happens when Jim wins the lottery? It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console, but not with only one person on it. I guess it’s still just a “hobby” for them.

bigyabai 11d ago
> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.
- serbuvlad 11d ago
  I think this is honestly correct strategy. Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game. Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store. Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well. However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused. Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
  - Foivos 11d ago
    They already have several such deals, such as Resident Evil.
  - eep_social 11d ago
    I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
    - serbuvlad 11d ago
      I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA. Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
      - bigyabai 11d ago
        I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed. Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
        serbuvlad 11d ago
        This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games. It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance. I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them. And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
        bigyabai 10d ago
        That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does). Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does. > why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code? Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks. Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
  - simondotau 11d ago
    For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
  - Kipters 11d ago
    > Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game. Gaming is also a software support game. Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
    - jamesgeck0 9d ago
      A lot of game industry operates on a "release and move on" model; nobody has time to keep updating an old game hardly anyone buys instead of working on a new thing. On PC and console this is fine because your games keep working more or less indefinitely. But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.
HSO 11d ago
> What happens when Jim wins the lottery? so much better framing than typical truck hit :)) love it

bigyabai 11d ago

> It seems like Apple could very easily turn the AppleTV into a proper game console Apple could turn the Mac, iPad or Vision Pro into a proper gaming console, too. It's just not something they are willing to do, no matter how well-positioned they are for it.

serbuvlad 11d ago
I think this is honestly correct strategy. Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game. Apple wants you to buy your games through the App Store, so they can take the 30%, which means competing with Steam. Which means getting licensed games on the App Store. Apple already fought one such license war over music and won. They're currently doing Apple TV as well. However, for the gaming industry they're complete strangers. Unlike music (which is mostly made on Mac) and TV/Movies (which are often made on Mac, at least partly), gamedev is very much Windows focused. Pushing for ports and licenses is an uphill battle, and probably not one Apple wants to take on. They have plenty of other profitable ventures.
- Foivos 11d ago
  They already have several such deals, such as Resident Evil.
- eep_social 11d ago
  I think you’re responding to “gaming” and thinking of AAA titles which are flashy and splashy but are a smaller market than mobile games. I guess gp might have been thinking of mobile or casual where Apple does have a significant stake and interest but no appreciable focus.
  - serbuvlad 11d ago
    I'm thinking of gaming as in Steam, including indies, AA and AAA. Of course Apple is doing perfectly fine for mobile gaming, and is giving more than enough tools to developers to implement mobile games perfectly well.
    - bigyabai 11d ago
      I am talking about PC gaming, and more specifically modern DXVK/Wine support. There's no need for ports, as the Steam Deck showed. Apple Silicon GPUs are all capable of supporting Vulkan 1.3 and translating DirectX code. Proton 11 supports ARM/FEX natively, which would make Apple Silicon a first-class citizen if you use Asahi drivers. macOS users will be stuck with Game Porting Toolkit and it's lackluster support; iPad/AppleTV/iPhone users have no options whatsoever, presumably to redirect their attention to the App Store that Apple profits from so handsomely.
      - serbuvlad 11d ago
        This is entirely a misleading point. DXVK, Wine and Proton are full of patches that exist to support individual games. It is not just a translation layer, as much as a great effort of the open source community to force-port every game in existence to Linux. The effort also includes stuff like ntsync that gives the Linux kernel Windows-y APIs for performance. I doubt Apple has any interest in any of that. I don't really blame them. And purely in principle, why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code?
        bigyabai 10d ago
        That is the point. Valve is maintaining the patches; Apple has to do nothing besides support compliant Vulkan 1.2+ drivers (which their community already does). Apple doesn't need to implement ntsync to support Proton or DXVK, either. macOS' synchronization primitives do the job just as well as esync or fsync does. > why are we all going through so much effort to save game devs from writing good OS-independent arch-independent code? Because Apple doesn't support OS-independent APIs. They also don't support old runtimes, so users will inevitably have to run the Windows version once the native code breaks. Valve ported several of their games natively to macOS, and almost every single one of them is broken on modern Macs. Valve didn't change the game tech, it's all runtime breakage.
- simondotau 11d ago
  For casual kids gaming, Apple TV and Apple Arcade is a fantastic combo. It's been plenty enough to keep my kid occupied, using hardware I already owned.
- Kipters 11d ago
  > Gaming is a license game, not a hardware game. Gaming is also a software support game. Especially in the last few years, preservation has been a big topic. Gamers want their purchases to keep working in the future, not being broken by an OS update as it often happens with macOS (compared to Windows)
  - jamesgeck0 9d ago
    A lot of game industry operates on a "release and move on" model; nobody has time to keep updating an old game hardly anyone buys instead of working on a new thing. On PC and console this is fine because your games keep working more or less indefinitely. But the vast majority of the games I've purchased on iOS can't be installed anymore. It's not great. In some cases the games still function, but I can't download them on new devices because the developer closed shop and disabled their Apple account.

HSO 11d ago

> What happens when Jim wins the lottery? so much better framing than typical truck hit :)) love it