It's not really an accident, Apple strongly dislikes AAA games (note: not AA games like fortnite or .. "games" like candy crush). If they support any kind of game development it's purely indie or puzzle style in nature and not high fidelity.
The reasons are.. well incalculable, there are so many:
To be competitive you must work closely with driver manufacturers; you would likely need to segment your desktop class hardware platforms based on what games they can play, you might bef forced to update hardware on a significantly shorter cadence- probably support for third party upgrades (like graphics cards). Also, Apple strongly dislikes nvidia who have a stranglehold on AAA games. (ever since they sold them a bunch of cards that desoldered themselves)
Apple wants to be a computing platform, and for "creatives". That's the image they're going for.
They can't win on gaming, even if they wanted to, but it's against the brand image to go for that market anyway.
You can't really do AAA gaming on a mac, and that's ok, not everything has to be about playing games.
The biggest rub on desktop GPUs on macOS is Nvidia insisting on full control of the drivers, which doesn’t jive with Apple’s attitude that GPU drivers should ship with the OS due to how deeply integrated they are with the kernel. AMD shares its driver source with Apple which works around this and allows RX 6000 series cards to work under macOS, but Nvidia would never consider doing something like that in a million years because too much of their business model revolves around total control.
It’s actually closely related to Nvidia long being a problem for Linux users, where open source drivers for Nvidia cards are permanently throttled to minimum performance levels thanks to Nvidia enforcing use of their proprietary drivers in its hardware. Incidentally AMD is also better behaved here — the FOSS AMD drivers have been quite decent for a long time now because a few years ago AMD got out of the way and started collaborating with the Linux community.
Apple loves AAA games if they're on the iOS store and bringing in billions USD per year of microtransaction revenue from teens and compulsive gamblers. They can't get that by supporting native APIs for non-App-Store desktop games.
While I was mainly talking about MacOS (the desktop); Does iOS support AAA games?
I haven't been promoted any AAA games on iOS- fortnite is not a AAA game.
Edit: argue your point phantom downvoters.
Fortnite is not AAA; God Of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Tom Clancy's the Division are AAA. Find a source that calls fortnite AAA. Find any source of a AAA studio working collaboratively with Apple and I will retract everything I said.
Just Dance Now[0] is not a AAA game. It was made by Massive Entertainment, who makes AAA games.
So, a game being produced by a AAA studio does not make it a AAA game.
What "is" and "is not" AAA is debatable, sure, but some things are clear:
1) they're not mobile games.
2) They have a lot of marketing budget
3) They generally push the limits of the platform (lots of LOD)
4) They have large development teams
AAA usually means that a game needs: Lots of time, Lots of Money and Lots of People.
Fortnite is low fidelity, has been in early access since it's inception (many years at this point) and has a relatively small number of people (<100 direct, compared to >1,400 for The Division) making it, even though it's been "in development" for many years, not AAA level.
FWIW I'm not saying AAA is "good", I'm just saying that Apple isn't chasing AAA- and "fortnite" is not a good counter-argument, the better argument might be call of duty or sims, which have mac ports, but they're definitely not first platform and they actually are emulation shims using Wine.
Fortnite itself does not claim to be AAA, and it's totally fine not being AAA, it's actually better to avoid making AAA games and instead go for "AA" with low fidelity because the stakes are lower and you can take more risks in making a more interesting and engaging game.
Go to game credits, count everyone until they mention a publisher.
Industry convention: Project only: Main studio first, ancillery studios next, outsourcing parties next, then the scope broadens and includes the publisher, HR, office team etc;
But anyway, Tim even says that they shipped with only 25 people. Even if they broaden it now the scope was defined early.
If you really want fortnite to be AAA, I concede, I don't really care.
But then: please give me at least 1 other example.
>It's not really an accident, Apple strongly dislikes AAA games. If they support any kind of game development it's purely indie in nature and not high fidelity.
Except that's not true at all when it comes to iOS. Back when Epic and Apple actually got along, it was common for Epic to be part of iPhone keynotes showcasing the graphical capabilities of the new GPUs.
I think Fortnite was also regularly featured on the App Store back when it was actually available there.
Obviously they have a much larger interest in supporting gaming on iOS since every game sale brings them 30% of the cut, but there's no general AAA game hatred at Apple.
That's certainly true, and for most people making games on PS4; their openGL has a weird DX11-ish 'shim' that you can use to make your code cleaner (at the expense of a bit of performance).
It's used heavily in Snowdrop; but in order to work on Stadia they had to abandon the shim and work on Vulkan. So, even when porting to linux GL was not preferred. (I worked there during this transition).
The reasons are.. well incalculable, there are so many:
To be competitive you must work closely with driver manufacturers; you would likely need to segment your desktop class hardware platforms based on what games they can play, you might bef forced to update hardware on a significantly shorter cadence- probably support for third party upgrades (like graphics cards). Also, Apple strongly dislikes nvidia who have a stranglehold on AAA games. (ever since they sold them a bunch of cards that desoldered themselves)
Apple wants to be a computing platform, and for "creatives". That's the image they're going for.
They can't win on gaming, even if they wanted to, but it's against the brand image to go for that market anyway.
You can't really do AAA gaming on a mac, and that's ok, not everything has to be about playing games.