> [...] yet multi-billon dollar studios claim supporting anything beyond x86_64 Windows is an impossible feat.
Who actually claims that? The issue is more that the ROI just isn't there. Remember that porting to a platform incurs additional support costs that need to be payed.
Behold, the actual reason AAA studios can't. Engineering excellence is not something you buy or otherwise invest in. It is your culture. It is who you hire. It is what kind of expectation you set internally for yourself and your peers. That is only marginally related to budget spent on salaries.
If you actually practice engineering excellence, the investment is small. If you don't, the investment is nonsensical.
Blizzard seems to disagree, as I mentioned in another comment. I’m just not sold on this argument tbh. It makes sense at face value but that’s not enough reason for me. Especially given how many games played on both PC and Mac from 2010-2020 and continue to do so. It’s not the empty desert for gamers it was in the 2000’s.
And Blizzard also stopped trying to port more advanced titles like Overwatch. Even Diablo 2 Resurrected didn't get an Apple Silicon release (despite the fact that they already made an ARM version for Switch).
Maybe you're right, and the technical hurdle is fairly small relative to the money they stand to make from it. Whatever the case is though, Apple's current offerings are not really attractive to developers. People would rather target the APIs they already know than do Apple's dirty work for them. Maybe Apple should take a page out of Sony's book and actually compensate or assist the studios building on top of their technology.
Specifically, those two titles don’t have Mac releases for any architecture. Apple Silicon support is somewhat orthogonal, since there weren’t any major API removals between x86_64 and arm64. (Unlike in the old days, when, say, Carbon was removed in the transition from x86 to x86_64.)
Actually it does. Everytime someone bothered to give actual numbers for games released on windows vs linux on equal footing, sales numbers represented barely a few percent while support requests represented 50+%
1. I was trying to focus on the development cost, but a few percent of 50 million dollars can get you a good support team.
2. Isn't the topic at hand mac?
3. Are you sure you want to cite that kind of number? The most prominent one says this: "Though only 5.8% of his game's buyers were playing on Linux, they generated over 38% of the bug reports. Not because the Linux platform was buggier, either. Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific, that is, would only happen on Linux." "The bug reports themselves were also pretty high quality, he said, including software and OS versions, logs, and steps for replication." That's free QA, not a burden.
Unfortunately this is not how many managers see it. They just see it as more work because people are "discovering" more issues that they now have to fix. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or in this case, the squeaky community is considered annoying and gets neglected.
Not to say it's all positives, I'm sure a big title has a lot of linux users in the annoying 'enthusiastic youngster' phase a lot of school-age PC gamers go through. But the kind of spreadsheet math that doesn't even classify support interactions is lazy.
I've worked with multiple companies on projects with large support infrastructure and teams. I've seem many foreseeably-bad business moves called "data driven decisions" based on support metrics. Metrics aren't insight, but they do let a business team justify the decisions well on paper. I'll avoid writing a whole rant about supporting a call center, but I will say their cost and ancillary nature makes iterating with the data coming out of them (or just iterating on the design on the support system itself) poorly prioritized and full of noisy signals.
I could be wrong, but maybe Linux users are more persistent (by necessity), and thus more likely to file bug reports, where your average Windows user is more likely to just go "F this" and stop playing your game.
Who actually claims that? The issue is more that the ROI just isn't there. Remember that porting to a platform incurs additional support costs that need to be payed.