Tangentially related - I recently made a fun discovery. Many older Steam games on mac are marked as 64-bit incompatible, but it turns out this is just a backend flag that's not always set correctly. Steam will let you install the game in spite of the warning, and if it does actually contain 64-bit code, it'll run just fine.
The days of this being relevant are probably numbered though, because at some point we will lose Rosetta. But I'm going to enjoy Antichamber [1] on my mac while I can.
The forced 32 bit incompatibility on Macbooks is so weird. My laptop is perfectly capable of executing 32 bit codes. Why does the OS start lying to me that it can't after an update? It's one thing to offer a new product without some backward compatibility, but to remove it via an update? How is it remotely acceptable?
By capable, the hardware is, but the software isn't. IIRC macOS removed the libraries required to run 32-bit applications back in Mojave or Catalina. So it's not really lying. While it is annoying that we can't use legacy software without resorting to workarounds like VMs, it does move the industry forward to 64-bit apps, on macOS at least.
Source 1 is extremely old (branching off from the "GoldSrc" engine that Half-Life 1 used which came from Quake 2)
Valve seems to be making a pretty strong effort to distance itself from working with that engine where possible (though it's unclear if their lagging tentpole title Team Fortress 2 will get the Source 2 treatment)
It's possible that rebuilding these games for 64-bit Macs specifically would encounter an undesirable amount of bugs
Valve ported Source to 64-bit Windows in 2005 (https://vghe.html/source-engine.html) but there were bugs, and it seems like they just let it fall by the wayside (I don't think it's been available since 2006, maybe 2007 at the latest).
And yeah, it seems like they've been abandoning Source 1 for a while now. Valve recently hired Joshua Ashton who has been giving Team Fortress some love but it seems like the focus is well and truly on Source 2 now.
Yeah probably this - Valve experimented with a 64-bit Source engine in around 2005 but that didn't last long, and engine licensees have since added 64-bit support (https://vghe.html/source-engine.html). Not sure where the trickiness lies but certainly in 2005 Source was very different (no Bink video, only DirectX 9 renderer etc).
I occasionally get the itch to surf or kz and boot up CSGO on my M1 Mac to do so.
It's just more convenient for me to do this on my laptop, rather than to slug over to my desk to use my windows desktop that I rarely boot up.
I tried doing the same with CSS, but because it's 32bit, it is no longer supported on macOS.
I'm assuming this is a similar feeling that Overwatch players went through when their game got replaced with something that they no longer enjoy.
Obviously Valve ran the numbers and I'm clearly in the minority, but man this just doesn't feel good. There will be more Mac players if more games support it, so this feels like a step backwards and is a negative feedback loop (just like others in this thread are also saying.)
Is this the same Apple whose new iPhone SOC has hardware ray tracing?
Apple has a gaming strategy. iPhone makes developers too much money to ignore, and since adopting in-house silicon across all product lines their handhelds, tablets, laptops and desktops all use the same APIs and CPU/GPU cores.
If you target iPhone, there is not much additional work to add a keyboard/mouse/gamepad UI to target the rest of their ecosystem.
We've started seeing Console games get ported to iPhone, which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
> Resident Evil Village on iOS Is Legit. I Forgot I Wasn't Playing on a Console
It has ray tracing with touch screen controls for the masses to play a reskinned bejeweled with banner ads. It's not a real gaming platform. No keyboard and mouse support. No first party controller. They even took away 3d touch that would have helped a lot with the haptics of touch screen controls.
Why does it matter if Apple makes their own controller? iOS/iPadOS supports other popular controllers and the Apple Store even sells multiple controllers (including the PS5 controller).
Adding built in support for a user's existing controllers, (XBox, PlayStation or Nintendo) to iOS devices and Macs is another one of those things that debunks the "Apple doesn't care about gaming" conspiracy theory.
Apple once argued in court that they ought to be allowed to kick out all games built on Unreal engine by third party developers from their platform.
Imagine you have developed a game, it is selling well, and one day you find out that the game engine you are using has been banned for disobedience and Apple wants you to rewrite your entire game in a different engine.
Apple doesn’t just not care about games, they despise game developers with a burning passion.
It's all a bit moot. Gaming is an ecosystem, and MacOS is not a big part of it. Even if Apple supported all the things it needed to, developers still wouldn't build for it, it's too small a segment.
Apple also has no buy in for the segment of gaming people wish it supported. Where SteamOS and Windows both have first party AAA game development studios.
It's not moot; it's software! So many developers put their pearls before swine these days, when the technical side of things couldn't be more clear.
Apple wants the same level of control Microsoft had with DirectX. It is blatant, and they're fighting for it even harder than Microsoft did. There's nothing wrong with offering a high-level API, but there is a problem with avoiding industry standards for the sake of maximizing your market size.
Stuff like the Game Porting Toolkit demonstrates just how deeply behind Apple is. They're desperate to prove how capable Metal can be, without acknowledging why nobody targets it. It's not surprising that a DXVK port could also support Metal. It's just not what developers intend to support; not upstream, downstream or direct from Apple. That sort of pointless insistence is where I draw the line between "just business" and "being an anti-competitive asshole".
How exactly does not caring (much) about gaming require a conspiracy? It should be the default state for the manufacturer of a computing platform whose main competitor has already cornered the gaming market.
Becsuse this is the gaming community and we can't speak subtly, apparently. There's definitely some spectrum between "does not support any games" and "full on dedicated gaming machine" and given the efforts of Google/Apple they are certainly somewhere in between.
I mean, IOS supports K&M and oodles of Bluetooth controllers, including console ones. Dunno why you want Apple to sell you $150 iController anyway that locks you into their walled garden3.
I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
> I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
Nah. Anyone gaming seriously will still take a Switch because even if their phone theoretically has more horsepower, in practice it's just not as good a gaming platform.
> I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
Amazon ran an alternative app store for a while, and were pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it. I don't know exactly why, but my naive explanation would be that no-one was spending money there because mobile games are bad and not worth paying for (or perhaps just that it's a lemon market and while there are good proper games on mobile it's impossible to distinguish them from the bad ones until you've bought it).
>Anyone gaming seriously will still take a Switch because even if their phone theoretically has more horsepower, in practice it's just not as good a gaming platform.
I love my switch, but it and the steam deck do highlight an aspect that died in Gen 8: "pocketable" handhelds are really no more. I can fit a vita in my pockets with little issue, and I have baggy enough jeans where I could even fit a GPD Win in if I really tried. But I'd say the latter is past practical pocketability. You can throw a switch in a bag but so can my laptop. I liked handhelds for the ability to simply grab and go.
Phones picked up that mantle for 6 years, since there was nothing else left. and I await the day that some portable PC strives to hit that Vita size. won't happen for years but probably by the end of the decade.
>pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it.
I think they pulled out the same time they gave up in the Kindle fire lines. Kindle was a store that penetrated the market but not Amazon. I even remeber the days where they had "free app of the day" a LA Epic Games Store.
It still technically exists but isn't really trying to compete as a store anymore. It has some "Amazon coin" deals for a few f2p games that let you get expensive whale packs for slightly less money. Probably due to some deal they made with certain game studios.
I don't believe you can make money on F-droid, and Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
Well yea, F Droid is made for mostly open source games and apps. Huge deal breaker for games using proprietary engines (since the lions share is on Unity) and doesn't want to make it's assets open source.
This theoretical "steam of Android" would work similarly to how desktop steam works. Allows sale of proprietary premium games, Bans f2p games in the beginning (inevitably opening up once it's culture is established), does some QA to ensure certain features (e.g. Input, compatibility, no viruses, etc.), has discovery algorithms for consumers, user reviews, forums, etc. It could even allow adult games like Steam, but it may also ban those for a while to establish culture (the porn black hole is a real, scary phenomenon).
>Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
I think it'd be fine in the beginning if you banned f2p apps (which most of google's revenue comes from), but yes. I'd wonder how big it'd get before we get the next Apple v. Epic debacle over such matters.
If you, as Valve, launch Steam and take your own payments within Steam - which I suspect Google would quash instantly - you would build up an install base that "owns" value in your store (modulo weaselly subscriber agreements).
When Google does Google things and kills your popular product, perhaps citing that it is a competing app store, you now have millions of angry gamers. Maybe they cannot sue you, but they can certainly abandon your market on other platforms.
Sure, I have no doubt about that. But you wouldn't be on their app store to begin with. Or at least, not expect to be on the store for long (I don't think any of the alternative app stores I used were on the play store). That does lose you some marketing, but you're already swimming up a creek as is trying to sell premium games to begin with.
Now, can Google remove your apk regardless? I haven't heard of a case, but it's not impossible for Google to her in the way. The much less publicized lawsuit from Epic involved Google blocking Epic from negotiating with Fortnite pre-installs with OEMs, so Google won't just sit by and let their money walk (even if they were leaving it on the table to begin with). Not a bad bet if you're determined, but it's not easy street even if you find your audience.
Again, Apple uses the same GPU cores across all it's hardware platforms. It will have hardware ray tracing on handhelds, tablets, laptops, desktops as well as on their upconing AR/VR platform as the SOCs are updated.
That might be useful if iPhones and iPads weren't gimped platforms.
There is no Steam (let alone any other game store) on iDevices. Just Apple's store.
As a consumer, I don't wanna pay for a game on Apple's store just so I can have a shitty iPhone experience. Especially when nearly every other game I have is on Steam and I can play on whatever device of mine I want.
>Especially when nearly every other game I have is on Steam and I can play on whatever device of mine I want.
Except for Mac, apparently. Not much android support either.
I'd say we can't truly reach "whatever device I want" until we at least cover the 3 major desktop platforms, the 2 major mobile platforms, and the 3 major console platforms. Until then we are all making compromises when buying a game.
What I said was accurate. _I_ can play on whatever device _I_ want. :-)
I take your point. Even so, Steam is leagues ahead of everyone else in this regard. I have Steam games I bought 10 years ago that I can still play on my current desktop PC. That is absolutely not the case with consoles. It isn't even the case for mobile for me, since I switched from Android a few years back.
It isn't 'just another' DRM platform. It's in a league of its own with the efforts create a virtual OS-platform to run games indefinitely. That's neither technically nor functionally trivial.
They encourage windows games to bundle old and insecure dlls, which the games generally did anyway. On windows, they don't really do anything here, it's mostly just that windows provides quite a bit of backwards compatibility anyway.
On linux, they do a bit more. They ship a hacked up copy of various libraries from ubuntu 12.04, mostly without security patches, and have the games use those, calling it the "steam runtime" despite it really being "ancient ubuntu libraries". They reduce the security of your machine, and I would only play steam games on a burner machine you don't login to your bank accounts on.
I mean you're not wrong, but games need a stable set of libraries to target. This comment implies they haven't updated those in a decade, but they have releases based on Debian Buster and Bookworm https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
The environment for both windows and linux provides unsandboxed acccess to the roaming/home folders, where game saves are typically stored. That's also where your browser's cookies to access your bank are stored.
Many of these games have such fragile netcode that they'll crash even if you don't fuzz them.
Every single metric on the business side supports those “not real gamers” being worth far more than the self identified gaming enthusiasts that balk at paying more than $60 for a AAA title for 30 years straight
and it truly is their ecosystem, because they refuse to support vulkan or OpenGL.
>which I don't think anyone was expecting a couple of years ago.
for sure, it's surprising to see a real AAA game get ported to phones instead of the usual cashgrab gacha/social garbage. on a technical level id be more impressed if it wasn't a game that already has to support consoles that came out in 2013.
> id be more impressed if it wasn't a game that already has to support consoles that came out in 2013
Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
>Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.
I don't understand why you're replying to me with irrelevant facts?
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One came out in 2013. Resident Evil Village came out on Playstation 4 and Xbox One on 2021. Unlike wine, video game consoles do not improve with age.
>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.
im not surprised that a layperson is unable to discern between the version of re8 he's playing now and the version of re8 he says he played two and a half years ago. It's also completely irrelevant to the fact that the most impressive game on iphone is a port of a game that also came out on PS4 and Xbox One.
No, but both of them have at least an order of magnitude (maybe two) more video game players on their flagship platforms (Switch and PS5) because it's solely for playing games, and the engines that are used have tooling to directly support the consoles.
i wouldnt know, i don't have access to their SDKs.
consider this: Microsoft at the height of its monopoly in the 1990s could have ditched OpenGL support to lock developers into the DirectX ecosystem but they didn't.
But it's mobile and so it's way too slow to be useful, so nobody cares. That's 99% likely to be the case with Apple's newest offering, just like it is with Qualcomm's and ARM's (that's right, literally every mobile GPU offers this now - Apple is one of the masses here)
Look at how hard it hits consoles and PCs, it's utterly pointless on a 6" display with a 5w SoC
If you want a "gaming department" you should try to show demand for premium games when they come about. But we failed 12 years ago to do so, so I'm not surprised to see history repeat itself.
If the gaming support strategy is "we'll try once and completely give up if it isn't immediately a wild success", the chances to succeed are pretty small.
That's not how you get the Xbox, you'll barely get a Stadia shaped hole if you give it a fair shake.
It's more like they tried a few times and realized they have no way to sell a game given the absurd amounts of piracy. 2010 (aroind the time of Infinity Blade) to 2013 was the golden age of premium games. By 2015 almost every game pulled out or went the f2p route.
This wasn't some 2 year flash in the pan like Stadia, I could still name a dozen premium games from this time I greatly enjoyed. But if Zenonia 2 had 70% piracy rates and the ftp Zenonia 3 (or maybe 4) made more money in a day than Zenonia 1+2 combined, what you going to do?
(note these figures are made up, I don't know the Zenonia piracy rates nor sales. But 70% is the average Android game piracy rate in 2015).
On the main point, yes, piracy on PC/mac was a huge issue.
But then, Windows PC were in the same boat. Looking from the sidelines, Windows gave publishers a lot more freedom in implementing anti-pirating (super invasive) features, and when push came to shove Microsoft stepped in to add OS supported anti-piracy features that the games could hook into (Microsoft using the same system for its own games).
I think we can at least blame Apple for doing nothing in a situation where a whole group of developpers are stuck with an issue that could be alleviated with the platform's help.
Irrelevant to the point, but Stadia was 3 year and half (nov 2019 start, to the death announcement on sept 2022, and actual shutdown on jan 2023). So basically the same span than the 2010 ~ 2013 miracle for Apple.
I forgot a lot about these early days (was absolutely not into PC gaming), for people in the same boat a nice refresher:
> 2010 (aroind the time of Infinity Blade) to 2013 was the golden age of premium games. By 2015 almost every game pulled out or went the f2p route.
I remember this too.
We had a period with plenty of premium pay in advance games, then a period of games with ads that you could pay to remove, then the companies decided that the most reliable monetization strategy in the face of widespread theft was microtransactions.
I would counter that an earlier step would be not to adopt that language in the first place. The options are not “Premium games” or “games”. They are “games” or “Microtransactional experiences”.
Brash, but like it or not there are enough "Microtransactional experiences" out there with fanbases that will react poorly to that language, that the PR hit isn't worth it. Genshin players probably overlap with the audience you want to target.
Also, in general im not a fan of "hate marketing" to begin with.
In case you mean the games on iPhone on the App Store, they generate revenue for Apple via in game transactions and not by game sales necessary. What people typically play on PCs are not the same games. Most of the games, as you can see with CS2, aren’t even available on iOS or macOS which is a problem. Outside of that I think you can run the games for iPhone on Mac as well but even then optimisation is necessary.
> they generate revenue for Apple via in game transactions
Once upon a time, there were many iOS games that you paid for up front with no micro-transactions at all, for instance, XCom was about $20 a decade ago.
I have a feeling the console game ports will be pay up front, just like they are on a console.
I think Apple's angle on this either should be or already is synergies. Because of AI and their nascent push into AR/VR, it appears to me at least that promoting gaming is one worthwhile prong in the campaign.
To keep investment in the platform strong, they stand to benefit from stabilizing and recovering from some of their NIH brain damage.
Will the fixation on collecting their cut come to an end? Time will tell.
I'm assuming they are not trying to appeal to your parents playing bejeweled when showcasing Resident Evil 8.
Will it work? No clue. Historically premium games had absurd piracy rates which is why most premium games pulled out and why F2P games with servers holding to value rose. But IOS always had lower piracy rates than android, so Apple has a better foothold for trying to re-appeal to console games studio than Google.
iPhone? Who tf cares for iPhone gaming? Are you gonna play CS2 on an iPhone?
And it's the same Apple that was barely mantaining OpenGL (an outdated version) and REFUSED to support Vulkan for their Metal Graphics API. If I remember correctly Valve helped or asked the creator of MoltenVK to open-source the project, so they could work on it as well.
Yes, Apple didn't care about PC gaming AT ALL.
Now they release a modified version of Wine and hope that everyone starts using it.
Sure, it might be Apple - and maybe reading between the lines that is why Valve dropped the support. However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac. If it was easier, maybe it wouldn't be a huge deal for Valve to continue supporting it, but that isn't clear to me.
I'm not a game developer though and don't closely follow this stuff, I'm just a person who occasionally likes to play CS on my macbook and can no longer do so.
Note: I am aware of Apple not generally being very supportive of games on their platform. It's always been that way.
Apple doesn't support Vulkan, obviously doesn't support DirectX, and barely supports OpenGL. Metal is a different beast, and the adapter layers are not adequate.
It takes extra effort, and fairly deep and unique knowledge of rendering, shaders, and compilation to support Metal, and even engines which do (Unity, Unreal) face some amount of difficulty in doing so well.
Apple's strategy of giving the middle finger to graphics APIs is patched over poorly by their partnership with Unity, and the fact that lower-end games can get away not needing a crazy amount of compatibility...but it's still on Apple to do better.
There is a robust and widely-used Vulcan → Metal compatibility layer. It hurts performance, and that sucks and is absolutely Apple's fault, but it does mean developers can port games to Mac without worrying about Metal.
It's also a massive PITA trying to debug or profiling performance on it - no native tools work right.
While "ok" for porting an existing game as a secondary platform, you don't want to be using it for primary development. And that will be why it will remain (at best) a second class citizen.
Yes, I want to be very clear GP was in response to the argument "Valve can't port games to macOS because macOS doesn't support cross-platform graphics APIs". Well, no, there is a compatibility layer, performance isn't stellar but if the alternative is your game doesn't run at all, you can take the hit.
Apple should not be happy about this outcome. It doesn't help them build some kind of walled garden, it just makes their hardware perform worse. They should add Vulkan support!
>there is a compatibility layer, performance isn't stellar but if the alternative is your game doesn't run at all, you can take the hit
They don't make many games these days, but Valve tends to be a studio that prides itself on performance. It can very much be "this game runs well or we don't use that platform at all" for them, compared to other AAA studios happy to take the PR hit for a quick buck.
The only story I've heard of people supporting Metal is by supporting wgpu.
Well and, whatever embarrassing game that Apple will trot out at their developer conferences 2-3 years after it was released and claim Macs are built for gaming.
Source 2 already has rendering backends for d3d9, 11, opengl and vulkan. There's no reason why they can't support metal besides a refusal to task someone to it.
Note that I said “supported properly” above. In addition to the very high number of bugs in Apple's implementation, the fact that it is officially deprecated sends a message to anyone wanting to do new development on MacOS “don't invest in OpenGL now as we could pull the rug under your feet” and it's done on purpose to push developers to Metal.
So now they can only blame themselves if they're losing games because the developer doesn't want to invest in Metal either.
> In addition to the very high number of bugs in Apple's implementation
Many of those 'bugs' remain unfixed to maintain backwards compatibility, not because Apple doesn't want to fix them.
> the fact that it is officially deprecated sends a message to anyone wanting to do new development on MacOS “don't invest in OpenGL now as we could pull the rug under your feet” and it's done on purpose to push developers to Metal.
As it should be.
> So now they can only blame themselves if they're losing games because the developer doesn't want to invest in Metal either.
There's nothing to 'invest' in. Metal is by far the simplest low level graphics API out of all I've used and it would not be hard for valve to write a source 2 rendering backend for it (few days/weeks at most for an experienced dev). There's plenty of AAA games being properly ported to apple silicon now and in a year or two there will be many more. Valve intentionally withdrawing themselves from the ecosystem is purely out of spite.
> it would not be hard for valve to write a source 2 rendering backend for it (few days/weeks at most for an experienced dev).
Put your money where your mouth is and write one. Just write one. If it's that easy, do it.
Which is more likely - a company that dumps tons and tons of resources into Linux, Wine, DXVK, and put out the Steam deck didn't do this supposedly easy thing because they just don't care or could it be that they don't have the talent in house and wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it?
> Put your money where your mouth is and write one. Just write one. If it's that easy, do it.
I can't because source 2's source code isn't available.
> Which is more likely - a company that dumps tons and tons of resources into Linux, Wine, DXVK, and put out the Steam deck didn't do this supposedly easy thing because they just don't care or could it be that they don't have the talent in house and wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it?
They don't have the talent? That's funny, considering Valve ported all their games to macOS many years before they ported to linux.
> They don't have the talent? That's funny, considering Valve ported all their games to macOS many years before they ported to linux.
Using OpenGL, not metal, thought. There's a good chance that they don't have a single developer knowing metal.
Sure they could learn, but then there's the next part of the sentence you're responding to: it's unlikely they wouldn't recoup their investment by doing it.
Source code for source 1 has been available for 20 years. It's been fully leaked multiple times and an official SDK with limited source is also available. There is no contradiction.
> Many of those 'bugs' remain unfixed to maintain backwards compatibility, not because Apple doesn't want to fix them.
Backwards compatible kernel panics is a interesting idea for sure…
Also, talking about backwards compatibility when discussing about Apple is pretty ironic as well.
> As it should be.
Can't complain if Valve don't follow them on that then.
> There's nothing to 'invest' in. Metal is by far the simplest low level graphics API
That doesn't change the fact that porting the game engine to it is still a massive undertaking. It doesn't depend on the graphic API itself that much, but more about the size and complexity of the rendering engine.
Valve isn't stupid, if it was profitable to do so, they'd do the investment anyway, but do not because it doesn't make financial sense.
Apple isn't entitled a free port of popular games to their walled garden. Developers may do it if it's profitable, but that's it. If Apple wants to bootstrap the gaming use case, then it's on them to make an effort.
> Valve intentionally withdrawing themselves from the ecosystem is purely out of spite
“Boohoo stupid Gabe does that out of pure naughtiness.”
I hope you realize how childish your statement is.
> However, it reads (to me) as not enough people are playing the game on the mac so they are dropping support. To me that doesn't read as being too hard for them to support mac.
I think you're missing the context here that CSGO was just replaced with CS2, and CS2 is an entirely new engine (it's Source 2 based whereas CSGO was still Source 1)
So this is a switch from a DX9 engine from ~15 years ago to a modern, Vulkan-focused actively developed engine.
People severely underestimate how powerful the gaming economy is.
Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
Gaming is what drives new hardware development, is what drives new personal computer ownership, and is what drives operating system preference.
For everyone else - a 10 year old computer does the job just fine... and it doesn't really matter what OS it happens to run.
Imagine if Apple had made it a point to dominate gaming too. Suddenly the folks spending $2-5K on a top of the line gaming machine would be forking it over for the latest generation of $5k Apple Desktops.
It is a TON better than it was twenty years ago when I first played with no longer dual booting and running only Linux.
Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.
So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.
Agreed, I'm no stranger to Linux, and also use a MacBook for work, but when I come home I just want to play a bit of Diablo 4 or whatever and chill. I would have switched years and years ago.
Got hooked on Microsoft as early as the DOS days by playing games as a kid. They earned a customer for life indirectly there. Maybe Adobe helped a bit too.
I gave up windows the day i learned that minecraft ran perfectly well on linux. More than a decade later, i have never felt the need to go back, but it all depends on the types of games you play.
>Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint.
Being the default OS is what made Windows dominate personal computing. The average person doesn't think about what OS they use at all, even when they're thinking about getting a Macbook.
I suggest you go an read some of the blog post by Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, explaining why they were task with creating DirectX in the first place..
And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..
IBM didn’t care about gaming, and neither did the early PC clone manufacturers. And early IBM compatible PCs were pretty shitty gaming machines compared to other PCs. And game companies used eye watering hacks to make their games work within the limits of the platform. PC dominance in gaming came after PCs became popular.
I don’t see how this is relevant. The PC gaming market was niche and immature at this point in time and developers were trying to gain traction. Today the market is massive and virtually all of the users and money is in the PC platform. There is no reason at all that Valve would waste money and developer time on supporting a platform that virtually nobody is going to use now or at any point in the near future. Valve is already doing great work with Proton and Steam Deck to get Linux gaming on par with Windows.
Steam and Battle.net are so annoying here. Three years on and what are essentially web browsers still haven't be compiled for Apple Silicon. Bnet keeps getting worse and I don't even run Steam anymore, there's no point.
You mean apple should only use x86 cpus still? or it should only use Nvidia or AMD gpus? Or maybe it should implement Direct3D? (oh wait, they've done that)
The thing that makes this a bit more frustrating is that Apple actually kinda has a solution, the game porting toolkit (Essentially Wine/Proton for macOS). Except that they don't just make it a component of the system for end users, and don't allow developers to use it as a runtime layer in their app (so Developers can't go the proton route and actually ship a Windows binary running on top of the game porting toolkit). So it's reasonable to assume that the toolkit will go away in a few years as well.
Oh well, at least it's not the first time that Mac gaming has shown to be a dead-end, but without BootCamp, it really feels final. Can't even count on half-baked, outdated ports from Aspyr anymore since they got bought by Embracer and are probably trapped in their financial struggles.
Play on your laptop using Steam's remote play, Moonlight or something similar. You run the games on that windows desktop you have stored out of the way (mine is headless as well) but play on your laptop where ever you want.
This works for some games, but for others I find the latency to be too high, and compression can get pretty wacky with games that have a lot of movement.
If you run off ethernet the latency isn't much of an issue (20ms maybe)... maybe not good for super competitive gaming, but I've never noticed any issue even with more competitive games as the network latency (game to server, not streaming) masks any input latency without problem.
I feel for the Mac users in spirit: Linux users have often received the same answer ("There aren't enough Linux buyers of this game to justify the development/support costs of porting."). OTOH, Counter-Strike 2 actually has a native Linux build even without Proton, so, this particular title isn't a problem for us.
It would be weird for Valve not to support Linux, given that the Steam Deck runs it. They could of course use Proton to run it, but AFAIR (most of(?)) the previous CS versions also had native Linux support. (Not sure about Mac support in the previous releases?)
It would also be weird to me for them to not have linux ports of their engines after blogging about the performance and bug squashing benefits of doing so for previous game engines.
In any event, around this time they found a lot of optimizations porting to linux that they then back ported to the windows client. This was 10 years ago, so the zeitgeist in the company may have changed, but I've certainly taken to heart the idea that you should be cross compiling to at least one different target whenever you can to improve your engineering. The earlier you start the cheaper the cost of doing so as well. (This isn't the only company doing so at the time talking about gains of cross compilation either, and not just games)
You can still download and play CS:GO. Right click > Properties > Betas. I've used ti for playing a mod with friends that doesn't work in CS2 yet. Of course, there's less players now.
This happens all the time. I used to be able to play Rocket League natively on my Linux PC. Then Epic bought it and simply pressed delete on the Linux port.
As much as that sucks it might be possible to play. I use the Hero Launcher to play the games from Epic through Proton. IDK if anticheat might mess you up, but you might try that
Expect that you don't lose access to a game you have?
They didn't just release a new game: they literally removed the previous game people had and replaced it with a new, incompatible game.
They didn't have to do that, they could have made a new game entry and earned their new install base by... putting out something that was better than the last entry and letting the players decide?
But much easier to just remove the last entry.
It's the kind of nonsense people normally jump at developers for, but because Valve is apparently still the darling of the gaming world so people seem to be excusing it.
Apple kinda set the tone here with their depreciation of 32-bit execution modes and OpenGL, plus their general hostility towards open or cross-platform APIs. By removing support for the old way of doing things and refusing to meet in the middle with developer frameworks, you end up with a platform that benefits nobody but the license-holders. That's what happened with DirectX, an actually useful API that Valve invests millions of dollars in spurning anyways. Why would they kiss the Metal ring?
CS:GO still launches now that CS2 exists. Never mind the fact that the source code leaked, you can still install CS:GO from Steam or run a cracked copy without VAC support. Valve supported unofficial servers from the get-go, so diehard CS:GO fans on Mac can play any version they like for as long as Apple chooses to support it.
> Valve is apparently still the darling of the gaming world
Damn these alternative App Stores and their powerful competition!
This is an insane amount of noise to throw out for such a simple point...
Valve made a new game: Instead of releasing it as a new game, they abused a loophole to force said new game onto people's devices without them having any say in the matter.
In other words, a piece of software they didn't ask for is being installed, and the software they did ask for is now hidden behind workarounds.
_
Apple plays no part in any of that: trying to paint not abusing your digital distribution platform... as being equivalent kissing Apple's ass is nonsensical to the point of absurdity.
This isn't ass-kissing, this is me being a pedantic asshole so I can untangle your argument and refute the idea that people "lose access" to their game. I'm not fond of DRM when Apple or Steam does it, but the way Valve depreciated CS:GO is borderline unimpeachable.
- Everyone with auto-updating enabled got the new game installed by-default. Nobody lost access to anything but official game servers.
- The old game has support for third-party servers on every point release, leaving it perfectly playable today.
- Bonus points: A copy of the game's source code was leaked, enabling the community to unofficially support new systems if they want.
Mac users got the short end of the stick, but I find it hard to demonize Valve over it. The root of this entire complaint is that an auto-update didn't behave as it should.
Feel free to hate on whoever you want. I've heard a lot of people say that CS2 is bad on it's own merits, and that's fine too. I just don't think auto-updating to a broken build is some vast betrayal of confidence or anticonsumer row. It mostly feels like an example of how MacOS and it's users are getting left behind over petty business issues.
You're complaining about broken updates on MacOS. I'm having trouble parsing your arguement seriously in the first place; people have been warning against auto-updates on Mac for years.
Given that nobody had anything taken from them, I legitimately don't see how you could demonize Valve over this. There is no way for me to sympathize with you over this, as a Steam user or as a former Mac user.
So now you're conflating intentional breaking software by deleting it and replacing it to avoid having to fairly compete on distribution like every other new game release... with auto updates.
Pro tip: using blatant strawman arguments to troll works better if you don't go so hard in the paint defending them. The latter just makes you look incompetent.
My entire point was to break down your conflation that users would "lose access" to CS:GO. That is wrong, and you have not produced any evidence to contradict that. My "strawman" is not an argument at all; it's genuine shock that anyone who cares this much about auto-updates would use a Mac in the first place.
Normally I am on Valve's side, but I agree that them pulling CS:GO was a stupid move. Anyone else would have been torn a new one for doing that.
Even though its not as popular as the others, I just stick to CS:Source and CS:1.6. Can't beat the classics, and they have been around for so long that they aren't going to be taken away at any point.
I honestly don’t get this rationale though. Why is this different from Linux? It’s like blaming Linux users for using Linux and they should have used Windows instead if you really want to game.
How is it the same? Apple runs a closed ecosystem and has shown it doesn’t care for gaming for a long time so its user should know that by now. Linux is an open platform and the results show. SteamDeck is running on Linux and can run most Steam games. Macs still can’t. Apple users should take responsibility on this one.
I am now having a brief fantasy of a world where Apple pulls Proton into the OS as a Windows emulation layer for games and starts pushing their changes upstream just like Valve does.
I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.
* Apple has billions of dollars and a hierarchy of decision-makers who could prioritize the R&D and implementation of making "gaming on Mac" a reality
* Linux is a distributed, community project without billions of dollars or top-down decision-makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
> Linux is [...] without [...] top-down decision makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
I'd say Valve is exactly that. Valve pays many developers their salary who are responsible for making almost all single player games work on Linux via proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d). Although they do push their changes upstream.
Kind of. But I wouldn't call Valve a top down decision maker for Linux. Simply a very talented contributor and influencer. And you always need to keep in mind that their work is still in the interest of supporting their proprietary platform.
No it's not. Valve is just a member of the community. It cannot for distributions to adopt anything. Valve cannot prevent kernel developers from making it difficult for them to improve gaming on Linux. Valve just does its own thing and offers up its work. They cannot force anything into Linux like Apple can with its OS.
To some degree, Valve can. It's a bit weird, but Valve basically is running its own distro on top of whatever Linux distro you're using. It's called the Steam Runtime and is quite literally just a bundle of things like specific versions of glibc. It exists as an attempt to prevent the usual versioning mess that comes with any form of binary distribution on Linux.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Steam Runtime is considered a bit of a mess on the technical end; Valve used to only test it with Ubuntu LTS, which caused plenty of issues for those on other distros or on newer versions of even Ubuntu.
IIRC Arch literally comes with a package whose sole job is to substitute certain steam runtime libraries that are known to cause conflict problems when used, otherwise you get fun X Window errors (or whatever equivalent you have for those on Wayland).
For the end consumer it isn't different. But in a pragmatic sense:
1. Apple has multiple teams of well paid engineers to solve any problem that arises. There's a lot more money in the game supporting Mac than Linux.
2. Apple has been shown to be hostile towards game development and make active decisions to make it harder to port to them, whereas Linix's most hostile issues arise from the proprietary nature of games vs. the open source nature of Linux (e.g. Package management, DRM, etc).
3. Linux makes concessions on its philosophies for games while Apple makes ultimatums. You can't ever trust that your game on Apple will work in 5 years, at least if you were developing in the 2010's. Meanwhile there are proprietary ways to deliver your game if you want to launch on Linux (not as sure about DRM but I've heard of solutions that simply haven't had mass adoption yet).
Much less, much much less. Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company with $2.8T market cap and blaming anybody except Apple for the drawbacks of your platform.
Apple's absolute top end models might go for $5,000, but then again, have you bought gaming computer components lately? I can't imagine I spent far off of $3000 for my gaming computer all things taken into consideration (besides peripherals of course.) I only have not attempted to tally up the cost because I fear it would make me sick. Without actually listing a real drawback to using the platform besides "software providers decided not to support the platform," you come off as one of those drones that mindlessly hate on Apple products only because you don't want to pay for them. And to be clear, I'm not even your supposed opposition, in that I don't even own any Apple products besides an iPhone SE (which are notoriously cheaper than flagship Android phones.) I just find the Apple hating bickering to be about as childish as the Playstation vs Xbox console argument.
And yes, I consider your comment to be childish bickering primarily because you don't have another argument besides "their product is more expensive than it's worth comparing hardware to hardware." Apple users understand that they're actually paying a premium for the software (the operating system), as well as the designed and usually fetching exterior (which to be fair does look nice, and I tend to prefer Macbook charging ports over Dell's old barrel ports.) Which, there is something to be said about an operating system that decided they don't want to run Java anymore. I'll grant that their software might have merit. Java web start apps are the bane of my enterprise existence.
You get a budget gaming machine for 1k these days, if that. The GPU almost steals your 1k budget by itself. Apple's new top end Mac Mini goes for $1300 and has a 10 core M2 Pro with a 16 core GPU, 16GB memory, and a 512GB SSD. More than enough to play Counter Strike 2 if Valve decided to support the platform. It's not comparable but not as outrageous as people say.
But again, you're still thinking in terms of money here. Where the problem isn't with how much the computer costs. It's completely irrelevant, actually. The problem for Mac users is that the software providers in question in this discussion don't want to support MacOS, which is a decision totally on them. I have no strong opinions against their decision to not support them if the user base just isn't there. There's no doubt that there are tons of MacOS users, they just might not be users that intend to game on those computers the majority of the time. But I do feel empathy for Mac gamers, as that was historically the opinion of game studios refusing to support Linux machines. And to be honest, it's still the case that Linux users are second class citizens when it comes to games that require an anticheat to run (many online FPS games fall into this category.) None of the big anticheat providers want to port their software to run on Linux.
You can play almost any game on ancient GeForce 1080 (i do) with decent fps, except Starfield and maybe some other poorly optimized titles. On windows, that is.
You can also play almost anything on SteamDeck (15W TDP max) on linux ($400 before discounts).
You can't really play 3/4 of game catalog on MacBook Pro M1Pro or newer ($2000+)
> Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company
A high spec Mac Mini is $1299 USD (10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 GB).
Anyone paying $4,999 for a Mac Studio/Pro is doing media creation for work and doesn't give a fuck about games or will have a separate console/PC for that. Those are workstations, not for gaming.
But that's the trouble: there's more than enough hardware in a Studio to game with. Saying that people who need a "media" computer don't care about games is silly. I used to run $5,000 PC's for CAD/FEA, and you better believe I ran games on it after hours. I've had high-end Mac laptops for software development work for 10 years now. I keep buying the ones with GPU's. They ALL suck for gaming. Not for lack of hardware! My $4,000 Intel MBP with a Vega 20 runs Elder Scrolls Online (NOT a demanding game) at 720p and 30 FPS. It runs BETTER if I force it to use the internal Intel "GPU". So I bought a $700 PC which runs the game at 4K, "high" settings, and an unwavering 60FPS. A friend just bought an M2 Studio. It manages to run the game at 4K, but < 30 FPS. On the fastest computer in the world, currently! I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks. Lots of people WANT to play games on Macs, but wind up moving back to Windows.
IMO, this terrible situation is on Apple. They have the resources to fix this ecosystem, and buy a seat at the table, the same way Microsoft has, at so many tables.
Fair enough except for your example. ESO does not support M1/M2. It's running on Rosetta. Bethesda officially do not support M2 so obviously they haven't made any effort to make it run efficiently on an M2. How is that Apples fault? The hardware is there for anyone to use but Apple can not force developers to use it.
How did Windows become the de facto gaming platform? Microsoft made easier-to-use API's, and then subsidized developers to use it. I don't program against it, but it seems that Vulkan and Metal are reasonable to use. It's the second part I want Apple to do now.
Neither of those two reasons are why Windows became the de facto gaming platform.
Microsofts market share was nearly 100% in the 90s and that's how they became the de facto gaming platform. Because it was the de facto PC platform. Apple was a much smaller company and nearly went bankrupt in the 90s. Microsoft dominated for reasons unrelated to gaming and the legacy continued. Bill Gates was in court for antitrust violations. Apple focused on other niches besides gaming just to survive and avoid bankruptcy.
Mac only has 8% market share, hence Bethesda not caring about Mac. The market is just too small. Even if Apple had the worst possible graphics API, everyone would release games for Mac if it had the biggest market share.
Gaming in the 90's started out on OpenGL, which was and is cross platform. Ports for Quake were being made for things like SGI workstations, because it was relatively straightforward. Microsoft headed off further development in a cross-platform gaming environment by creating a Windows-only API, and making sure developers used it, with lots and lots of money. Windows became the de facto platform because Microsoft used their monopoly to kill off the burgeoning threat of an open ecosystem. If it hadn't done this, Macs and Linux could have been viable gaming platforms, despite their relative marketshares.
As I said the vast majority of games. For example Minecraft is not a native Windows application in any way. It just creates a window and then renders the entire contents of the window itself instead of using win32 to make an interface.
No, only a tiny minority of PC games run on the JVM. The vast majority are native and not running on any kind of VM. Even with the Unity engine the games are natively compiled.
I didn't intend to bring up the JVM. Minecraft Bedrock edition is written in C++ and renders the entire window contents and even has its own UI framework that it uses.
There's way more to it than GUI libraries. That is a native Windows application calling Windows APIs. You can't run that Windows executable on Linux without Wine/Proton.
Even a console application (no GUI) depends on operating system APIs.
> That's like saying you can't run Firefox without freetype. Requiring a dependency doesn't make you no longer native.
At this point you're just trolling.
Take notepad.exe and try to run it on Linux. It wont run because its Windows native. That's a native application. Same as 99% of games that aren't JVM based.
> How, by having a different OS? Sorry about that I guess.
> (If it had native Vulkan it wouldn't matter. The most effective strategy, the one Microsoft uses, is to buy all the game studios.)
By making their OS easy to target by game makers. There's no good excuse - Apple has access to the same graphics pipelines as everyone else. XPlat game engines have boiled it down to mostly a checkbox these days... so where's OSX? Apple has a lot of work to do before that's a reality.
> Calling Valve a game maker is a stretch;
You can't be serious, are you? Valve's titles are among the most popular games in the history of games. They may make most of their money through Steam, but to say Valve doesn't make games is ridiculous.
That wasn't even the point - Apple users will blame the actual studios/developers for not supporting OSX when the blame lies at Apple's feet.
Billions in annual profit, zero f's given about gaming on their platform. It's a choice - and one Apple users need to comprehend. Apple doesn't care.
Valve is not a normal company; there's no hierarchy and they're only capable of doing things if someone at the company decides to pay attention to it.
Do you remember what happened to TF2? It first degraded into an item trading game, then they abandoned it for years and it was full of bots. There's no reason Overwatch and Apex should've replaced it except that they stopped fighting for it.
TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
Counter-Strike is still one of the most-played games ever. CS:GO had an average of almost 1 million daily players while AAA Games like CoD Warzone hover around 200-500k.
DOTA/DOTA2 also rakes it in. They also have many very successful single-player games. Valve is a wildly successful game company - they just don't do the "yearly release" dance...
TF2 today is mostly unplayable due to bots and weirdness with their player matching game. I put a lot of hours into TF2 and the experience is almost unrecognizable today. CS:GO was, I think, completely outsourced to a third party. They still produce some game-like artifacts but primarily they're the owner and operator of the premier online games store
CS:GO is complicated - it started as a console port of CS:Source by a 3rd party developer, then was taken in-house and transformed into a full stand-alone new Counter-Strike game. So, it was indeed developed by Valve.
IDK anything about TF2 - but bots or not, 100k active daily players is nothing to sneeze at for a 16 year old game.
They are indeed the premier online game store - yes... but saying they are not a game developer is absurd. They don't release a new title every year, but when they do, it's a huge hit.
> TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
They fixed it again after people sassed them enough about it, but it was always a better game than Overwatch and there's no reason people should've been tricked into playing that.
(Though, I don't know if the people on right now are actually playing TF2 or just trading hats.)
Who else supports Metal? Oh, that's right - only Apple.
There's more to game support than just graphics API.
Apple chooses to make game support on OSX hard - and shocker... you don't get games supporting OSX. Who can we blame? Apple...
Just like Apple chooses to make Linux kernel support hard on M1/M2 and leaves it entirely up to volunteers to make it work. Who do you blame? The Kernel developers or Apple?
The Metal API is heavily documented and Apple provides a plethora of code samples in four programming languages, with literal step-by-step how-to guides on porting from OpenGL to Metal.
You can complain that they don’t support third party low-level frameworks, sure. But they definitely make it easy and inviting to support their homegrown solutions
Depends what you mean by "default". Windows ships with DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan support. Call of Duty runs on Vulkan by default, for instance.
Vulkan is notable as being new (doesn't have legacy baggage OpenGL and DirectX have), is natively cross-platform, and is often more performant than other options for modern games.
It's cross platform in that if you want, you can write implementations for other platforms. In addition to supporting multiple platforms in its current state.
The difference is that Microsoft is responsible for the DirectX API on Windows but does not have anything to do with shipping OpenGl or Vulkan for Windows.
Microsoft plays roughly the same role a Khronos (specifies the API, provide conformance test suite, provide an SDK, etc.) but when it comes to actually “shipping” DirectX, Microsoft doesn't have anything to do either, it's all on the graphic card vendor to ship DirectX drivers. As an example, for a while after its release, many people didn't have access to DX12 at all, just because their GPU didn't have DX12 drivers.
So the situation is much less different between DirectX and Vulkan than you make it sound.
qemu is dog slow, and it's barely working enough to get Windows 7 x86 to boot on a M2 (not to mention that the UTM guest tools are mostly broken, so no acceleration anywhere).
If you're judging how much sympathy people "deserve" by what they spend their own money on, you deserve even less.
Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.
I think you're missing some nuances of the conversation here. A lot of Apple buyers celebrate the fact that Apple intentionally prevents interoperability with large swathes of software. So if someone is complaining that software doesn't work on an Apple product, they don't "deserve sympathy" because they've deliberately chosen a product where that is ostensibly a selling point.
What? Who is "celebrating" that Apple prevents interoperability? Unless you're saying that buying a macbook is equivalent to celebrating all of Apple's decisions, a clearly false equivalency?
Every time the EU forces Apple to open up some of their platform (USB C, alternative app stores, etc) there's a top comment in the thread saying how the new change makes Apple platforms somehow "ickier", that they chose Apple because of the walled garden-ness that somehow makes it safer, and so on.
We are not talking here about people trying to uplift themselves or humanity around them, and get/give access to education, Internet, computing, etc. We're talking about people who dropped 2 grands to buy into an luxurious anti-freedom walled garden.
Who said anything about enemies. I just don't think someone that consciously bought into a exclusionary walled garden deserves any sympathy... because some external software doesn't work for them.
I sympathize with them but I also sympathize with Valve for being put in a position where they have to support an extremely close and opinionated platform that can change at any moment just because a trillion dollar company decides to.
Here's to hoping that with gaming on Linux gaining prominence (thanks in no small part to Wine/Proton and Steam Deck), Linux overcomes Windows as the go-to OS for gaming.
And Windows 10 can emulate the Super Nintendo. But multiple consoles are not as cheap as the Windows box you already have, more annoying to setup or stow, and don't have some little QoL addons, like freezing the game.
What you're emulating is irrelevant. What matters is which provides a better experience to you, the end user. One choice is actively being worked on, while the other (despite under-the-hood perf. improvements IIRC) seems to garner more loathing and disdain with each release.
Linux folks swearing for "Linux games" that are in reality Windows games running on top of a Windows emulation layer are the ones missing the forest from the trees.
Proton is just a new desktop application API for Linux, one specialized for gaming. While the win32 API is certainly not an open standard, it is a stable one, arguably more stable than even browser APIs, and obviously more stable than the various APIs offered by Linux.
Years ago I was optimistic that fixed shared library runtimes, such as the ones offered by Steam, would be enough to make native game development for Linux viable. But even with these, so many things simply break in places they should NEVER break, and can only be fixed by recompiling them (thanks glibc), so I no longer feel this way.
While my heart bleeds for open source, video games are fundamentally more art than function, so the expectation that the user (or the upstream maintainer, Steam) needs to be capable of recompiling them is simply unrealistic when considering the licensing & support required for this. Video games need a stable API, perhaps even more than most other types of software. A game built 10 years ago should continue to work when run today.
When considering all of this, along with the fact that Valve is the only large organization with the resources and incentive to fix this situation. The only real path forward Valve has here is to create their own custom desktop application API for Linux that goes beyond just a set of shared libraries and is fully integrated, meaning third-party game developers don't need get involved in the often messy inter-library politics the Linux community is accustomed too.
But if Valve really needs to go that far, why invent a whole new API for it? Why not just copy win32? That's the most popular API among game developers after all. In fact there is already a Linux runtime that not only supports win32, but actually treats desktop stability as a core priority: WINE. Why not just throw resources at that instead of making something new?
While I'm mostly speculating here, I suspect that this line of reasoning is what gave birth to Proton. It has also led to interesting situations, consider this: Elden Ring on release had/has a problem with micro-stuttering, this issue was patched in Proton very quickly, within the first week of release, but remains an issue on Windows to this day. This means that right now, Linux is the best platform to play Elden Ring on if you want the best performance and graphics. Much like video drivers are updated to fix bugs for individual games, Proton now fills this role as well, but with an even faster development cycle.
This highlights one of the key benefits of Proton: it scopes an entire Win32 runtime (wineprefix) to each game. A hasty hotfix for one game will not break another, each game needs to only pin the runtime that works, and no further tweaking is necessary. You simply cannot do this on Windows, Microsoft does not have this kind of flexibility.
A future where Proton outlives Windows, one where Proton expands the win32 API to include more features never supported by Windows, while I can't say it will happen, it certainly can happen, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
One thing that gets me with proton is that as you say it effectively 'crowns' win32 as the PC gaming platform, but it seems like a weird situation where MS control it and valve/codeweavers are constantly chasing them for any new/changed functionality so their sub-platform remains relevant. I think an opportunity has passed to divorce PC gaming (or perhaps "consumer real time 3D"?) from MS/windows because Valve don't want to take on all that responsibility, and no one else is interested enough to set up a consortium to pick up that gauntlet.
This is my cynical side, but I'm sure they don't mind the opportunity to get their store in front of people, both with the deck and by how closely knit steam is to providing gaming to non-windows PCs. In my view PC gaming is in a weird spot right now if you try defining "what is the platform?" Is it windows, is it steam (and all the other features it has), is it x86, how much can/should a game be 'portable' from one ecosystem or enclave of PC. There's also been issues with games like Starfield not working with the intel Arc GPUs until a few days ago that have me wondering (from a fairly naive point of view) how closely that aspect is tied to assuming nvidia/AMD are the only possibilities versus how well it was written to the abstraction layer, assuming intel were compliant.
If enough players play via Proton and want to stay that way, then the subset of the Win32 API that is well supported for Proton can itself become the standard. MS might add new APIs, but developers may choose to keep the old ones, therefore targeting the largest userbase.
Of course, MS might also start changing the behaviour of lots of APIs, deprecating them left and right, effectively trying to kill Proton. But that means they'll also kill their own backwards compatibility.
If, again, Proton becomes "popular enough", I don't see how MS can stop it short of finding some way of preventing developers from using old APIs in new applications (which would very likely be anti-competitive behaviour).
I've been a macOS user for 11 years now, but I hope that, however unlikely, Proton wins out :)
Isn't this the whole reason Valve created steam runtimes so that they could have native linux binaries with also long patch lifetimes? AFAIK they even select Ubuntu LTS releases so they can surf off upstream patching for longer.
Ubuntu's extended support even pushes that out to 10 years, and I imagine Valve could also do its own patching (or just ignore security concerns).
Nice thing w/ Valve is they allow you to use your distro's libraries or switch to the runtime, depending on how much performance you are trying to eke out of a game.
Odds are anything written a decade ago doesn't need cutting edge performance though.
I briefly touched on this but steam runtimes (aka shared library runtimes) in practice aren't as isolated as one would assume, an update to glibc is often enough to break applications targeting them. Furthermore, in practice many maintainers think little of video games and are often comfortable breaking them if it helps with the server side of things.
For evidence of this, look no further than Ubuntu, the basis of the steam runtime, dropping 32bit support and breaking all software (video games) that depend on it. Sure you can still use it for older stuff, but there is no future here.
Well. Microsoft is also dropping 32 bit support for Windows 10 in 2025. I guess that makes Proton some weird hackish abstraction layer over the continuously updated underlying linux libs.
Would be funny if Proton gets pulled into Windows releases to maintain support for legacy games as Microsoft shortens the length of their support.
Ah yeah, you're right. WOW64 appears to not be going anywhere anytime soon.
Although. I gotta say, I don't use windows much, but some folks I kind of helped out on the side were upgrading to Windows 8 and were completely unable to launch their 32 bit XP accounting software binary with every emulation flag I tried. (could just have been my inexperience on this, but wasn't finding anything in the support guides).
Oddly enough, it ran fine in Wine in virtualbox in a small ubuntu instance, so they ended up just using that in seamless mode.
So, at least from past experience that legacy compat is not 100% and I'm guessing games might be even more finicky than accounting software.
They are however (by dropping the 32bit versions of Windows) dropping 16bit support. Which still exists in 32bit Windows 10 along with NTVDM (AKA DOS emulation). So I guess it's the end of the line for MSDOS?
>But if Valve really needs to go that far, why invent a whole new API for it? Why not just copy win32?
I can think of at least two reasons:
Legal - APIs might be copyrightable in the future.
Control over changes - Not having to play ketchup every time Microsoft changes or updates an API. Windows APIs do still change and break applications they have compensated for this with application specific shims.
That being said I can't imagine what Valve would come up with. Maybe they could base something around Vulkan, Musl and Wayland.
Yes. But that's the thing - if more and more people play games on Linux (even through Wine), there will be more Linux machines around.
Developers might be more interested in developing for it if it is more than a footnote of an OS, possibly creating a positive feedback loop. Especially with companies such as Valve invested into it.
To those who might not be aware: Wine originally stood for "Wine is not an emulator", a recursive acronym that were popular in the geek culture a few decades ago. Same for KDE Desktop Environment and GNU's not Unix.
I guess this falls under "other features" but it's pretty common to emulate systems behavior via a re-implementation, or thunking calls to a copy of the original libraries, etc.
Oracle uses the verb "emulate" to describe branded zones, which function similarly, as well. I think it's semantically fine to call this emulation, it's just high-level emulation.
If Linux offer a layer of compatibility with Windows API, abd devs release games ensuring that the games run on that compatibility layer, the distinction of "but they don't release games natively for Linux" is largely irrelevant.
Linux is a better OS than Windows in mostly every way, and what held a lot of people from making the switch was the inability to run their game library there.
Nowadays, I can run the vast majority of my game library on Linux without any issues. In fact, older games are often better supported by WINE/Proton than by Windows itself. And the situation seems to only improve as time passes.
The biggest problem isn't the small market share (3% of desktop users is still a decent chunk of customers), but the lack of standards and fragmentation making good QA basically impossible.
This isn't relevant to game developers. Most game developers who nominally support linux will test on a single distro and release a single zipped or tarred binary (not even an rpm or a deb). Linux users are expected to sort out any issues they might encounter on their own distro, and linux users expect to do this as well.
So for example, I as a linux user download factorio_alpha_x64_1.1.91.tar.xz
This isn't a package made specifically for my distro. Was it tested with my distro? Almost certainly not. Do I care? No, not really. Might I have some trouble with it? Probably not, but maybe! Do factorio devs get flooded with hate mail for not packaging factorio as an RPM and testing every single release with every single long-tail distro? I think they don't. They might get a few nutjobs sending them letters but by in large the linux gaming community (as it were) has low expectations and is easily pleased with the bare minimum.
>Do factorio devs get flooded with hate mail for not packaging factorio as an RPM and testing every single release with every single long-tail distro?
Based on my experience (not game dev), Linux users are extremely polite, grateful and willing to bend over backwards (or even write patches themselves) to get things working.
This makes it even harder to tell them that you simply can't support their preferred configuration.
This is the factual reality of the matter. 300+ distros to test and you can't support them 100% of the time like you can with Windows or macOS and give a guarantee to your customers that it works on your OS.
Unfortunately, the Linux fans continue to ignore the worsening fragmentation issues.
Steam includes the Steam Runtime, a container-like environment that provides a single target for Linux game developers. In fact, it's commonly used by NixOS users to run proprietary software that wasn't built for NixOS.
Other than the Steam Runtimes there is also Flatpak as a container-like environment to target if you want a stable environment that is shared accross distros if you aren't specifically making a game that is published on Steam
Yes, but that's a very broad brush. Regardless of the distro people use either x11 or Wayland, this compositor or that compositor or no compositor, this or that driver, ....
So even if you manage to publish a deb, rpm and to the aur, QA is difficult.
The only reason Linux now sees support is because it tied in with Valve's desire for a handheld console and them wanting to rattle MS's cage a bit by showing how much better games ran on Linux. It worked; MS has devoted more effort in recent years to fixing gaming issues.
The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Valve is more concerned with meeting games were they are, not where they hypothetically could be. In the case of Linux (more gamers on Linux than Macs, although it's close), Valve has additional reason to care because they view Linux as insurance against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft. Clearly they don't feel the same way about Macs (makes sense, because their Windows customers could more readily switch to Linux than Macs). So if gamers are already acquiring Windows/Linux machines to play games, why should Valve waste their resources trying to bring about a hypothetical reality where gamers choose to buy Macs instead?
It's not Valve's responsibility to engage in pro-Mac activism. It would be weird if they were doing so.
> Valve has additional reason to care because they view Linux as insurance against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft. Clearly they don't feel the same way about Macs (makes sense, because their Windows customers could more readily switch to Linux than Macs).
Agreed, and I think that's quite wise. When it comes to escaping tight-reigned dictators that can threaten your business, Apple is out of the frying pan an into the fire. Imagine if they invested heavily into macs and then Apple required all mac software to go through their store (with 30% cut of course) like they do on iOS? That would be disastrous
As I said, Linux has more importance to Valve than can be accounted for by its popularity because Valve sees Linux as a hedge against anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft.
Why? Mac users are cornered into exclusively a mobile device(MacBooks) and will more than likely purchase game consoles... or even just use remote play services(I use GeForce Now)
Windows users are already on Windows and Windows machines are much more open to dual-booting Linux... if needed.
Apple costumers get by with Apple's risible video game offerings, which still compromises mostly of waiting lounge pasttime shovelware and glorified slot machines, by buying computers from other manufacters (Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Windows/Linux PCs, Steam, etc.)
Maybe of casual and gacha games. Unless iDevice users want to miss out on the highest selling [1] and highest rated [2] AAA games their only option is directing money to other companies.
The vast majority of mobile games are not really substitutes for PC games the way e.g. console games are, except in the super broad "Netflix: Our biggest competitor is video games because customers only have so much time" way.
There’s another problem with Mac gaming: even though Macs have a higher marketshare than they’ve ever had before, they aren’t owned by people who are expecting to use them for games.
Someone who is into the PC gaming scene already owns a gaming PC by now. If they own a Mac it’s probably their productivity machine.
It’s obviously an anecdote but that’s how I do things. I have a gaming PC and all it does is gaming. My Mac is for portable computing and general productivity. Even though I own a Mac and some of my games work on Mac (like Baldur’s Gate 3), I rarely if ever use that Mac for gaming.
I think it’s on Apple to put real money into changing that perception (and to make the OS a little better for gaming - for example, Windows handles window management for games better, Mac handles mice with scroll wheels terribly unless you get third party software).
Valve has supported Linux for over a decade[1], way before they made any hardware. It makes sense for them to not rely on Microsoft which have threatened their position as a gaming store before with UWP games appearing exclusively on Microsoft Store and the win32 platform potentially being killed off (which all turned out to be a flop in the end).
> The only reason Linux now sees support is because it tied in with Valve's desire for a handheld console
Valve have been improving/supporting Linux gaming for almost a decade[1].
Apple figured out that privacy is a marketable product. They don't do it because of altruism, they do it because it makes extreme amounts of money.
Likewise, Valve figured out that doing good by the customer is a marketable product. Gamer loyalty to Valve is an insurmountable fortress that no other storefront has managed to pierce. The likes of TotalBiscuit and AngryJoe galvanized the PC gaming community into one that does not tolerate anti-consumer bullshit, and anti-consumer bullshit Apple does.
> The number of Steam Decks pales in comparison to the number of Macs, which now represent 30% market share of desktops, while linux is still stuck around 3%.
Which is completely irrelevant to gamers. A substantial amount choose to have a console and no desktop/laptop machine at all[2]. Linux is trending up [3], while MacOS trending down (and in addition is installed on fewer gaming machines than Linux overall) [4].
MacOS is completely and utterly irrelevant to gaming - unless you're talking about Candy Crush and the sort. This is unlikely to change unless Apple has a radical change in direction regarding gaming; both in terms of hardware and business model. They have clearly and loudly demonstrated that they have no interest in either: you can't use GPUs with MacOS, and their fork of WINE is neither free nor upstreamed.
It helps that by and large gamers on PC are savvy enough to pirate if stores get too frisky. It's amazing valve managed to establish such a moat that they can take their 30% cut.
That's because even with their cut the price consumers pay stays reasonable most of the time (and there is the second hand market). Thanks to sales and events you won't be paying 60 bucks for a 5 year old game. But thats how it works in the Mac App Store (I guess we should be thankful its not outright subscription yet).
The reality is that developers follow Apple commercial practices on their platform (can't blame them) and it doesn't lead to an interesting competitive market. In fact I would argue that most peoples are getting priced out of the Apple market, they just didn't realise yet. It seems that their strategy is making and accommodating only luxury/premium priced products, so they are going to make a good amount of money for a bit but in the long term their technology will become irrelevant. And this is exactly what's happening with their M silicon despite what the general sentiment seems to be. Apart from lower power they are not actually that impressive in real world tasks and particularly not in gaming (optimised or not).
In fact after switching to their own silicon, Apple has mostly increased the price to access a particular performance level, and I would argue that previous Intel machines were better gaming machines at equivalent prices points. Without concerning yourself about prices one can see that in best case scenario (taking Metal benchmarks for reference and extrapolating when needed) :
M2 can be about as good as an AMD Ryzen APU destined to notebook/laptops (6800U)
M2 Pro seems to be in between a RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 and it would be a slightly slower RTX 3080 laptop.
M2 Max can be slightly faster than a RTX 3060 but slower than a RTX 4060 laptop ; it seems to be equivalent to the Radeon RX 7700S (AMD describe it as a notebook part...).
M2 Ultra is irrelevant because it doesn't provide real improvements in graphics performance.
Realistically the only way to get this low level of performance would be to buy a laptop (not too high end) or to go for pretty old or entry level desktop part.
Now if we talk about AAA games, M2 is pretty much useless, it is somewhat better than previous Intel iGPUs but that isn't saying much ; you still won't be able to run anything graphically intensive at 1080P in an enjoyable manner. M2 Pro could potentially run some of the less demanding games with a decent experience (around 60 fps stable) but it starts around 1.5K in a desktop form factor (naked, no K&M nor display) yet it perform worse than cheaper 3050Ti laptops (that have all those things !). In laptop form factor it starts at 2.4K but is generally much worse in gaming performance than a similarly priced/specced PC laptop. And it feels that talking about M2 Max in any form factor is a major waste of time because it starts at 2.4k for the naked desktop but you can buy a better performing (for games at least) desktop PC and still have money left over to buy a Macbook Air (not even the cheapest version). So unless you really need that power for a macOS only software that properly use the new arch it doesn't make any sense. Not only very few will buy but they won't even think about gaming on it. It is unsurprising, after all the M2 Max has barely more Gflops than the 550$ Xbox Series X...
Before their own silicon Apple was not particularly good at gaming (especially on the entry level) but at least if you were willing to pay you could access a decent level of performance. It wasn't very competitively priced but the premium was worth all the other benefits. For example an iMac 27 inch with a RX 5700 XT would cost you over 3K but it was worth it for the whole package (especially the display). Now even if you want to spend 3K on a mac, not only you won't get any package at all but the graphics performance will perform worse than this 3 year old iMac. And that is before talking about architectural optimisation problem and general support.
So I believe Valve sees that and decided (rightfully) that it wasn't worth their time. Previously it was just a matter of making a build that could run in the macOS GUI and it wasn't too much work because both GPU and CPU APIs could be almost identical. I'm sure there were some differences at compile time but it didn't ask for a large parallel port and a decent amount of customers could get a pretty good experience (high end Macs and eGPU users). But now they would need to maintain a parallel port that would diverge in significant ways (even if we just account for the GPU code) and on top of that even the most high-end customers would only get a performance that would be considered ok for mid-range/high-end laptop. It is just not worth it.
Considering that the 3nm A17 Pro isn't really the revolution it was touted to be ; this is probably the right move. Not only Apple hardware is becoming irrelevant to enthusiast but it seems it will not improve for a while (maybe ever) considering the A17 already has heat issues even though it isn't a whole lot faster it looks like M3 chips will run hotter and use more power without really closing the gap.
Reality is catching up to the Apple arrogance, you can buy monopoly power on a technical advantage once but eventually competition is going to come around. Now is the time and I think it is only the start. Most cross platform software that needs a significant rewrite won't get ported to Apple Silicon, it doesn't make sense considering the weak hardware.
They'll come and say : but it doesnt use a lot of power. Yeah I would be pretty mad if my slow small car would use as much gas as Porsche...
> MS has devoted more effort in recent years to fixing gaming issues.
Could've fooled me. Their first party title Halo MCC is riddled with bugs (crashes, textures not loading, etc.) and has cheaters flaunting super speed in multiplayer.
Delta Halo on Halo 2 is practically unbeatable on Legendary mode due to crashes, unless you use the original graphics. The big was reported to 343 years ago, I think back when MCC was still an Xbox exclusive, and they still haven't fixed it. And they don't give you any warning about it, you only figure it out after the game crashes halfway through the level for the 5th time and you decide to start Googling it.
I use https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky to play CS2 on my M1 Mac. It runs really well if you change the launch options to `-nojoy`, turn on vsync (or else it may crash every couple minutes), and can bear some audio glitches.
> Whisky is built on top of CrossOver 22.1.1, and Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit.
Oh, this is so sick—I didn't know that anything that used the Game Porting Toolkit as something better than a developer tool existed yet. I'm going to make use of this.
I have a M2 Pro Mac Studio as my primary computer, and I tend to use steam's streaming from my gaming PC to my mac for casual gaming, but there are sometimes I just want to natively run a game that isn't supported in macOS or streams quite poorly with Steam's streaming.
(Why is my setup the way that it is? My gaming PC is in the garage—primarily to have a big VR playspace—and on early mornings it can just be too cold in there.)
In my experience with Crossover, it provides access to a lot of Windows games. And they are core to the proton/wine scene. So they are the shit. Gaming on your Mac with crossover is viable.
Thank you for the `-nojoy` suggestion, that seems to make it playable on CrossOver as well.
It's a shame that Valve made this decision, because Apple is pushing hard to make a gaming comeback on Mac (hence Game Porting Toolkit), so we might see those numbers change in the next few years.
Game Porting Toolkit isn't good enough, as it seems to be only for testing, still have to rewrite a bunch of shit in Apples proprietary nonsense and deal with heavy handed code signing crap.
Proprietary rendering APIs are extremely common (like… Direct3D) and completely not an issue. The ones on game consoles are /way/ more proprietary and unportable than Metal.
Game consoles have huge userbases that purchase games, thus the incentive to port is higher. You can also develop them from a Windows machine because all the tools are designed for that..
Mac userbase that purchases games is small, they need to make it easier if they want more games. And Apple also doesn't want you developing on Windows-- you need to use this bloody Mac.
Hi, Metal isn't my favorite graphics API either but for what it's worth
Metal was released before Vulkan, hence why they didn't use it (Apple should still adopt it though imo)
> Game consoles have huge userbases
They may not purchase as many $70 games but there are 1.5 billion iPhone users worldwide
> they need to make it easier if they want more games
Game Porting Toolkit is Apples initiative to give developers an easily accesible shim to make the porting process easier
I understand that in the past it's been difficult to develop for Mac on windows, but GPT seems to be a genuine attempt by Apple to help companies port their games over to Apple devices
FP32 performance of a M2 Max silicon that start at more than 2K is less than the 500$ Xbox.
Developers see that if someone has that much money to spend on a machine so uncompetitive performance wise, they should have money for a console. They wouldn't be able to give a better experience on the Mac anyway, because of hardware limitation.
PC's on the other hand can buy GPUs that crush anything even at the low/mid range (300$) ; and they can expect the system to be supported for years. It's a no brainer really.
Unless mac users go out in numbers saying they want to pay triple price for games I don't see anything happening.
> The ones on game consoles are /way/ more proprietary and unportable than Metal.
Right, but the console proprietary graphics frameworks have clear market demand. Macs are not a platform with which people buy to game, and metal is not a graphics framework with clear market demand. Apple will need to subsidize porting if they want to get a critical mass of games on Metal rather than OpenGL, i.e. the easy API to target. (Yes, I'm aware many game engines bring this for "free", but that doesn't mean these ports are competitive with their equivalent on windows on the same hardware.)
EDIT: I forgot iOS; that's probably what might make a difference this time. Unlike the Mac there is a clear market demand for gaming on that platform.
It's good. Vsync adds a small amount but my monitor is 144Hz so it adds less than half what a 60Hz would add (I think?). I've heard of some folks being able to play without Vsync and without crashes, but not me. Not yet at least.
They're probably right but it does feel like a negative feedback loop. I used to have an Intel MacBook, during COVID I had a blast playing COD: Warzone with friends while in isolation. But then I got an M1 Mac and that door closed. If it were possible to play I'd probably still do it from time to time.
That said, I probably wouldn't be spending enough on battle passes/whatever to make it worth their time. To be cynical, I wonder if it's less the total number of Mac players and more the amount of money earned from those players. Stands to reason anyone that didn't buy a specialized gaming rig is going to be more of a casual player.
Looks cool but unfortunately the only games I'd be really interested to play are the more modern ones my friends are playing, my understanding is the copy protection etc always gets tripped up by Wine.
Thanks to Valve investing a ton into proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d) copy protection are usually no longer an issue.
The problem is kernel-level anti cheat like EAC, BattleEye, Vanguard and EA's AC. The first two work flawlessly (on Linux) if the developer enables support for Linux (Halo, Apex Legends).
Apple wasn't also the most helpful when it came to motivating developers to port their games over. 30% fee for apps and no native development until 2014 with Metal. Windows had DirectX for a much longer time.
Besides the fact that apple demands far too much money from developers to "access their platform" they have also failed to deliver cross platform tooling so you need some fiddly Mac machines to be able to even build for their platform. Then there's the fact they broke backwards compatibility by using their own obscure processors so that makes developing for them a non-starter for many shops.
The thing here is if cross-platform tooling were available, it’d encourage the proliferation of “checkbox ports” which have barely been tested on actual Macs and never optimized for them, which one could argue is more damaging than not having ports at all.
As a game dev I'm OK with having to set up a mac to do initial testing of my port and make sure it works, but I'm not OK with having to do that again every time Apple makes breaking changes to their APIs and threatens to pull my game off the app store unless I port and rebuild. I don't have to do that on Windows or Linux (or on game consoles).
I assume that on Linux you ship with all dependencies included, because if you rely on whatever is supplied by the user’s distro’s package manager provided things will be breaking all the time.
Long-reaching backwards compatibility has never been an Apple thing due to how it encumbers OS development. The longest period old apps were supported was probably in the classic Mac OS era stretching from System 7.5 or so up through OS 9, but that was mainly due to how little the OS changed in that timespan (relative to contemporary OSes and OS X in the the same length of time). With OS X the bits under the hood have always been in a state of flux even if the user facing bits barely changed at all, which makes backwards compatibility extremely challenging short of shipping virtualized old OS versions (which brings its own challenges, such as having to patch 0-days those old versions for however long you plan to keep compatibility for each version around).
Windows’ backwards compatibility is good but has meant that many parts of the OS are effectively frozen in time which has complicated modernization efforts. I suspect that soon MS will bail and start telling people to virtualize software targeting anything older than Windows 8.1 or 10.
The bigger problem I see here is the required shift of paradigm: once users/developers are allowed such things it's no longer "Apple devices own their users", it's a more traditional "Devices belong to their users" which comes with a whole new level of problems that Apple can't possibly deal with.
The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation. There is a reason both major console platforms settled on the same hardware (AMD CPU & GPU). Sony's own teams crying out "stop with the fucking proprietary bullshit like cell". Now Sony even publishes its games on Windows! It's top selling MLB The Show ships on Xbox!
The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.
Yeah pretty much everyone who tried some sort of RISC implementation for graphics has let go in favor of the modern GPU architecture. Apple seems to think it knows better but the actual performance getting out of their hardware says otherwise.
The base was pretty good to scale stuff at first and was(is) enough in a mobile phone but it really shouldn't be applied to a console and even less to a full size computer...
> The issue is more likely the very different graphics implementation.
Metal and Vulkan are very conceptually similar. Most things you can write against Vulkan will work in Metal, only the API calls will differ. MoltenVK will even wrap Metal with Vulkan's API.
But the OP isn't talking about graphics APIs, they're making the absurd claim that ARM CPUs are "obscure". It's so wrong it borders on asinine.
The M1's TBDR GPU is very different from an Nvidia-style GPU. The different API doesn't actually matter much, but for best performance you'd want to rewrite the renderer whether or not you used a different API.
That's not the same as saying ARM processors are obscure. You've probably got at least a dozen of them in your house right now if not several on your person.
This subthread of people being just anal about a comment that we should all understand the meaning of.
Apple switched to ARM ISA and moved away from an open graphics abstraction layers. Those two things go hand-in-hand. ARM ISA isn't the problem, being a proprietary API on a platform that isn't of value for major game devs - that's the problem.
(FFS - Blizzard left MacOS, the one that released their titles on OSX one of the first.)
Arguing over what ARM ISA includes or not, is besides the point.
Yeah Apple should have realised something was wrong when blizzard went out with Overwatch and no mac version in sight because the numbers of macs that could run it decently well was so small even though it's not that demanding of a game.
Since then Apple has only made more excuse and even raised the price of their weak-ass proprietary hardware. They made their bed they deserve no efforts from anyone ; not developers not users. If they come out with competent hardware at a decent price then we will see...
That custom compiler is *checks notes* clang. Yup. Totally custom. Don't see that compiler anywhere else in the industry.
As far as high level code is concerned Apple's chips are just ARM chips. They've got microarchitectural features that put them ahead of other ARM chips clock for clock. But if you want to call their implementation obscure then by that twisted logic then AMD chips are obscure because they operate differently than Intel chips despite the AMD64 ISA.
It's a stupid distinction to justify an ignorant statement. Between iPhones, iPads, and Macs Apple has shipped a billion of their CPUs. At a billion units it's just dumb to suggest they're obscure. Different from Wintel PCs? Sure. But obscure? That's just asinine.
Playstation is a stable platform, where game devs get to squeeze every little bit of performance out of. It doesn't come out every year, with new features.
You can use normal APIs on consoles through translation layers (it works the same on the switch). The translation layers aren't the best so everyone just ends up using the proprietary 'API' in the end, which translates/gets inlined down to raw commands written to the GPU's command buffer at compile time.
Vulkan is probably the least used API across any games. Most switch games don’t use it either.
Honestly, this is the biggest division between gamers who obsess over API and people who develop gamers. API divergence is really not that big of a deal as long as you can do similar things.
That’s only if you publish through the App Store. A developer who publishes on their own website doesn’t pay any percentage fee, though they do pay 100$ a year for the developer account which allows to sign and notarise the app. A developer who publishes on Steam pays 30% to Valve.
Steam seems to be a far healthier ecosystem than the app store, though. You might actually be able to break through on steam whereas the Apple app store has a very ossified list of top games.
> Steam seems to be a far healthier ecosystem than the app store, though.
Not the point. Also, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest gaming platforms, catering exclusively to games, is doing better in games than a more general platform; it would be strange if it were the other way around. Also also, no one is defending the state of gaming on macOS, we’re all aware it’s bad.
Neither do apps distributed directly by third parties as long as they are signed etc. (you just need the $100/300 per year apple dev. account for that).
Steam charges a one-time $100 fee per game, so it’s still similar if upfront publishing costs are the issue. But certainly that $100 is less worth it if there are hardly any Mac players and thousands of Windows/Steam players.
There's a big difference: The Steam fee "will be recoupable in the payment made after your product has at least $1,000 USD Adjusted Gross Revenue for Steam Store and in-app purchases." https://store.steampowered.com/sub/163632
Its quite a lot to pay just to make a gamejam game available though, and that is where indie developers starts out. If you can't publish your toys without paying 100 dollars then it is a huge issue for onboarding new developers who just want to test what it is like.
The $100/yr is to publish to the App Store, which I don't think is the place for a gamejam game. You can download Xcode for free and distribute the resulting binaries for free.
Totally. One of the mods I have helps a little bit, but I was surprised how little it helps. Mostly just like allowing workers to help each other haul/construct.
On the one hand I wish it was better. OTOH in the back of my mind I wonder if part of the magic is forcing you to get into the nitty gritty and do you best to manually optimize and if you don't you accept the chaos and inefficiency--nearly a metaphor for life.
I was there, but didn't know that I could click on OS Version. Thanks!
I also wonder if Linux or Mac OS users are more or less likely to answer the surveys. Unless they've changed how it works, it is a pop up asking if you want to be recorded.
DirectX was also crappy vendor lock-in, but let's not pretend that the similarities go beyond that.
DirectX was vendor lock-in _from the vendor that owned 80-to-90-percent of the market_. Yeah, it sucked to be tied to their platform, but at least you were tied to the platform that nearly your entire target audience was already using.
Metal is vendor lock-in from a vendor that owns like, what, _maybe_ 10% of the market if we're being generous? And that 10% of the market is a group that largely is already disinclined to care about video games, so you're already unlikely to capture a noticeable portion of that already-small minority market segment.
It's a dumb move, really. Compare that with how Linux has started getting support for games: WINE and Proton are compatibility layers so that you as a developer can still target that 80-to-90-percent of the market and your game will (probably) work on the 1% that run Linux too without you needing to do extra work -- and Vulkan (and OpenGL before it) are ways of targeting _everything_...except of course Apple, but that's only because they tend to take an IE6 approach to implementing standards (that is: either everyone accepts our crap as a de-facto standard, or else we don't implement any standards).
10% of the desktop market maybe, for mobile games Metal usage is much much higher. Practically every 3D game on iOS is using it now.
This is also probably why Apple is holding out. They see their phone/tablet iGPUs getting powerful enough to be in a league similar to those in their laptops and believe that mobile and desktop gaming will eventually converge. Game publishers might not care about the tiny share of Mac gamers, but will they also feel that way about the far more numerous iOS gamers?
There’s been hints of this happening with some games straddling the line between desktop and mobile like Genshin Impact which is often compared to Breath of the Wild and now the upcoming RE4 remaster will run on iOS in addition to the other major gaming platforms.
Mobile gaming and desktop gaming are roughly as similar as Java and JavaScript, or to use another comparison, as similar as spray bottle and a fire engine.
This is true for many games, probably even most available on iOS and Android today, but there isn’t really a reason it has to be true. iOS has native support for great USB/BT controllers (Dual(Shock|Sense), Xbox, Switch, etc) so as long as there’s adequate computing power there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be capable of the same games one might play on a Deck, PS5, PC tower, etc, especially on iPad or Apple TV where the screen being used is larger.
That remains a purely-hypothetical future though. Not something that you sacrifice any shred of present-day market share for, in the hopes that someday all past trends of "smaller-form-factor devices are more limited than larger-form-factor user-upgradeable devices" will be reversed.
This is typical magical thinking from Apple fan user. I have a friend like that. They seem to think that somehow a chip that will be limited to 10w by its thermal envelope design (and even then last iPhone shows that 10w is already too hot) will be able to compete will chips that can use multiples of that with no issues. It seems to come from a belief that Apple is so much smarter and better than everyone else that they can basically make magic.
In fact, even if you would somehow find a way to divide power consumption of current competent gaming system by ten it would still not be enough.
And all that is before talking about the fact that peoples who games for hours on end tend to prefer displays bigger than 6 inchs...
Anyone with functioning brain cells can objectively understand that AAA gaming on mobile is a distraction at best and a waste of ressource when you are not filthy rich like Apple. But Apple gonna use marketing to say otherwise instead of using it's money to offer more competent hardware at better price...
Game developers generally may care to support Metal to get access to iOS, but this obviously isn't going to entice Valve. Valve wants to sell other people's games through their own store, not their own games through somebody else's store.
Or they could actually properly support and maintain OpenGL (or OpenGL ES, even). Or they could offer Vulkan. They don't even need to be native implementations, they could be Metal wrappers maintained by Apple. It doesn't take much.
On Windows you've been able to use OpenGL if you want, literally forever, because there was always a baseline version of it available with the OS (and then if you installed video drivers, you got a GOOD version of OpenGL.) Now you have the option of native Vulkan if you have drivers too. All of this is maintained collaboratively by Microsoft and the GPU vendors' driver teams. You don't even need a GPU, Windows has shipped software rasterizers for Direct3D literally forever as well (and the modern software rasterizer, WARP, is actually quite fast)
And on Linux you can either use OpenGL (natively), Vulkan (natively), or Direct3D (via Proton), and all three perform great and are reliable, maintained collaboratively by the Linux community and GPU vendors' driver teams.
Meanwhile on Mac your option is to write your own custom Metal backend, or hope that an emulation layer you get from a third party like MoltenVK will work good enough for your purposes and won't break when your end users install an OS X update, since Apple is happy to break backwards compatibility for any reason any time they want. If the build of MoltenVK your app ships with breaks you need to integrate a new version and ship updates to everyone.
Even if you did game on a mac in the intel days, you would get massive performance improvements dual booting into a windows partition, so that's what most people who were serious about it would do and that certainly doesn't help the numbers.
Yep, they don't care as long as they make billions. It's really horrible how macOS in general has become so lackluster when it comes to performance. When your competitors can extract more performance on the same hardware (that you designed !) it really shows there is something wrong.
But I guess they fixed it with the Apple Silicon switch : no direct comparison possible so they can pretend to be as competitive as they want.
I believe the AS switch was in part to avoid competing and the prices increases validate that...
I think there's some fundamental issues with gaming on Mac also. I've tried gaming on mac for a very long time, and games were always sluggish and fullscreen seldom worked correctly.
This is stupid. There’s been an explosion in the number of gaming-capable Macs since the M-series chips came out. It’s remained largely untapped. The reason “there aren’t enough players” is because there aren’t enough people doing games for Mac! It used to be an issue of hardware and OS support, but it has now become an issue of (frankly) lazy/biased/unimaginative developers.
This is a chicken and egg problem. I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 on my M1 Macbook pro, it's been a fantastic experience. The only reason I keep my Qindows machine around at this point is for the occasional game session. I've talked to many mac users over the years who were gamers but were marooned on consoles. So many unique experiences on PC that either can't be found on console or are objectively worse without a mouse and keyboard. Seems like money on the table waiting to be picked up.
Linux is strategically important for Valve to maintain a credible alternative to Microsoft. Note they don't even have to necessarily ever "pull the trigger" to force Microsoft to make sure they don't lock them out, simply having the credible option to do so is sufficient to achieve their business goals.
And having picked up a Steam Deck about a year ago now, going into it with the expectation that it would run maybe half my games and tending away from the AAA releases, I can say they have a very credible option. Valve can run almost everything without Microsoft now. Pretty much everything I have runs on my Deck just fine, since I don't do the multiplayer games that have aggressive anticheat on them. I almost don't even think about compatibility any more because it's just there, for what I do. This has spilled over to my Linux desktop, too; I switched it due to having my fill of Microsoft's belief they own my system, own my users, and can do whatever they like with them, and if that cut off all gaming it would have been fine with me, but in reality the spillover of Valve's efforts is that it works just fine.
Apple has chosen to make themselves strategically unimportant to Valve by making it probably even more difficult to support them well than to just give up and submit to Microsoft entirely. They could have played this role but have chosen not to, because in their world, this is relatively minor compared to what they want out of their platform.
So even if the user count is roughly the same, Valve is going to support Linux much more, and is pushing it harder.
Linux adoption is 100% incidental to to Valve investing in their own platform, which happens to be built on Linux. It has little to do with the technical merit of the platform where games end up. BSD isn't one of the biggest gaming operating systems because it's so great for games, it's because Sony needed an OS more free than Linux for their console.
> Linux adoption is 100% incidental to to Valve investing in their own platform, which happens to be built on Linux.
I'm not sure if you realized it but you are arguing the same point many others have been in this post. Apple is not investing in gaming, especially relative to their market cap compared to valve. Valve is making gaming on linux a reality because they are investing in it.
Apple has the money, they don't have the motivation to make it happen, because they don't want to participate on an open platform. That would be counter-productive to their goals of a walled garden.
If you buy into Apple, you cannot leave their walled garden and that's by design, with no plans on changing.
Especially DX12 giving so much more control has actually backfired in a lot of instances, because game developers don't treat PCs with the same optimization care as they do consoles. Consoles have standards (and reject bad builds), for PC you can always pull a Todd Howard and tell users to upgrade to compensate for their misuse of the APIs.
Windows has traction by market saturation, not the technical merit of their Graphics API.
It's merit is utterly irrelevant. It's good enough, and good enough with other avenues of investment win over "the greatest thing of all time" every single time.
Because the games are there. In large part because Valve is making it happen.
> Apple's indifferent (if not hostile) attitude towards gaming
They’ve been touting the abilities of Apple Silicon for gaming on their events. Their platforms support modern gaming controllers with zero setup. They had Hideo Kojima (and others) at WWDC. There are two separate sections on the App Stores just for games. They developed multiple technologies specifically for games: https://developer.apple.com/games/
We can argue if Apple’s gaming strategy is any good, but calling them indifferent or hostile to games does not align with reality.
At the end of the day, there is a path to switch from Windows to Linux for gaming (both playing and development) without requiring an investment in hardware. Switching to Apple for gaming effectively requires investing in new (at least to the user) hardware.
That's a pretty huge difference, and things like the yearly fees (even if they aren't expensive in practice) only make the switch less attractive.
No one wants to have to switch platforms to do one specific thing, we’d all prefer for the things we want to be available in the platforms we want to use. If you like Windows, you’re not going to switch to Linux for gaming. What the growing number of Linux games allows is for Linux people to not have to switch to something else. In the same way, the people who want to play games on macOS are the same ones who already use the platform.
But having proprietary APIs on Macs isn't going to get other desktop games to Apple, when Macs aren't nearly as numerous as people would like to believe.
Couldn't Apple do the same? Why isn't it working? You don't realize it but you are proving the counter-argument many are making. Apple refuses to contribute to an open platform for gaming, so they have to rely on converting game developers to work within their walled garden.
What are you talking about, you think linux came and courted gabe? NO! It's a free platform they can build upon and make it their own, so they did it. No one is going to pull the rug out from under them.
Also apple is fucking swimming in games, I'm willing to bet more gaming is done on ios than windows. It's just not games that represent 'the gamer'. No modern warfare 5000 on ios. I know that most days, even as I could be identified as 'a gamer' for the last 30-40 years, I spend more times playing games on my phone than I do on consoles or my pc. Part of that is just 'I always have my iphone' part of it is the games are often designed around short session length, part of that is most AAA game releases these days are wildly uninspired. Every once and awhile I can black-out a whole sunday just to soak in a big release (I imagine spiderman will eat a day or two whole in a few weeks, I know Baldurs Gate ate more than a few sundays since it was released)
It's sad not to see many games on macos, though the ones we get are generally ones I want. Aforementioned baldurs gate 3, mid tier 'indies' that are frankly amazing like Hades and Slay the Spire. I could care less if assassins creed 326 makes it to macos, or mordern warfare 754: even more jingoism. It hurt a little to see blizzard abandon macos with diablo 4 .. then I played it and well ... not so hurt anymore.
If there was enough money on the table waiting to be picked up, Valve would know that. They have incredibly fine-grained detail of their user base on Steam, and they have multiple economists on staff to guide their decisions. It isn't worth it to them, and it isn't on them to bust out of that chicken and egg problem. They fixed the problem they already had (fear of Microsoft screwing them) by putting their eggs into the Linux basket.
I certainly keep a latest-gen console around so that I can play cross-play enabled games with my PC buddies. I don't have the patience or space for another computer, so a console is the next best thing. I will never have the best graphics nor control over performance, but the trade-off is worth it.
I'm in this boat, for most games I use my PS5 because its got the big Sony AAA single-player exclusives. The Steam Deck is a perfect option for PC games that need a keyboard/mouse, like CS2, because you can plug it into any USB-C dock and use it as a desktop PC.
Indeed, I'm getting better performance than my 3 year old Windows machine with a 2070 gtx. I wasn't expecting gaming laptop performance from a mac, but I was pleasantly surprised.
That's one of the Asahi Linux (the ARM Mac Linux) GPU driver developers trying random games on Steam on Linux on an ARM Mac. Showing it is possible to run games. Nothing too specific, you can just skim it to see what games are booting. I recognize Portal 2 and Battleblock Theater.
Exactly. I am a casual gamer at best. I am an Apple power user. I lucked into a gaming PC a couple weeks ago for $50 at a thrift store. So I have a PC just for gaming. I think non MS users who game probably have the same. Likely a dual boot Linux/MS computer.
It is kind of annoying you can't game on Macs, however thats just how things are. Cars handle better than Trucks, and Trucks can haul more than cars. There is a lot of overlap in what they can do, but ultimately they have different specialties.
That said, my experience with Microsoft from a long time *nix users has been pretty horrible. I do think a lot of this is Microsoft, but a lot of it is going from being a poweruser to being a total novice is quite annoying.
I'm also a primary mac user and have been almost my entire life. I have a pc that literally does nothing but play games, it's a stupid expense at this point. I may not bother to buy another to replace this one when it's finally to slow to bother with. May be a console life for me.
Steam Deck is OK. Probably too expensive if you're not gonna play it as a portable ever, but not awful. The desktop experience is a jank-fest (the usual amount of Linux desktop jank, plus a whole pile more for some reason) but it's pretty good, actually, as long as you avoid desktop mode and stay in the Steam experience as much as possible.
It is too underpowered to do much gaming at 1080p (let alone 4k) except older games, but handles its native ~720p pretty well. You have to go into desktop mode to get higher res than that (on an external monitor), but you'll only want to do that for games that are both older (so that it can run them at tolerable frame rates at 1080p) and that really need the extra pixels, anyway. The Proton stuff works quite well, most things that run well on modern Windows in widescreen without a bunch of hand-ini-editing config tweaks or whatever work fine on the Steam Deck without much pain.
Decent option if you catch it on sale. Depends on what you play, though. Some folks find its mouse emulation touchpad thingy decent, but I found it a fun-killing chore for any kind of pointy-clicky-draggy games (Paradox, various tactical war games). But, you can play those games docked with keyboard & mouse and they're ok.
It's a hell of an emulation system for older console games....
If you’ve got a solid internet connection, streaming services have become pretty viable these days. I just stream GeForce Now to my MacBook, and just the fun novelty of playing Cyberpunk at 4k “on” a little laptop has yet to wear off.
Yup, generally I would agree. But as I commented elsewhere on this post, I like to install mods for my games which is not something I could do with just the streaming solution as far as I know.
I am a big Microsoft guy but I am about to have zero windows machines in my home.
The final justification for a physical windows desktop was to play games, but I haven't touched a single title in months. Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
My ideal tech stack at home is starting to look like one MacBook as you say. All the windows stuff I do for work is on a Windows365 desktop in the cloud. I've got a region within 10 milliseconds of my home office and it's been working out great so far.
Will probably get rid of these boxes before next year rolls around.
Could you elaborate on this more? What do you mean? What makes you a big Microsoft guy? I mainly ask because everything else you said seems contradictory of that so I'm curious your definition
> Gaming feels like something I am completely over at this point.
Which is why releasing games for Mac users has less sense, than Windows or Linux. You're probably in the category of a casual gamer, which is served well by mobile games.
I recently switched to Nobara Linux (a gaming focused Fedora spin) and it has run every Steam game I've thrown at it outside of Street Fighter 6 (which runs, but at low settings and multiplayer is spotty). Proton has done wonders for Linux gaming and after over a month without booting my Windows partition at all I don't think I'm going back.
+1. I can't stand Windows. I can't wait for the day I can use macOS as a daily driver for gaming (I already use it as a daily driver for everything else).
Not with the newer arm64 chips. The best you can do is a VM, which is going to not going to be performant for demanding games. It might work okay for older titles.
Part of this is probably related to Apple's pushing gaming a little harder with Sonoma.
The pool of players is so small because gaming has been neglected on the Mac for so long, while tech like Vulkan that might have opened the possibility of gaming on a Mac has been blocked entirely. Valve is probably spot on in saying it's not worth the effort for the users they'll pick up right now.
That said, now that Apple is at least presenting as if they're trying to change this, that user base could grow over time. The problem is that in the shadow of Epic's big battle with Apple over App Store rules, it would make sense that Valve is wanting to just NOPE right out of this arrangement. Why help build gaming on the Mac when the balance of evidence suggests it's just going to be used to drive you off the platform? It presents a risk to a chunk of Steam's install base for little to no benefit.
I'm honestly pleasantly surprised macOS still gets the support it does by Unreal engine, it would be really easy for Epic to deprecate macOS support entirely (albeit not in the consumer's interest).
No point in releasing and maintaining games for a platform that is actively hostile towards them. Even disregarding the whole Vulkan/Metal situation, Apple's complete disregard for backwards compatibility means any game that does get ported will probably just stop working in a year or two if it's not updated, so why bother?
Consoles give 6-8 years of guaranteed compatibility for a single console life cycle, and often extend that compatibility for another 6-8 years for the next version of the console. Is there any game that does not run on the console hardware that was current at the time the game was shipped that now doesn't because of OS updates?
For examples of cross gen compatibility, the Xbox Series console is compatible with approximately all Xbox One titles, the PS5 is compatible with approximately all PS4 titles, the 3DS was backwards compatible with basically all DS titles.
Really the notable breaks of late have been PS3 to PS4, and WiiU/3DS to Switch.
For examples of continued compatibility within a generation... every console ever? I think there were a handful of PS2 titles that had graphical bugs on the slim PS2? But that's going back over 20 years.
It is infinitely more than the number of iPhone apps that have not recieved updates in 6-8 years that are still runnable. Even mac apps will often have trouble in that kind of time frame.
You're also the one who expected "all" to work cross gen. My original point was just that "all" would work on the software for a given piece of hardware that worked on the original hardware. The fact that 99.9% also work on the next gen is a bonus, because the same gen compatibility already leaves Apple's backwards compatible story in the sand.
Games consoles don't release OS updates which delete a chunk of old APIs and break your game -- once you've released for a console, you can generally assume the game will work on that console forever.
No, it's not the same at all... losing software compatibility because you installed an OS update and buying an entirely new piece of hardware that never had compatibility with your software are entirely different and unrelated things.
The current situation of gaming with Apple computers makes complete sense.
Most of the people dedicated to playing games on their computer will at least want to upgrade the occasional part from time to time to keep up, which is impossible when everything is soldered together.
It simply has never been a decent platform for games, bar some mobile ports, due to its closeness.
That's a weird argument. The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds. And eSports titles generally do not change their minimum requirements too much to keep their entire audience engaged and FPS high. Not to speak of Intel rarely to never reusing the same socket anymore and the switch to AM5/DDR5 specifically making incremental updates unavailable to most people.
> The M1 is quite capable and can keep or or even outperform many current gaming value builds.
At the same price? I would be surprised if that is the case. You can get a used M1 Mac Mini for around $300 on eBay. For that money, you can get a used i5 business desktop and a new low-profile RX 6400 for about that. At that price point, you'll see much better visuals and framerate for most games on the Windows PC (or you could run Linux). The PC owner can then later buy a better desktop system and put the same GPU in it. And later still the PC user can upgrade the GPU.
With the M1 Mini, that's basically it, and if you want to upgrade anything, you are buying a completely different system.
I've generally been quite negative on Mac's prospect throughout this thread, but even I would expect a M1 mini to wipe the floor with an 8th gen i5 (or whatever businesses are currently retiring) and RX 6400 for the games that are supported.
Why would you think that? The CPU is likely to be a non-issue for lower end gaming and the RX 6400 has significantly better theoretical performance and memory bandwidth.
- People shouldn't buy Apple hardware for the games, but there's clearly an audience of Apple users (that have these devices for _other_ reasons) for a lot of games, so supporting it should be an easy win. Source 2 already had a Metal build (via Dota 2). Valve cut away a confirmed audience larger than Steam Deck owners.
- Don't get hung up on "the M1". Apple's higher end models scale quite well, the Pro is very common and the Max, while mostly a bad investment solely for games, would scale well if there were games to run on it.
Besides the other responses to your comment, many gamers are probably playing other games besides eSports titles - they'll also want to play more demanding games as well. Not many are going to buy a platform they can't upgrade the bits and pieces in.
Intel and AMD have multi generation sockets both newest generations can run on ddr4/5 and for most the bottleneck is still their GPU... stop inventing.
Intel has Sockets for one tick/tock generation. AMD is much better there, but especially right now AM4 is not exactly futureproof and AM5 is still quite expensive.
And which component bottlenecks is always relative to your resolution.
IIRC playing counter strike on Mac was wonky anyway due to Mac's mouse acceleration, so I super rarely played CS even tho I had it installed and liked it.
Funnily enough, you can finally turn off mouse acceleration in macOS Sonoma without jumping through any weird hoops that may or may not work anymore. It's a checkbox in the Mouse preferences pane now.
If Apple really wants games to bother supporting their platform of questionable financial viability, they may need to learn a lesson that other platforms figured out a long time ago: you can pay a developer a bunch of money and they'll make their game run on your system. I know that's a big ask for a small company with $166 billion of cash sitting around, so I don't expect it to happen.
Sad to see Mac development shops bailing on the platform as it finally comes around to having useful GPUs in all of their computers. Blizzard used to have all their games cross platform up until Overwatch and now Diablo 4, but apparently it just wasn't worth doing anymore.
I think it's just been decades of the Mac mostly sucking for gaming, people don't even think about buying games on it. If you want to play games you already own something that's better for that.
Game devs already support their primary mobile platforms, that make them the most money. Macs are basically for work and low intensity recreation at this point. Gamers don't buy Macs, due to low customizability.
And yet Apple is putting a bunch of work on the technology side to try and get more games on to the Mac. So someone at Apple has finally decided it matters a bit and they could go after this.
Where I expect them to fall short is on convincing major games that Mac support actually worth doing, regardless of what tools Apple can provide for it.
They're at the point of waving around a handful of games (Death Stranding, No Man's Sky, Resident Evil Village) and having Hideo Kojima on stage at WWDC. But I don't think releasing new dev tools on its own is going to take them from here to Counter-Strike 2 and Diablo 4 making their way back to Mac support.
I can empathize with giving up a platform that has little ROI. As a Mac-only computer gamer (after 30+years of PC gaming) it still makes me sad to see it abandoned.
I can say that the game seems to run fine on Crossover. GeForce Now is also a great option if you're on Ethernet on great Internet.
> GeForce Now is also a great option if you're on Ethernet on great Internet.
It's a competitive shooter, the kind of game people play at the lowest settings to reach 400 fps. I doubt many CS players will tolerate the added latency of streaming.
The way the camera works in FPS really strains the compression. It works way better for games with a top down camera. let me know if i'm wrong, this has just been my hunch.
I don't think the situation is as bad as it's made out to be. Yeah, you're not gonna get the latest triple-A looter shooter 3000. I've never enjoyed those. It may be a small minority, but enough games still get native ports that when I'm travelling with only my mac I'm never short of things to play.
DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of graphics doesn't extend past "hobbyist".
There's an alternate universe where Apple opened up Metal to work across platforms and languages, and that would be the successor to OpenGL. As it is right now, we're in this complete mess like we were in the 90s, where there's this hodgepodge of stuff being written using OpenGL and DirectX and Vulkan.
Maybe if I learned it better I would learn to love Vulkan, but with the little I've played with it, it is absolutely dreadful. Doing even a minimal amount of stuff with it requires hundreds of lines of arcane, hard-to-read code. I spent two days figuring out how to make a cube rotate, and then I was done. OpenGL wasn't exactly "ergonomic", but it was substantially simpler to get something built with it than Vulkan.
Metal, on the other hand, is a genuinely pleasant graphics API. I find it reasonably straightforward to do a lot of stuff, it's reasonably easy to intuit what the code is trying to do, and at least in the things I've played with, it performs just fine as well.
If Apple had pushed for Metal to be the successor to OpenGL, I think the world would be a better place now.
Vulkan is sort of a post-API API. It seems to be designed specifically with high performance render pipelines in mind, and "end users" should interface with it through an intermediary layer.
Ie, you might prefer bgfx[0], cinder[1] or openframeworks[2].
Yeah, I know, though for awhile on certain parts of the internet, whenever people asked for the best place to learn OpenGL, you'd inevitably get some comment like "OpenGL is deprecated, learn Vulkan", and I just wanted to strangle them and say "These are different things! It's like telling them to learn machine code instead of C".
My most recent stuff has been playing with FNA, which more or less works across platforms and wasn't even terribly difficult to get working on Mac with F#.
Still, a guy can dream about a world where Metal was the new standard.
Unfortunately this is partially true unless we get more OpenGL updates. OpenGL doesn't support hardware ray tracing and some other newer features that are only supported in Vulkan\D3D12.
That's been a frustration of mine as well; the OpenGL people kind of abandoned it in favor of Vulkan without a viable alternative.
I guess the typical response is that people will use something like a game engine anyway, so I guess fair enough, but I want something lower level than a game engine without having to get a doctorate in graphics rendering just to draw a rotating cube.
WGPU (which is not web only) papers over many of the fiddly bits of Vulkan. It is lower level than OpenGL, but not frustratingly so. Although I agree: OpenGL is still situated in an abstraction sweet spot, and could use some love/replacement.
I mean, they've done a good chunk of contribution to open source; they're one of the biggest contributors to Cassandra, for example. I believe they also contribute a lot to the FreeBSD kernel.
But I more or less agree; Apple kind of likes to "open shit up and then forget about it" a lot.
Catalina removed 32-bit support, so Mojave was the last version with it, so Valve has had since October 2019 to get their 64-bit shit together — arguably since June 2018 when Apple informed everybody that Mojave would be the last OS with 32-bit support.
Apple started telling people that 32-bit was deprecated something like fifteen years before it was actually removed. Everyone except video game programmers got the message, which says something about video game programmers.
Well it can't be the total number of Mac users, which is higher than the population of some countries. Maybe it's just that there aren't many Mac gamers who want to play Counter-Strike, just like there wouldn't be many Xbox owners who want to play Mario, even if it was available for Xbox.
I think this is laughable. The excuse that "there aren't enough players" is wild, because by all metrics Counter-Strike and CS2 is one of the largest multiplayer games of all time. Currently #1 with over 1,200,000 active concurrent users on Steam by a margin of 2x over the closest game as I write this.
So if a game that is consistently in the Top 5 most played games by concurrent users (For the last 20 years) doesn't have enough to support MacOS. What does?
I always struggle playing games on my Mac because they keep updating the OS to disallow third party tools to disable mouse smoothing. Mouse smoothing is the bane of my existence.
The Steelseries ExactMouse tool still works for me on the absolute latest version of macOS Sonoma, without updates. What tools are you using that keep breaking?
FYI: Valve had macOS binaries and scripts for CS2 since the Limited Test. They were constantly updating the depot with macOS files and when it finally released to the public, a few weeks ago, they decided to sack macOS support.
Can't totally blame them for their decision but the developers that worked on the macOS port either wasted their time or they figured out it wasn't worth the effort with all the restrictions Apple has on their OS.
I saw the announcement and was quite excited as I haven't played CS for a long time, and the new version looks great. I was looking forward to playing it on my speedy (last gen Intel) Mac...but I guess that's not happening. I doubt it will run better than mud on my Windows box, and I don't feel like buying a new computer just to run one game.
It would be very interesting to see how many players of Baldurs Gate 3 were/are on mac, it is one of the blockbuster games of the decade after all. It runs flawlessly and mostly on ultra settings on a M1 max. Instantly swiping between a browser and the fullscreen game without flickering is just as good as it gets, regarding gaming user experience.
Your stats would be off, because the macOS build took another 2 months to move out of early access. I do play on my Mac now, but I also did on my Windows Handheld before due to availability.
I'm not sure I'd call a (very very good) turn-based RPG a blockbuster game of the decade when titles like Fortnite and Minecraft exist with orders of magnitude more players from a much wider range of demographics.
I think it's more about not wanting to port the steam client to arm than it is about porting the game. There's source engine games ported to ppc and arm platforms after all.
> I play Dota from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook Pro and it runs more than fine.
Dota on macOS doesn't ship an arm binary and uses moltenVK to translate graphics api calls, it's on borrowed time if valve doesn't want to ship proper binaries as rosetta isn't gonna exist in a few years.
The irony is that the steam client is basically a web app container. It’s high time they invest in making steam a universal cross platform and cross architecture app. They’ve gotten by with a mediocre app for a really really long time.
I miss the old flat style steam had when I was a kid - the simple vgui toolkit used in all their games of the era was simple and responsive. Now they have the same 2003 vgui elements in the app still but entire sections of the app have been redesigned with some CEF based web view thing that randomly likes to turn into a nonresponsive black blob on the screen until you force kill and restart or simply not appear on the screen at all.
They still keep it updated and even fix macOS specific bugs so I'd hope they'd keep that up. But yeah, I guess once Rosetta goes they'll probably just throw the towel in.
I hope they don't. Source is already pretty much isa agnostic, it isn't difficult at all for them to set up the infrastructure to ship universal binaries for macOS and it just seems to be a power play on Valve's part.
Can't really blame Valve here, the issue at hand is that Apple have deliberately choosen to shun games and believe that they can wall garden even the graphics stack.
When in reality it's just more cost for the studio to port over and debug.
• Even years after the introduction of Apple Silicon, the Steam STILL only has a legacy Intel version which requires Rosetta. Despite being little more than a glorified web view, apparently they can't even bother to compile it for the newer CPUs.
• They outright LIE about macOS compatibility: The store pages of some games show a big warning banner about being 32-bit-only and unable to run on Catalina+, BUT THEY RUN FINE!
So Valve is not only not trying, they seem to be actually sabotaging Mac gaming. It's a good thing I started switching to GoG even back when I was still on Windows, and making most of my purchases there than on Steam with its additional DRM bloat.
As for the hardware, even my previous fan-less MacBook Air M2 with just 8 GB RAM ran games like Baldur's Gate 3 at a playable framerate, and my current M2 Max just blazes through everything (that's available).
Dota 2 (also built on Source 2 like CS2) works completely fine on Apple Silicon, albeit running through Rosetta. Not sure what excuse the CS2 team has when the smaller Dota team can do it (they even fixed a bug preventing it from launching on macOS very quickly)
The performance hit from Rosetta makes it tough, and Proton hasn't worked on MacOS since before the first public release (before that, it actually did). It's not worth the effort for a platform that routinely snubs the gaming sector.
The whole reason Proton came into existence is because of very efficient translation layers from DirectX to Vulkan, DXVK and VKD3D. WINE was compatible and performant before the Vulkan translation layers but lacked modern DirectX version support to make it viable for gaming.
So without Vulkan support from Apple, Proton is not really transferrable at all.
for many (probably most) ideas and concepts you probably could apply them to macOs with just a few tweaks
but code reuse will be much more tricky in multiple ways. 1st while both macOs and desktop Linux are unixy what proton has to interact with is much more OS specific for quite a bunch or parts; 2nd when proton devs run into some issue with linux OS services/tooling they can (and have) fix the problem upstream, they can't with macOs; 3rd you can do much more "unusual" things with linux, some of them might matter for proton
most importantly proton for mac would be either way a non small money investment and that investment has to pay of in some form
if you only look at game sails I would be surprised if is worth it for either mac or Linux
I my opinion what Valve gains from proton is not earning more money through Linux game sales but a "safety net".
Windows has shown that if they can they would (at least for non enterprise licenses) love to lock down Windows similar to iOS, e.g. allow only their app store and and not allow 3rd party stores on their store. While the last time they tried that it didn't work out and EU is pushing regulations to reduce how much such app stores can be locked down this is still a _sever_ risk for Valve.
So by making large parts of their library "good enough" usable on Linux they always have a way out by providing a in-between of a console and a open Linux desktop which people can run on their hardware or for which they provide hardware ... like the Steam Deck (which is a bit different focused as a handheld but Windows is also not locked down at this moment in time). As a bonus the know-how and code stack they are building allows them to fan out in more areas even if Windows never get's locked down. E.g. they could create an actual console os with a immutable locked Linux core but then use stuff like flatpack-like container technology to still allow using it like a fully free Linux desktop for most use-cases but due to it being locked down at the core they can promise copyright protection and anti-cheat similar to a console to investors and game (weather that is ethical good is another question unrelated to this argument.)
So proton provides value in form of "potential" and "safety net".
But proton for macOs doesn't have any of this benefits. More so then windows macOs is increasingly getting more locked down and you could call Apple "king of the walled garden business strategy".
So for proton for macOS it has to be clearly profitable, which it doesn't seem to be.
And while Apples seems to wanting to get back into gaming on desktop slowly, they also tend to have quite a strong preference for software being developed with their proprietary tools. So while it might seem a good idea for apple to cooperate with Valve short term, long term I would speculate they wouldn't even like something like proton, because that can diverge sells away from their app store and isn't under their control but (Steam being) a part of the "experience" people might start to value a lot.
While it lacks a user-friendly installation process, I've had a great experience so far with running the windows version of steam via the game-porting-toolkit.
CS:GO is a competitive shooter. Macs are not widely popular with that type of customer.
It has nothing to do with the technical limitations or business decisions of Apple (especially since Valve would distribute via Steam, where Apple's cut wouldn't factor into it).
If they ever ship to iOS, they'll have to support Metal, and once they have to support Metal, they'll get Mac support essentially for free. That will change the calculation on whether Macs are worth supporting for them.
Because instead of releasing CS2 as a separate thing, they released it as an update to CS:GO. So those 1% of CS:GO players that were happily playing on macs a few weeks ago are SOL now.
What does this have to do with engines? AFAIK, Valve developed their own engine "Source 2". At the end the article contains
> Regardless of numbers, one of the reasons Valve is reluctant to develop CS2 for Mac is that Apple devices do not provide native support for the Vulkan API that the game is based on. Vulkan was designed to succeed OpenGL and address some of the latter's shortcomings, and while there is an open-source library called MoltenVK that provides a Vulkan implementation on top of Apple's Metal graphics API, it still lacks some of Vulkan's advanced features.
Valve isn't saying there is some technical problem with Metal that prevents game engines from using it, so how are other game engines supporting it relevant? Valve isn't supporting it because too few of their customers use Macs for it to be worth it to Valve. It may be worth it to other engine developers, or maybe those other engine developers are wasting their time/money, but in either case that has nothing to do with it not being worthwhile for Valve.
Valve publishes the relevant statistic btw. They have less Mac customers than Linux. Mac users are fringe and just aren't very relevant to Valve.
>...while there is an open-source library called MoltenVK that provides a Vulkan implementation on top of Apple's Metal graphics API, it still lacks some of Vulkan's advanced features.
The existence of other games/companies that do choose to support MacOS is irrelevant. Valve isn't those other companies, they're making their decision based on the statistics of their players, not because they think it's technically impossible for games to support Macs.
To be honest it seems like you're a bit offended that Valve is dropping a platform that isn't used by ~99% of Valve's x, so you're saying essentially the same thing but with a sour grapes twist. That's why you brought up iOS market share another comment with a smug sort of "gotcha" tone, despite iOS obviously not being relevant to Valve at all.
Listen, nobody is denying that MacOS and iOS are relevant platforms generally, but they aren't relevant to Valve and this discussion is about Valve. There's no reason for you to be upset about this.
As a gamer, I'd never invest in a Mac ... you can get 2-3x the PC for the same price, and you can upgrade it for 5-10 years. I don't want to buy a new $2k Mac every 5-10 years to keep up with game requirements. I'll use a Mac when my employer buys me a $2.5k MBP though.
Apple insists on making everything difficult. No support of opengl or vulkan. You can use moltenVK, but you own the issues and bugs that arise from that layer, get fucked. No openXR on their upcoming headset either.
The fun doesn't stop there in Apple Land if you're interested in hobbyist development, you get obnoxious code signing requirements, you can only deploy a few iOS app to the devices you paid for per week, and they only last a while before they cease working and you have to redeploy them.
100% this, Apple wants complete control over the distribution and tooling used on their platforms. While it does provide advantages for their hardware development I think it just ties back to them wanting 30% of any application or gaming revenue.
The answer is pretty simple: Apple doesn't care about gaming.
This goes back to Steve Jobs who didn't like gaming and apparently saw it as a waste of time. John Carmack mentioned this from his time working with Jobs.
Apple is now a leading gaming company -- not because they want to be, but because they're in a billion pockets and lots of those people enjoy gaming.
The reason the tooling and developer experience sucks is because Apple doesn't have an advocate for gaming at the VP or C-suite level.
PC games that could be ported to Mac and published on the App Store are less likely to do so since there's a lack of support from Apple's side. They care more about mobile games it seems.
To be fair, 30% is what Valve as a distributor charges (glass houses and all that). Valve the game developer is a hobby project subsidised by Valve the distributor.
I've never seen an API get as much hate from big tech as OpenGL got over decades. It started with Microsoft trying to kill it, and now Apple. The proprietary alternatives are not really even that much better. Just vendor lock-in for the sake of vendor lock-in.
I think OpenGL is important as a simple, "universal" legacy standard. As long as it's supported (with reasonable performance), through something like Zink it's fine.
As someone who is new to graphics programming, the pervasiveness of OpenGLES3/WebGL2 is really great. It's a single relatively-simple standard that is almost everywhere.
Desktop OpenGL isn't simple, it's hard to use and even harder to debug, and it doesn't have reasonable performance unless you know which APIs are mysteriously slow.
WebGL is covering up a lot of stuff for you, but it's better to find/create a modern "simple" API on top of a modern rendering API if you want one.
Why? OpenGL works just fine and there are plenty of resources about OpenGL programming all over the internet, unless you're a triple A studio, you don't need what Vulkan has to offer, it will only slow down your development by adding needless complexity.
It isn't just triple A studios moving to Vulkan. Emulator development, for one, is moving there too. RPCS3, Dolphin, etc all see big time benefits to moving to Vulkan.
OpenGL drivers are well known for being buggy as well. For a very long time, AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows were terrible and saw little love given that DirectX on Windows is where most of their effort went. It seems that Vulkan drivers are more performant, less buggy, and treated more as a first class citizen across both Windows and Linux.
And OFC, Apple deprecated OpenGL and they are stuck at 4.1 from 2011. At least with MoltenVK, you get Vulkan->Metal and a modern-day API to talk to without having to deal with Metal directly.
OpenGL doesn't necessarily vanish, it becomes a higher level abstraction instead of something graphics drivers must natively speak. I think we are all better off if graphics vendors stick with supporting primitives and let higher level tools be built on top.
While Apple does indeed make things difficult, they're not actually the problem in this case.
The reason mac users are complaining is because Valve released this as an update to CS:GO rather than a separate game.
I don't think mac players would really care that much about CS2 not being mac compatible if Valve hadn't done that. They would've shrugged and said "ok, I'll keep playing CS:GO then". But they can't do that, and that is 100% on Valve.
Valve could have handled it better, but you can still play CS:GO. Right click > Properties > Betas. I've used it to play a mod that hasn't been updated for CS2. There's very little playercount though.
I used to wish for the day that macOS gaming could become a thing. Now I seem wiser or more understanding of larger issues. The mac desktop/os is great. It would be great if many games supported it natively.
However for the game makers where's the payoff? It's been long enough of Apple by their actions making it not a suitable platform as a gaming target. Even if it was today, there's little reassurance that there won't be some tech/policy change that impacts the publishers and gamers in an undesired way.
Today I use Apple hw/sw products in a commodity manner. Most apps/tools I use can or could easily be run elsewhere. I'm not interested in walling myself into anyone's garden.
I have been using a MacBook Air for less than a year and I don't see the greatness. Screen is okay, touchpad is a bit better but a lot bigger than at my HP Elitebook, battery time was twice better but it was degraded faster than elitebook, it is 3 hours vs 5 now for the same regular devops tasks (it was 4/8).
Mac OS... It is horrible. I can't actually describe this, maybe I'm just a linux binded user and gonna prefer Manjaro KDE forever.
Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.
Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.
> Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
Steam does run on Mac but the client and the game library are 2 different things. Not sure if you noticed the shrinking library and Apple's attitude towards the Mac games. They don't care about it. 0 support for 32bit games migration, unconventional api support (compare the usual d3d/vulkan land). Unlike ios, Mac does not have a hold on the game market
You're right they don't have a hold on the game market but they do care about gaming, just in an Apple kind of way - they want control of their stack, hence Metal as the only fully supported rendering engine. They're actively looking for developers to produce games or port them with the game porting toolkit.
If their approach is to buy a few notable games occasionally like resident evil, not sure how long that would last. I actually would like Apple to just extend their support of IOS games to let them run seamless on Mac. There are both freemium and premium games on IOS. Just throw in some control api support and let the user install them on Mac. But Apple doesn't even bother with this low hanging fruit
I don't think people play counterstrike because they are cheap. A lot of my money goes to computers, and I still end up playing a lot of counterstrike. It's because it's fun.
What? The only monetization is skins. You also need to pay for the premier matchmaking. CSGO and CS2 is top of the Steam charts with about 1mil active players, not because its free, but because it is a great game.
Valorant is there, but CS is practically its own genre.
In CoD, Destiny, and CS you all shoot guns, but the difference is stark between them.
For competitive gameplay, and gameplay feel, CS wins.
You saying Macu users are too rich for the game? Have you SEEN skin prices in CS2?
Saying Valorant is 'there' is dismissive. I would argue a lot of the changes in CS2 were made to stay relevant to Valorant competitively.
CS2 doesn't feel remotely competitive in its current state on 64t. It's a huge problem that Valve thankfully are taking seriously and patching every few days. I am curious where they will go with the networking re: subtick.
I wish Valve would talk more about their decisions to remove several settings and things like lefthand. It feels like it is intended to keep things more similar across clients (IMO more competitive and level), so they don't end up in the config-maxxing hell that is TF2.
This is a misconception. Apple has something like 90% of the market share of all computer shipments above $1,000 in cost. Those shipments dwarf custom builds. Also, you can visit the Steam hardware survey, expensive ($1,000+) PC builds are quite rare, actually maybe only about 10% of the Steam audience, which neatly matches the expectations for who owns the premium end of the market.
Not sure why I’m being downvoted. Anyone can easily verify what I’m saying by visiting the Steam hardware survey. I know that this does not match the expectations of HN readers!
It's de facto a pay to play game (you need to buy "Prime Status" to play main game mode since it went free to play), monetization is fair gameplay-wise, only cosmetics.
> Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.
Assuming people who play f2p games don't have to pay their hardware too.
>What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story.
That isn't accurate in this case because the rich gamers have more expensive setups than a macbook/imac. If you are spending 100,000+ on a cs skin you also have a 4090 (ie. not macos). You are thinking in terms of 'pro' software and ios mobile games.
When you ask people about the "economy" they repeat whatever they heard in the media about the "economy" because they don't want to sound out of touch.
This is why the answers on all the economic surveys are that the responder is personally doing fine but thinks everyone else is doing badly.
This is kind of a complicated story. I'm not really trying to talk about whether you're right or wrong. You're saying something objectively true, it just doesn't mean what you think it means, and it doesn't translate to the role that CS2 plays in Steam, or how the CS2 audience differs from the rest of the audience on Steam.
On the one hand, the top of the app store is free to play experiences - apps like Spotify and Tinder, games like Monopoly Go.
There are places where "nobody" (close to 0%) pay for Spotify subscriptions (representative of all subscriptions), like Japan, even though the iPhone is more popular there than anywhere else in Asia, comparable to the US, so there's some additional cultural elements to software spending that are a long story to tap into.
And, in your life, you might know 1 person who (1) has spent money (2) in Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, or a Supercell title, and (3) is above the age of 25. There's something weirdly idiosyncratic about Roblox; and then, something about the off-brand-studios-you've-never-heard-of games. 11 year olds and Monopoly Go players, they are somehow bringing those titles to the top of the App Store.
If iOS had a similar tiny marketshare relative to Android as macOS does relative to PCs, nobody would maintain free to play games for it. Those games are monetized by whales and advertising, including cross-promo, which are scale plays. There are no "small" free to play games.
It's a totally different audience. iOS has both audiences, but the people who literally monetize in F2P are smaller in size than pay-to-players, even if they produce greater revenue overall. The pay-to-players are the audience I am talking about, because I'm trying to say that that's whose left in small platforms, and macOS has a lot more of them than whales.
An illuminating example would be that the Epic Game Store has Fortnite. And yet. Who cares about the Epic Game Store? Epic has so many incentives - it practically buys all the sales of finished games up front, to give them away to its users for free. But that's actually kind of the opposite of what they should be doing for a healthy ecosystem.
Fortnite monetizes free to play users better than anything else on EGS, so you can't make a huge F2P game on it. And by the way, Valve has CS2, DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2, #1 #2 and #8 on the charts that have only 2 other F2P games on it.
How much do you think a gaming rig costs? OG CS was famously cheap to run, but CS2 is not the same thing. Sure, you don't NEED to pay $2k but I'm sure players are paying as much as they possibly can to have the best gaming setup
The thing is, is that CS2 replaced CSGO (which at one point was pay-to-play, which means people were required to sink money into a title which is now completely upended), removed a lot of content (whole game modes are missing and there's no plan on adding them back into the new version; maps have been removed, and to an extent some of the customization has been removed), and removed Mac support, which was previously very much supported with CSGO.
They've also changed the game mechanics when it comes to determining when gunshots "register", which has very much changed the dynamic of the game and has vastly raised the bar for casual players to win even a single round.
Further, ranked matches are handled differently now. It used to be that even losses contributed to your initial rank after a couple of placement matches. Now, you must win 10 games before you get a rank. Since placement games (games you play before you get a rank) are more or less randomly matchmade, it means that less skilled players are going to be up against impossibly difficult opponents to the point that even a single win is impossible, thus you're trapped in this unranked loop and will never achieve meaningful matchmaking with people of your own skill level.
Further, "Prime" status was originally a barrier for cheaters since you had to buy it, and it made it such that prime status players were only matchmade with other prime status players. Since cheaters run the risk of getting permanently banned, they'd have to buy Prime over and over again - something Valve betted would be a way to filter out a large percentage of cheaters. However, they started to grant Prime status to people who had leveled up enough, which removed the cost barrier. Since cheaters level up quickly, it's become sort of a moot mechanic now.
And no, Steam won't refund Prime status purchases, which are around $15.
Couple the matchmaking differences with the shot registration differences, the removed content, and the dropping of support, and you have what is essentially a completely unique game that Valve replaced CSGO with.
People are rightfully very upset. Many people bought CSGO for e.g. MacOS support. Now that game has been removed from their libraries with little to no recourse. Steam said they're issuing refunds for a few select Mac users but I've yet to see anyone say they've been granted such a refund.
It's a messy situation that Valve has handled in one of the worst ways possible, learning no lessons from the Overwatch 2 debacle that did much the same thing (and was received equally as poorly) or from Ubisoft's repeated similar behavior.
valve should offer a refund to anyone who has predominantly played on macOS over the last year or two.
other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here. maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time, you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested. and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time, hard to take that part seriously...
> other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here.
You don't see an issue paying for a game only to have it forcibly removed from your possession?
> maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time
This isn't the official pool (if you're talking about competitive pools), and no it doesn't happen all the time. Valve never removed a map from CSGO, only added them.
> you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested.
Oh right, community servers. I forgot about that, thanks for reminding me. Community servers are no longer listed publicly in a browser like they used to be. Now you have to google search for servers and connect to them directly via IP and port. They removed that functionality as well.
> and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time
Not really. The only time people complained about it prior to CS2 was when they made it server registration to combat cheaters, which introduced a lot of randomness depending on who you asked (nobody really knows how it works, but people could feel a difference at the time). Now they do sub-tick registration which is an approximation function that is being gamed by non-casuals.
Here's a good video on the subject[0]. Ignore the bit about mouse DPI, dude had no idea what he was talking about with that.
They're trying to offer 128 tick-like gameplay without having to pay for the increased compute and network costs of doubling the current 64 tick servers by faking hit registration, which is having an adverse effect.
So it's not merely some "git gud" complaint. It's a very valid complaint over a major change of game mechanics from a previously purchased titled that was effectively stolen away from you.
You should be upset by this. This is not how companies should behave.
Nobody cares about 3D APIs anymore. If you're serious about publishing a game you use whatever API the vendor gives you, including all the idiosyncratic ones provided by console manufacturers (NONE of which use OpenGL or Vulkan). If you're serious about publishing a game in 2023 you will be using a commercial engine -- either your own (if you're big like Valve) or someone else's -- and that wraps and abstracts away the 3D API details.
Besides which, Metal is a fantastic API, at least as capable as Vulkan and less cumbersome to use.
The difference is that these 3 companies already have a market, Apple doesn't even bother trying to convince people to get games on the platform, other than iOS. I don't think they care about gaming on macs at all.
It allows them avoid being compared to PC's . They don't have worry about someone saying the Mac sucks for playing game X... because nobody will even try.
It bolsters their image that they're not just another PC.
I've been deeply coupled to Apple since 2005 and it's safe to say they've made stabbing attempts at getting serious about this a dozen times, real serious ones too, but inevitably it doesn't matter.
The most recent one that comes to mind is Mac x VR marketing push...4 years back? Ended it complete tears, SteamVR isn't even available for Mac anymore. And it was depressingly obvious at the time there was no reason for it to work out, it was clear ARM Macs were coming very soon.
The fact that they view a stabbing attempt as a step toward being serious seems like a big part of the issue. In order to have a successful platform, you need to be dedicated to the idea of being a platform and continue pouring in the resources whether it feels like it's aligned with this quarter's business themes or not.
Making games is already difficult, nobody wants to do extra mile to support a platform, Valve made the right choice with proton, unfortunately, that means less incentives to have a native gaming experience on Linux.. I'd say the tradeoff is worth it
Apple should do something similar, but they'll never do since their users expect quality over anything else, wich is why they market Game Porting Toolkit as a testing platform, as opposed to a shipping platform for Valve's Proton, even thought it's basically the same project, 2 different culture, Valve doesn't care if the experience is worse
Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft either offer direct support of APIs very similar to PC ones, have first-party supported wrappers or otherwise have well supported tooling which supports the platform.
Eg Microsoft's graphics API is also just a DX12 variant, Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, and while I'm not informed about Sony's current systems, their APIs were previously fairly close to OpenGL/Vulkan in design. They all also put in a lot more effort to accommodate game developers than Apple's "my way or the highway" approach to everything.
On top of all that, as dedicated gaming devices, they have momentum going for them which results in game dev tooling being ported because, well, they're devices meant primarily for gaming. They also all have many first party studios with very popular IPs. Apple has none of this going for it.
Microsoft and Sony also happen to be bringing a lot of popular first party titles to Windows, so the console APIs are only more likely to drift towards the Windows & Linux standards. Even moreso with the consoles mostly just being regular PCs now.
Pretty much no one uses Vulkan on switch, and gl only gets used by small indies that aren't using a major engine and couldn't/wouldn't partner with a porting studio. NVN is just significantly faster than either of those (and the switch needs all the help it can get performance wise)
Dealing with code signing bullshit at work this week. I hate that we support Apple at this point. We have like 5-6 engineers who are even capable of doing this work across a massive organization. It's a total nightmare and I'm never surprised that game devs don't want to deal with the constant headache.
Apple does seem pretty determined to keep games off their platform.
PSA for all OS vendors: nobody is going to write software for your walled garden anymore. Nobody. The more you try to force this, the more you will simply repel developers from your platform.
The OS graphics/app API wars are over and everyone lost. For GUI people are going to use Electron, Tauri, or maybe Qt. For games they're going to use OpenGL or Vulkan.
Even big companies are avoiding native development. What do Slack and Discord use? Electron.
You sound like a web developer, but that's not how games work. Console games are all developed for proprietary graphics APIs; if you're not touching one, it's because you're using someone else's engine.
More importantly, Vulkan is low level and has to be written for a specific GPU brand for best results, so your code using the same API would not behave the same way.
Apple is known for the fancy screens, the retina screens, high end graphics.
But then what, falls down in gaming?
It seems like a no-brainer they should have the best ports of games, and people would see them and be "wow, that looks great, I'm going to buy an apple".
It's like the mirror image of a guy who came to a filmmaking subreddit asking whether the clearly gamer PC he was looking at, would be good at editing 4k/6k video.
Answer was overwhelmingly, 'well, you COULD by doing thus and so, kinda, or just get an M1 Mac?'
I'm thoroughly OK with people playing games made for PCs on PCs. Knock yourselves out. It's a big industry. I'm not in it. :)
I remember, years ago, being quite envious of people playing Space Engineers (if I remember the name correctly). Years later, I never did get to play Space Engineers, so I did other stuff. Basically none of it was game stuff. I'm cool with that.
Mac computers are more capable than they have been for a long time, if ever. All it takes is for a developer to have the will to make it work on Mac.
Recent game releases for Mac include:
- Lies of P
- Baldurs Gate 3
Soon - Resident Evil 4
Slightly older release - Resident Evil Village
Maybe Valve just can't hack it? They also flamed out on their VR support a few years back, only releasing a few betas before they gave up and cancelled the whole thing.
I know Apple and Linux are two very different things, but this complete abandonment of macOS by Valve should be concerning to anyone who champions Valve for their support of Linux. It's a bad look for their commitment to Linux.
Valve never had a commitment to Linux beyond trying to break Microsoft's monopoly.
Don't get any illusions that Valve loves Linux, or Linux users. They just hate being locked into a Microsoft ruled monopoly.
And picking between MacOS and Linux as a platform to compete with Microsoft, it really is a no brainer that you'd pick Linux due to the freedom of development it offers.
You're the one with the correct point of view. If Microsoft comes to Valve with a sweetheart deal for the Steam Deck that truly unlocks more sales and compat, they'll drop Linux like a box of bricks.
I honestly find it absurd that we have a perfectly good solution for gaming in the form of online streaming services like geforce now, but they somehow just haven't gained much adoption. Games not being available for a platform should be a thing of the past already.
You mustn’t play CS if you think cloud gaming services are anywhere near suitable for this game. Milliseconds matter, and streaming your game sets a hard cap on how quickly you can respond; a cap much much higher than most players will tolerate.
Imagine playing CS on an streaming service! People are chasing more FPS and better hardware to see their opponent a millisecond sooner, talking about tick and subtick impact on the game.
Playing single player games on a streaming service is fine, but competitive games? I don't think that's gonna get too much traction.
Was really hoping M series would open up Mac gaming, but definitely a chicken and egg situation along with Apple not really doing much to help. Still hoping things get better with game port toolkit and Mac Gpu getting better every generation.
For now the best way to game on a Mac IMO is Sunshine/Moonlight and just run a gaming PC somewhere in the house, works perfect.
I think Apple is starting to push hard to get into the gaming market. You already mentioned Game Porting Toolkit as an example, but they have been regularly giving the floor to AAA game studios during Apple's big keynote presentations. Notably, Capcom is bringing RE4 Remake to Apple devices, following Resident Evil Village. Death Stranding is also getting a macOS port soon.
If I had to guess, I think Apple is actually going out of their way to financially incentivize these companies to port their games to Mac, even if sales are low (e.g. paying them to port the game). Throwing money at it may be a good way for them to get out of the chicken and egg problem.
I don't think you can dismiss 1.8 million concurrent players on CS:GO back in May of this year as just "peer pressure or nostalgia". Plenty of people obviously still find it extremely fun, myself included.
CS:GO had a huge botting problem, game being free to play + rewards you with items that you could sell on the market place, people would afk farm crates, massively inflating the player count
CS is currently at an all time peak of 1.8 million concurrent players, including an actively growing pool of new users. There is no marketing for game, let alone "peer pressure." It is exactly the chase to outrun becoming "outdated" by adding faulty game mechanics that these players are looking to avoid.
Part of why I like CS so much vs modern 'live service' games is that I can play whenever I feel like it and I never feel like I'm missing out on something happening, and when I come back after not playing for weeks or months, everything's the way it was when I left.
It’s just that not having ADS into iron sights or vaulting in 2023 game feels archaic. The movement is incredibly clunky; I suppose to preserve that 2000 feel.
Sure Valve didn’t want to break the expectations, and lose a skin-selling cash cow. I was just hoping it would be more than a VERY subtle facelift and more of a very incremental update than a 2.0
The marketing was simple - they replaced CS:GO with the new version. It’s like Twitter changing to X.com without marketing the new brand
> It’s just that not having ADS into iron sights or vaulting in 2023 game feels archaic.
And thank god. Nobody was asking for thi.s
> The movement is incredibly clunky
Clunky to some is incredibly layered to others. Simple, yet oh so difficult to master, but crisp to input (well... there's some nonsense with the subtick system currently making it less crisp than players want, but that can be overcome). CS has multiple movement based subcommunities for a reason.
(from your original comment)
> Just move on.
Because you enjoy the mechanics of other competitive shooter titles, doesn't mean that everyone does. You seem to think that if everyone played Apex, Warzone or Tarkov they'd suddenly enjoy it, and presumably their PC or some other factor limits them. Newsflash: plenty have played the others and come back to CS.
It's akin to telling a rugby player: hey, why are you still playing rugby? American Football is so much better. Rugby is an archaic game from the 1900s.
The days of this being relevant are probably numbered though, because at some point we will lose Rosetta. But I'm going to enjoy Antichamber [1] on my mac while I can.
1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/