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)
