Macs are the future of gaming, whether you like it or not!

true, wow and minecraft already run native on apple silicon®
also indie masterpieces, such as tunic and disco elysium
it will be over for peesee once valve drops dota or cs on m1

>We are Apple and we are superior
>every developer will optimize their games around our hardware despite us having next to no marketshare

>Macs are the future of gaming because you can just target the specific hardware so it's like developing for consoles
>We just need developers to actually make games for Macs
>Just make the devs learn the special snowflake graphics API that nobody has ever cared about
>Also PC is dying because it's too expensive, that's why Mac is the future

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I'm not even gonna bother to read. I'm a dev using unity and we were all set to release on Mac, until we saw performance changes by 80% on different latops just a couple of years apart or in different price segments. We can't release on mac because we can't handle over 50% of our users making returns because *their* macs can't fucking run the game.
Mac will be the future of gaming when it's windows.

Eh, it's not completely impossible, but pretty unlikely.
Reasons:
- Macs are still fucking expensive. Americans may be able to buy them, but a ton of third-world countries won't buy them on principle. That's a huge install base.
- The only API for games that is well-supported on Mac is Metal. So you have to explicitly support Macs, since you create rendering code only for Macs. It's less of a problem with huge engines, but indies will have a hard time and it will probably have worse support overall.
- Steam has spent like 15 years being uncomfortable with being overly dependent on Windows, they don't want to be locked down to one platform and drown if they ever decide to take a cut. It is technically possible that Windows will just change to MacOS as the dominant platform but Steam sure will be fighting it.
- Did I mention that Valve's Proton compatibility layer that made gaming on Linux possible at all translates to Vulkan? I don't know, maybe Mac users have a workaround, but otherwise we run into the same "gaming library incompatibility" issues.
- Oh wait, there's an even bigger problem, if it's M1 we're talking about. It's ARM. Every PC game in existence uses AMD64, a different CPU architecture. I heard Apple had a recompiler called Rosetta to deal with that, but all my knowledge of computer science tells me it's gotta be slow as shit. Could be wrong, though.
- You know what ultimate "hardware and software tightly integrated" called? It's a fucking console. Why would PC users who like power and flexibility move to walled garden of Apple? Why would console users who just love to plug in and play move to something that requires some minimal effort to install? And if Apple provides a variety of hardware then it both changes their entire business model and gets rid of this advantage by necessity.
Overall it's really unlikely with the way Apple's been positioning itself. I don't think it cares to commit to becoming dedicated to gaming.

never ever

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>Macs are still fucking expensive. Americans may be able to buy them, but a ton of third-world countries won't buy them on principle. That's a huge install base

Macs account for the majority of laptop sales over $1000 worldwide. Honestly Apple could have become the gaming platform of choice years ago when they switched to Intel chips and Nvidia GPUs and still supported OpenGL, but Steve Jobs had some weird dislike of games that’s carried over after his death. Apple could still be an excellent gaming platform but they insist on their own special snowflake Metal API that basically no-one outside of Apple has any idea how to use.

Fuck no, valve tried on around 2010 and look how it went, apple goes out of his way to fuck any Dev with it's shitty drivers and dumb fucking proprietary graphics API, mac will forever be a small minority on computer gaming.

I'm up for it, I don't have any love for Windows. I actually like macOS more than Windows, and M1 is very power efficient, isn't it? If it can run AAA games without turning into a housefire, inject it to my veins. Otherwise, fuck off.

>Implying Apple won't throw money at the problem until it goes away
In era of Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and whatelse Apple managed to make a streaming service that recently overtook Amazon to be the third one most popular.
They have infinite money.

>The only API for games that is well-supported on Mac is Metal.
Metal 3 now has 100% feature parity with DX12, and MoltenVK is a direct Vulkan Metal translation layer. In a year or two Proton for Mac is bound to be released.

When people recall Ballmer's push for Windows to be an "anti-Unix" they forget it wasn't only about system interchangeability, but also static linking vs dynamic linking, which effectively makes Windows forever backward compatible, while MacOS and other Unix systems eventually lose compatibility with older software if system libraries or their features become deprecated.

That implies Apple throwing money at gaming. Apple don't like gaming, they only like having passive income from gacha games on App Store.

Sure they can pay for those macports. Just like Google paid lots of money for Stadia versions.

You see how well that worked for them so far.

I don't think you can say Valve really failed yet, gaming on Linux has become a lot more viable, and you couldn't really succeed while it wasn't if you're a gaming-related company promoting Linux. Sure, Steam Machine failed, but they kept at it and Deck seems a lot more popular. It did take them a literal decade though, but it wasn't like they committed all their resources to it or anything. It was a slow-burn thing.
While Linux isn't dominant or anything and there's no particular reason to believe it might become dominant any time soon, the situation did become a lot better and it's not just plain impossible anymore.
The thing is, Valve committed to their decision even when it didn't pan out at first. Apple could theoretically just dump all their money into gaming, but they seem perfectly happy selling luxury devices and ignoring gaming altogether. It's entirely different.

Is MoltenVK even good? Is the translation 100% or even just the most used subset? I remember reading it was pretty bad, but it was years ago. Never had a Mac myself.
It's nice that Metal 3 is finally on the level of other APIs but it sure took them a while. It's a huge disadvantage, and you still only want to target it if you're a big engine or you really care about Mac. MoltenVK could change that, but I think it needs to be production-level for that, not enthusiast-level.
I still don't get why they didn't just give up and implement Vulkan. I mean, I think Metal came out before even DX12 but I'm not sure why they're so committed to it by this point. They're not fucking Microsoft with de-facto monopoly.