Cracking the Mac Gaming Market

The silicon isnt the only thing holding back Mac gaming. Support for gaming controllers is great, but otherwise bluetooth is an awful standard to use for anything gaming due to the poor latency. Then there is the poor refresh rates on almost all Macs, including the Studio display. And then the difficulties in using audio connections for discord or streaming... and so on.

Choosing a Mac to play games is the same as buying Brunello Cucinelli and then hang out with friends at an outlet village.

"Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max."

That's a MacBook Pro that starts at $4100. What's the addressable market there?

Mac as a gaming platform went through at least 3 recent, destructive transitions: Metal, killing 32-bit (and the vast majority of its existing library), and moving to Apple Silicon. Apple can make iOS developers jump through moving hoops because that's where the audience is, but high-end gaming studios won't put up with that (without "encouragement") just to access the tiny Mac base.

There's a rather big cultural gulf to bridge if Apple really wants to get serious about gamers. I doubt the very lively indie scene has any patience for that App store nonsens, and as opposed to iOS app devs they already have a well functioning eco system of stores.

Then there's the pure aesthetic divide. Not just angular black and rgb leds versus sand blue squircles. But also having keyboards with mechanical switches (few of the prebuilt have mac layout) and mice with more than one button. I've tried to program a gaming mouse on a Mac and it was not a pleasant experience, it ended in me giving up.

The Mac App Store is a red herring here. It’s not even used by Mac apps much anymore, so why world it be a reason gaming isn’t happening on the Mac.

Steam is available on Macs. Everybody is already on Steam. So distribution isn’t an issue, except perhaps for the most casual of casual gamers.

That little story about "Untitled Goose Game" is a perfect little microcosm of how stupid and arrogant Apple is when it comes to developers. All of the other gaming platforms have enticed developers to it by creating a platform they actually want to work with, or made a platform that has such a glut of users that the developers will deal with a *reasonable* amount of extra work and restrictions to get their game on to it, such as gaming consoles. Or both.

Apple has *neither* of those things. It's a small userbase of non-gamers -- no one buys a mac for gaming. And their platforms are some of the most developer hostile in existence right now. The fact that a major game release got tossed for the mac because of their shitty, pointless, and terrible app store review just goes to show how little Apple actually cares. And they have done so much else to make it hard for games to release on the mac, like to name one example, assuming everyone else is just going to jump on board with their proprietary APIs that are harder to work with than the competition.

I am reminded of the words of Captain Pellew from the Hornblower series: "I judge a man by what I see him do, not what others have tell me he has done." And in spite of everything Apple tells us, what we see Apple doing is being actively hostile and malevolent to developers, including game developers, and not actually caring about making the mac a gaming platform, or really any of its platforms other than maybe iOS, and in that case they seem to care the most about getting a cut of the unethical free-to-play money.

Right now, to write a game for Mac hardware, you have to use Metal APIs. Meanwhile, to write a game for PCs, you use a completely different set of industry standard APIs. Game companies aren't going to port their games to Mac if they have to do a massive rewrite to make them perform properly. And for all their talk about how powerful their GPUs are and how good the gaming experience is, Apple has shown no interest whatsoever in implementing an industry-standard API for MacOS.

Apple talks the talk, because it makes their silicon sound good, but they don't care to walk the walk, and until they do, there won't be a lot of games for the Mac.

Apple's hope is obviously that it will be sufficient to convince iOS devs to make their games available on Macs.

Anyone remember Game Sprockets?

The promise of gaming coming the Mac has always just been around the corner.

If gaming exists at all in Apple’s DNA, then it is very much a recessive gene. Apple execs just don’t get it.

This is actually really simple: is Apple developing first-party games in-house? More than one? Ongoing support, fully funded? If YES, Apple execs finally get it. If NO, nothing’s changed and you can continue to ignore anything Apple says about gaming. Every successful game platform vendor needs original IP, and until Apple’s willing to make that commitment, gaming is not happening for them. Apple is willing to do this for TV+, it boggles the mind that they don’t perceivethe same need for gaming.

Re: Wraith’s comment — there is simply no way anyone’s playing 2023 AAA games on a 2012 Mac Pro unless you’ve replaced the motherboard. You can’t run something like Cyberpunk 2077 reasonably without a modern graphics card and memory bandwidth. AAA games from 2015 don’t really count.