Hmm, imagine an Apple M1Max based gaming console. Bam!!
Yes priced at only 2X-3X (scalper-priced) PS5 and the latest Xbox and maybe 4X-5X a pretty well equipped PC that can also cover computing needs too. I would guess an Apple console would be specially engineered so that there would be no way to get native macOS or iOS on it for more utility either. Put the gamer in a situation where they can either buy this Apple MAX console or a PS5 + Xbox + Windows PC and see what all but the fan-niest choose.
Never-the-less, this MIGHT be (sort of) coming if the rumored Mac Mini "Pro" rumor pans out. Or if that gets only M2, perhaps the Mac Pro Jr rumor? I can't see either being remotely price competitive with the latest gaming consoles though... and since both of the console makers spend/subsidize big for big games, I don't see the big games coming due to a simple lack of financial incentive: we can make a lot of money here or little there- which should we choose?
If Apple wants to be a gaming company, they need to compete in more ways than great hardware. Else, perhaps the word "lite" should be applied here... a lite gaming company? They are already that in a big & successful way. Building next gen hardware doesn't bring the programming investments. See countless next-gen consoles in the past that never got the traction.
If they really want a serious bite of this space, they might want to do what the others did: spend a big pile of cash to buy some game programming studios, stop waging "our way or the highway" war on independent gaming companies, show gaming companies how they can make MORE money coding for Apple Silicon than they can for Windows/PS5/Xbox (especially tricky with the first cut of all revenue being 15%-30% right off the top) and probably throw some money at good gaming companies on top of that. It seems they need a "billions" investment pool for quality games much like the "billions" investment pool for AppleTV+ programming.
Else programming businesses face a simple decision: we can spend countless hours and dollars coding for this incredible MAX chip that is in a fraction of only new Apple laptops, which is a fraction of all Silicon Macs, which is a tiny fraction of all Macs AND give Apple a first big cut of any revenue we can get right off the top...
...or we can put those same resources towards a market that is at least 10X larger (near infinitely larger if compared only to MAX-based Macs) and/or to a console markets proven to pay much more than a $1 or maybe $5 for games and likely get great games subsidized and/or exclusive money to boot. Hmmmm, what should we do?
This is basically a "put your money where you mouth is" situation. Will Apple do that? If so, then this could actually go somewhere. If no, then Mac gaming remains largely as it has been for decades.
Why would it be that expensive? The MacBooks aren’t even that expensive and they come with a screen and keyboards.
The M1 Max MacBooks start at $3099, that's pretty damn expensive. The screen is going to be at most half of that, and the keyboard will be what $100?
The PS5 is $500.
So yeah, a M1 Max console looks like it'd be a lot more than the PS5 unless Apple changes its pricing strategy.
The majority of PC Gamers don’t play with the most expensive hardware. A small, but vocal, percentage spend stupid money gaming hardware.
Look at the specs for the average AAA game and the M1 machines will fall within them. Sure, you’ll not be playing with graphic settings set to Ultra, but on any latest AAA game you’d have to spend thousands to do that PC or not.
I agree that Apple chasing ever higher margins over market share is strange. If they went back to a 30% margin and took 10-15% off the RRP of their Macs they’d move a lot more of them now that they have such a strong key selling point.
Sadly Tim Cook is obsessed with beyond greedy margins.
It isn't about "the most expensive hardware" but rather the minimum hardware. To play even average Steam games at 1080p at 30fps you need an Intel Core i5 with Nvidia GTX 1650 (or AMD Ryzen 5 with AMD RX 570 equivalent). A Windows machine with those can be had for $700. The cheapest MacBook - whether Intel or M1 - with the necessary graphics power costs at least twice as much.
Marketshare and Mac sales have increased. Financial reports aren’t “PR”. They aren’t even advertised.
Sales have increased. Market share hasn't increased because Wintel and ChromeOS sales have grown almost as fast. Yes, Wintel and ChromeOS sales increases will taper off as workers and students return to offices and classrooms but lots of people will have swapped out their Intel Macs for M1 Macs by then too. Apple played these same games during the iOS vs Android wars era - which are now all but over - with their quarterly "record iPhone and iPad sales with unprecedented numbers of people switching from Android to iOS!" statements. The market share remained 15/85 for the former and 35/65 for the latter with the exception of supercycles like the iPhone 6 and iPhone 12 launches, and even then the share reverted to normal within a couple of quarters after the supercycle ending.
Same deal here: globally Apple was slightly under 7% market share before the M1 and is now slightly over 8%. And the biggest seller is the MacBook Air, whose 8 GPU cores wouldn't be enough for Steam even if one of them wasn't disabled.
Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.
As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.
As a AAA segment gamer, I previously used to be able to play most games on my Mac. Either ported to native code or running in Windows by way of Bootcamp. Since Mr. Cook took over, I can't find any other explanation to Apple's attitude visavi serious gaming, than a personal dislike of these games. Hence, Apple hardware has gradually become a completely lost cause for any serious gamer.
Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.
And the reason for the lack of market share is the cost of Apple machines. Back in the Intel days, the entry point was $1000 for a dual core 1.1 GHz CPU that would have barely been able to play the 99 cent mobile games or the ancient stuff like Portal on Steam. For that you can get an Intel Core i7 device with a midrange Nvidia GPU.
The switch to Apple Silicon has made things worse. Despite what Apple's PR is willing to allow you to believe, market share has not increased. But now the RAM on Macs can't be upgraded and there is no third party GPU support, even over Thunderbolt. Your "you can't blame weak GPUs" is false. While the M1 in the Mac Mini, MBA and entry level MBP has CPU performance comparable to many gaming machines, the GPU performance is nowhere close (on games anyway, not the Final Cut Pro stuff that Apple designed and optimized it for). To get RTX 3060 performance you need to spend $3300. That would get you an RTX 3080 system easy. Or two RTX 3060 systems with enough left over to buy an iPhone SE 2020.
That is also why the "Apple needs to take gaming more seriously and invest in it" talk can't be taken seriously. The pricing just isn't competitive and the decades' old "total cost of ownership" sales like that Apple pushes doesn't work in gaming because hardware gets upgraded or replaced every 3 years - or less - in order to be able to play the latest games. No one who is even halfway serious about gaming is going to buy a Mac. What you want is for devs to ignore this, create or port games for macOS anyway and lose money.
I don't even believe there is a real avenue for console gaming for Apple. The PS5 and the XBox One X cost $500. The M1 Mac Mini? $700. So the idea of Apple producing a machine with equivalent graphics power for $200 less than their current 8 core GPU device just isn't happening even if Apple chooses to emulate Microsoft and Sony and sell it at a loss. Maybe more things could be done with iPhone and iPad gaming, but they have tried Apple Arcade and it didn't have an impact, mainly because they didn't move nearly as many Apple TV units as they hoped (again, cost).
"And the reason for the lack of market share is the cost of Apple machines. " => Have you seen the price of high-end gaming PC's (laptops & desktops)? They're not cheap. They're definitely right in the same price range as the new MBP. Apple went out of their to compare them to an MSI and Razer gaming laptop.
"The switch to Apple Silicon has made things worse. Despite what Apple's PR is willing to allow you to believe, market share has not increased." => This is true but market share numbers only take in to account new systems sold. In addition to that, if you listen to Apple's financial conference calls, they always go out of their way to say that 50% of new Mac sales are going to first-time buyers. That means even though market share isn't growing on a quarter to quarter basis, the total Mac user base is increasing. About a decade ago there were 65 million Mac users. Today it's around 130 million. And in the last two fiscal quarters, Mac revenue has surpassed even iPad revenue.
As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.
As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.
FYI: Game Center wasn't discontinued.
As an app it was discontined back on iOS10. Since then of course some of the features have been integrated directly in the OS, but not all of them.
"Previous Game Center features that are no longer available include:
Status
Profile photo
Ability to add friends
Ability to see friends' games and stats
Relying on app developers to support Game Center makes using these features tricky. Developers can support all Game Center features, some of them, or none at all. There's no consistent experience with Game Center, and it's difficult to know what features, if any, come with a game before downloading it."
gatorguy said: "Previous Game Center features that are no longer available include:
Status
Profile photo
Ability to add friends
Ability to see friends' games and stats
?? I guess you haven't looked at Game Center recently. It allows you to use a Memoji or text for your profile image, set a nickname, add friends, invite friends to multiplayer games, and see what friends are playing and what their scores are. It keeps track of your personal achievements by game and has the standard array of privacy settings for your profile...'Everyone' (anyone can see your achievements and recently played games), 'Friends Only', and 'Only You'. You can also turn on/off 'Connect with Friends' and 'Nearby Players' per the multiplayer invites.
gatorguy said: "Previous Game Center features that are no longer available include:
Status
Profile photo
Ability to add friends
Ability to see friends' games and stats
?? I guess you haven't looked at Game Center recently. It allows you to use a Memoji or text for your profile image, set a nickname, add friends, invite friends to multiplayer games, and see what friends are playing and what their scores are. It keeps track of your personal achievements by game and has the standard array of privacy settings for your profile...'Everyone' (anyone can see your achievements and recently played games), 'Friends Only', and 'Only You'. You can also turn on/off 'Connect with Friends' and 'Nearby Players' per the multiplayer invite
FWIW I've avoided updating to iOS15 for now. Is that where the new functions were added? I'm not a gamer anyway and wouldn't have paid attention. Thanks for the update and correction.
Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.
Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.
All Apple needed to do to justify being described as a games company is invest in producing games, which they do for Apple Arcade:
This puts them in competition with other games companies similar to how investing in movies and TV puts them in competition with movie companies.
They could make some moves to boost Mac gaming, maybe they will over time. It looks like their priority is iOS gaming due to the volume of users.
Apple could buy their way into gaming on the Mac by buying a big game company like EA, Take Two, Ubisoft, Activision, Crytek. Each would come with a game engine (Frostbite, Dunia, CryEngine). Crytek would probably be the cheapest option, some of the others are valued at tens of billions. Tencent is supposedly looking at buying them:
They don't have much of a games portfolio though. I don't think Apple owning an engine would help them much, a lot of the engines have support for Metal anyway and Amazon has an open source game engine based on CryEngine.
Apple would benefit more from a large games portfolio and popular IP that they can make new titles with. If they owned EA, they'd attract millions of players with exclusive Mass Effect games. But EA is $40b and they would run into some issues because a few games (like the next Mass Effect game) are being developed on Unreal Engine so they'd have to pay Epic a cut of the sales.
Developing new exclusive games is far too slow a process for Apple to gain a foothold in gaming. The other companies own dozens of studios and would produce at least 10x the yearly output of Apple owning a single studio.
It looks like their strategy is to leverage the player volume on iOS and get those games working on Mac. That will cover a lot of the casual games market. For the Mac side, I think their best bet is to do what Valve is doing to get Windows games on Linux with a compatibility layer. Once there's a few thousand games running, gamers will start playing on the Mac and buying games there and the developers will follow with native ports.
Social gaming is what keeps players on a platform like Roblox, Minecraft, GTA Online. Apple is trying this with an upcoming game in November that works on all their devices and exclusive to them:
Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.
Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.
All Apple needed to do to justify being described as a games company is invest in producing games, which they do for Apple Arcade:
This puts them in competition with other games companies similar to how investing in movies and TV puts them in competition with movie companies.
They could make some moves to boost Mac gaming, maybe they will over time. It looks like their priority is iOS gaming due to the volume of users.
Apple could buy their way into gaming on the Mac by buying a big game company like EA, Take Two, Ubisoft, Activision, Crytek. Each would come with a game engine (Frostbite, Dunia, CryEngine). Crytek would probably be the cheapest option, some of the others are valued at tens of billions. Tencent is supposedly looking at buying them:
They don't have much of a games portfolio though. I don't think Apple owning an engine would help them much, a lot of the engines have support for Metal anyway and Amazon has an open source game engine based on CryEngine.
Apple would benefit more from a large games portfolio and popular IP that they can make new titles with. If they owned EA, they'd attract millions of players with exclusive Mass Effect games. But EA is $40b and they would run into some issues because a few games (like the next Mass Effect game) are being developed on Unreal Engine so they'd have to pay Epic a cut of the sales.
Developing new exclusive games is far too slow a process for Apple to gain a foothold in gaming. The other companies own dozens of studios and would produce at least 10x the yearly output of Apple owning a single studio.
It looks like their strategy is to leverage the player volume on iOS and get those games working on Mac. That will cover a lot of the casual games market. For the Mac side, I think their best bet is to do what Valve is doing to get Windows games on Linux with a compatibility layer. Once there's a few thousand games running, gamers will start playing on the Mac and buying games there and the developers will follow with native ports.
Social gaming is what keeps players on a platform like Roblox, Minecraft, GTA Online. Apple is trying this with an upcoming game in November that works on all their devices and exclusive to them:
Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.
Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.
All Apple needed to do to justify being described as a games company is invest in producing games, which they do for Apple Arcade:
This puts them in competition with other games companies similar to how investing in movies and TV puts them in competition with movie companies.
They could make some moves to boost Mac gaming, maybe they will over time. It looks like their priority is iOS gaming due to the volume of users.
Apple could buy their way into gaming on the Mac by buying a big game company like EA, Take Two, Ubisoft, Activision, Crytek. Each would come with a game engine (Frostbite, Dunia, CryEngine). Crytek would probably be the cheapest option, some of the others are valued at tens of billions. Tencent is supposedly looking at buying them:
They don't have much of a games portfolio though. I don't think Apple owning an engine would help them much, a lot of the engines have support for Metal anyway and Amazon has an open source game engine based on CryEngine.
Apple would benefit more from a large games portfolio and popular IP that they can make new titles with. If they owned EA, they'd attract millions of players with exclusive Mass Effect games. But EA is $40b and they would run into some issues because a few games (like the next Mass Effect game) are being developed on Unreal Engine so they'd have to pay Epic a cut of the sales.
Developing new exclusive games is far too slow a process for Apple to gain a foothold in gaming. The other companies own dozens of studios and would produce at least 10x the yearly output of Apple owning a single studio.
It looks like their strategy is to leverage the player volume on iOS and get those games working on Mac. That will cover a lot of the casual games market. For the Mac side, I think their best bet is to do what Valve is doing to get Windows games on Linux with a compatibility layer. Once there's a few thousand games running, gamers will start playing on the Mac and buying games there and the developers will follow with native ports.
Social gaming is what keeps players on a platform like Roblox, Minecraft, GTA Online. Apple is trying this with an upcoming game in November that works on all their devices and exclusive to them:
I expect Apple has a similar feeling about wholesome content as they do about TV content and this type of game checks all the right boxes.
After Wii U and pre-Switch would have been the optimal time for Apple to have acquired Nintendo, who was struggling vs Sony and Microsoft.
No large acquisition will be approved going forward. The big techs are already so wealthy and powerful, they won't be allowed to absorb any more potential competition for any segment of their businesses.
I have to confess that I rarely play mobile or casual games, so I had missed some of the developments mentioned above.
As for Game Center, one of its most glaring faults was that it was so insular. It was OK in the early years, but the lack of support for Android and social (read Facebook) connections effectively rendered it obsolete as a foundation for games, and particularly multiplayer games. Also, like I said, it was technically unsound and highly unreliable.
Are Apple's current game related services (as mentioned in posts above) multi-platform?
As for the Mac, I think Apple has the resources and competence to do very well as a gaming company. The real question is if they want to.
Marvin said: It looks like their strategy is to leverage the player volume on iOS and get those games working on Mac. That will cover a lot of the casual games market.
As I posted earlier, mobile gaming revenue is now larger than PC and console gaming combined. You could make the argument that Apple is in a better position for gaming going forward than any of their competitors. They have the largest platform for the largest stream of revenue in gaming. Rather than thinking it's Apple that is compromised because they don't have a big AAA presence, it's starting to look more like the AAA companies are compromised because they don't have a big mobile presence. The line between mobile/AAA is going to get much blurrier in the future and Apple is in a good position to capitalize on that.
Time to build a metal optimised game engine. Apple will have to do it. and then support gaming houses to use it. Plus Apple itself could buy or build an exclusive halo game to drive interest. Preferably with lotsa blood and gore.
why would you bait your comment with a post like “lotsa blood and gore” The gun violence link might never be proved but what the world needs less of is #MachoMen craving blood lust and #MDK and more of Its a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
... which is why there's basically 1 in 20 games on the Mac?
Its not like they can blame weak GPUs any more.
It depends on what type of games you're looking at. For hardcore gamer games like all the leading FPS franchises and whatnot, yes. But they dominate the casual gaming market, which I'd argue is far bigger than games which require the very latest consoles or expensive gaming PCs.
Not much chance of Apple buying up a big game developer—those are all sewn up now. The exception of course is Nintendo, but I think they’d rather die than be bout out by an American corporation. That leaves either an in-house solution, and/or the coalescing os several smaller iOS developers into a game house with much broader ambitions. Apple might still throw a small fortune at Steam to backport some titles, but that seems like a long shot.
Hmm, imagine an Apple M1Max based gaming console. Bam!!
Else programming businesses face a simple decision: we can spend countless hours and dollars coding for this incredible MAX chip that is in a fraction of only new Apple laptops, which is a fraction of all Silicon Macs, which is a tiny fraction of all Macs AND give Apple a first big cut of any revenue we can get right off the top...
...or we can put those same resources towards a market that is at least 10X larger (near infinitely larger if compared only to MAX-based Macs) and/or to a console markets proven to pay much more than a $1 or maybe $5 for games and likely get great games subsidized and/or exclusive money to boot. Hmmmm, what should we do?
Exactly this. No serious game development shop is going to invest in porting large games to Mac for a fractional marketshare, the vast majority of whom bought those laptops for work and so they're not even looking to game with them. Apple has a long road ahead if they want to compete in the console gaming space.
Comments
The PS5 is $500.
So yeah, a M1 Max console looks like it'd be a lot more than the PS5 unless Apple changes its pricing strategy.
Same deal here: globally Apple was slightly under 7% market share before the M1 and is now slightly over 8%. And the biggest seller is the MacBook Air, whose 8 GPU cores wouldn't be enough for Steam even if one of them wasn't disabled.
As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.
As a AAA segment gamer, I previously used to be able to play most games on my Mac. Either ported to native code or running in Windows by way of Bootcamp. Since Mr. Cook took over, I can't find any other explanation to Apple's attitude visavi serious gaming, than a personal dislike of these games. Hence, Apple hardware has gradually become a completely lost cause for any serious gamer.
Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.
"The switch to Apple Silicon has made things worse. Despite what Apple's PR is willing to allow you to believe, market share has not increased." => This is true but market share numbers only take in to account new systems sold. In addition to that, if you listen to Apple's financial conference calls, they always go out of their way to say that 50% of new Mac sales are going to first-time buyers. That means even though market share isn't growing on a quarter to quarter basis, the total Mac user base is increasing. About a decade ago there were 65 million Mac users. Today it's around 130 million. And in the last two fiscal quarters, Mac revenue has surpassed even iPad revenue.
"Previous Game Center features that are no longer available include:
Relying on app developers to support Game Center makes using these features tricky. Developers can support all Game Center features, some of them, or none at all. There's no consistent experience with Game Center, and it's difficult to know what features, if any, come with a game before downloading it."
https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/09/heres-all-the-apple-arcade-exclusives-so-far/
https://toucharcade.com/2021/04/19/fantasian-apple-arcade-exclusive-interview-hironobu-sakaguchi-final-fantasy-terra-battle/
This puts them in competition with other games companies similar to how investing in movies and TV puts them in competition with movie companies.
They could make some moves to boost Mac gaming, maybe they will over time. It looks like their priority is iOS gaming due to the volume of users.
Apple could buy their way into gaming on the Mac by buying a big game company like EA, Take Two, Ubisoft, Activision, Crytek. Each would come with a game engine (Frostbite, Dunia, CryEngine). Crytek would probably be the cheapest option, some of the others are valued at tens of billions. Tencent is supposedly looking at buying them:
https://www.thegamer.com/tencent-might-buy-crytek/
https://www.thegamer.com/tencent-secured-more-games-ma-deals-in-2020-than-any-other-studio/
They don't have much of a games portfolio though. I don't think Apple owning an engine would help them much, a lot of the engines have support for Metal anyway and Amazon has an open source game engine based on CryEngine.
Apple would benefit more from a large games portfolio and popular IP that they can make new titles with. If they owned EA, they'd attract millions of players with exclusive Mass Effect games. But EA is $40b and they would run into some issues because a few games (like the next Mass Effect game) are being developed on Unreal Engine so they'd have to pay Epic a cut of the sales.
Developing new exclusive games is far too slow a process for Apple to gain a foothold in gaming. The other companies own dozens of studios and would produce at least 10x the yearly output of Apple owning a single studio.
It looks like their strategy is to leverage the player volume on iOS and get those games working on Mac. That will cover a lot of the casual games market. For the Mac side, I think their best bet is to do what Valve is doing to get Windows games on Linux with a compatibility layer. Once there's a few thousand games running, gamers will start playing on the Mac and buying games there and the developers will follow with native ports.
Social gaming is what keeps players on a platform like Roblox, Minecraft, GTA Online. Apple is trying this with an upcoming game in November that works on all their devices and exclusive to them:
https://www.starwars.com/news/lego-star-wars-castaways
I expect Apple has a similar feeling about wholesome content as they do about TV content and this type of game checks all the right boxes.
As for Game Center, one of its most glaring faults was that it was so insular. It was OK in the early years, but the lack of support for Android and social (read Facebook) connections effectively rendered it obsolete as a foundation for games, and particularly multiplayer games. Also, like I said, it was technically unsound and highly unreliable.
Are Apple's current game related services (as mentioned in posts above) multi-platform?
As for the Mac, I think Apple has the resources and competence to do very well as a gaming company. The real question is if they want to.