AAA gaming is now the smaller market for revenue versus mobile gaming. If anything, Apple is ahead of the curve for making money from gaming versus AAA oriented companies. That's why you see Epic and Microsoft suddenly doing a full-court press of lawmakers and claiming that Apple's mobile operating systems are anti-competitive. They're the ones that are behind.
See image. You are right when it comes to market share. But it’s not all about a large addressable market. It’s also about how much you can gain within the market you choose to take on. If you have 50% of a smaller market VS 10% of a large one, you might have a more strategically favorable approach, depending on the many variables in play and the positioning you seek.
Secondly, there’s also prestige. Look at their streaming video business. A name like Oprah or an exclusive with Tom Hanks is to attract a specific audience but also to say to your competitors: “yo, that’s our domain now, and we are serious”. Thirdly, it is brand recognition towards the customer. You build perception, a view on your ecosystem and its content.
With gaming, Apple will further sell their Apple Silicon benefits through AAA gaming. They show Mac is not just for productivity, and that their SoC’s are amazing.
They will cross-sell services and hardware to a new audience: gamers, perhaps a younger demography as well.
What Apple can bring is also removing the poor experience of Steam, incompatibility issues and provide AAA-gamers with a more refined user journey. For that they’ll need an exec who understands hardcore PC gamers, because Apple does not.
So although I agree with you on market data, I don’t think that is necessarily the strategy to go for.
No big studio (maybe except Blizzard's WoW) uses Metal directly. They use it via an engine, like Unity or UE, as stated in above post. Pretty much every major game in that list uses Unity or UE.
Well that’s great. Two of the biggest 3D engines in the industry support Metal.
Not sure how this is a negative.
Never said it was. But claiming gaming on Mac is "getting better" when this only really improves things for the two major engines which already have Mac support is a bit of a stretch. Very few AAA games use UE/Unity. They mostly all write their own engine around DirectX. People seem to misunderstand that to write an engine in Metal is literally an entire rewrite of the game's core from scratch. Devs just won't see the RoI from that since the Mac gaming market is so tiny.
Vulkan libraries on MacOS would mean no rewrite is required, and no performance-degrading MoltenVK sat in the middle. One of the main reasons so many OpenGL games came to Mac was that the engine didn't need a rewrite. No reason Apple's can't provide libraries for both, aside from the fact Apple wants devs to be locked in to their proprietary tech.
Having founded, headed and sold a gaming studio after 13 years of operating (mobile, VR, desktop), I can tell it’s not just the above that is taken into consideration.
Spending valuable resources on development, LiveOps and customer support for a platform that makes you lose money almost every time, developers might, to your point, have the ability to port to macOS relatively easy (mind you, not THAT easy), it still makes no business sense because there’s just a handful of buyers which you’ll have to support and develop for regardless of sales.
Apple needs to realize that in order to build a truly friendly ecosystem for anything outside mobile games, they need to invest cash into content creators, get exclusives on their platform and heavily invest in a gamers-centric ecosystem. PC gamers and console gamers think and play different compared to mobile gamers. They need to build a division around that.
Lastly, most AAA franchises traditionally use their own engine that they fully own or have source code access to, not Unreal or Unity, which only provide partial access and/or come with license fees.
Why is Apple trying to do what their devices are not meant to do? Those who buy their computers are not gamers. We are talking about another contingent of people when we refer to mac users.
With Ventura, gaming on a Mac is getting better, but it's still a far
cry from where Windows is, so the best solution for gamers is still
having Windows on our Macs. I've been using OneCast for several months now, and it has proven to be the best solution for playing Xbox on my Mac. For
others, Parallels Desktop can be a good solution. It's a desktop
virtualization software that allows you to run any Windows app on a Mac.
If someone didn't knew about these two apps, read about installing and running them in this guide about how to play xbox on a Mac.
Comments
With gaming, Apple will further sell their Apple Silicon benefits through AAA gaming. They show Mac is not just for productivity, and that their SoC’s are amazing.
Spending valuable resources on development, LiveOps and customer support for a platform that makes you lose money almost every time, developers might, to your point, have the ability to port to macOS relatively easy (mind you, not THAT easy), it still makes no business sense because there’s just a handful of buyers which you’ll have to support and develop for regardless of sales.
Apple needs to realize that in order to build a truly friendly ecosystem for anything outside mobile games, they need to invest cash into content creators, get exclusives on their platform and heavily invest in a gamers-centric ecosystem. PC gamers and console gamers think and play different compared to mobile gamers. They need to build a division around that.
Lastly, most AAA franchises traditionally use their own engine that they fully own or have source code access to, not Unreal or Unity, which only provide partial access and/or come with license fees.
Those who buy their computers are not gamers. We are talking about another contingent of people when we refer to mac users.
I've been using OneCast for several months now, and it has proven to be the best solution for playing Xbox on my Mac.
For others, Parallels Desktop can be a good solution. It's a desktop virtualization software that allows you to run any Windows app on a Mac.
If someone didn't knew about these two apps, read about installing and running them in this guide about how to play xbox on a Mac.