The reality is that Macs are one of the best platforms for gaming and Metal3 is the reason.
The reason that Macs suck for gaming is 100% on the developers who take the crappy approach of taking a Windows game and wrapping it in Cider and calling it a Mac game. There’s literally NOTHING Mac in this approach. It’s a Windows game running on Linux software and it will always have a performance hit.
Compare the old version of Eve Online to the current Metal based version and the difference is night and day. Then compare that to the iOS version of Eve Echoes and you start to get the picture that it’s not Mac hardware that’s the problem. We’ve been screwed by idiot developers who just treat us as a third class citizen in gaming.
We don’t need AAA titles if this is their approach. We need games designed specifically for Macs that makes people want to game on Macs that leave Windows PCs and gaming consoles in the dust. We can do it if developers don’t develop for the money but develop to showcase their talent. Ego is a massive driver and will be the only way Macs can get out of their gaming doldrums.
The issue, like it is for almost everything, is... money. I don't think it's an "idiot developer" problem.
Developing for the Mac with Metal et. al., takes expertise and effort to port existing games that aren't using Apple's APIs.. It also means that there's a different code base to test and support. As a business decision, If the developer doesn't take the cost into account and doesn't think they'll make up the effort in sales, then a port to native technologies on the Mac won't get done regardless of the "ego" strokes of saying "I ported to the Mac and it runs so much better".
Use of high level frameworks mask that effort over and can be a much more "justifiable" - but as you say it's at the expense of performance.
It will be interesting to see in practice how well the porting toolkit works to reduce the costs/efforts to port to Mac native technologies.
which is why I said developers need to NOT port their games but make Mac only games that will get the industry waking up.
Mac users will pay for games which means developers are losing money by keeping Macs out of the loop. But Mac users are decerning and won’t buy titles if they are a hassle. Cider is the biggest reason Mac users don’t buy games. It turns good games on PCs into crappy games on the Mac which turns people away from a potentially great gaming platform.
Mac developers need to stop with status quo games and build limitless games to showcase the Mac. Let’s see if they have the balls to give it a go.
Why would developers take that risk with an uncertain platform? Apple needs to lead the way. Arcade is a decent start.
Parallels is awesome for some games but not all. But it’s still not a Mac game is it? It’s a Windows game running on Windows on a Mac.
we NEED native games.
That's why the porting toolkit Apple released is better. Here's Cyberpunk 2077 running just like a native Mac game. At 2:08, they show the dock icon and Mac environment:
Diablo IV:
There's no Windows OS involved. It's a Windows game but the compatibility layer intercepts all the requests to the Windows system and redirects them to the Mac system equivalents.
When the game says it wants to draw an object using DirectX 12, it gets caught and changed to being drawn using Metal instead. As far as the user is concerned, it gives the same feel as a Mac game, it just has some overhead due to the translation.
So far more than 40 games have been ported in just a week. To do native ports of those, each game studio/publisher has to get a porting team together as well as QA and a budget for doing the port. If the port isn't using a cross-platform engine, a Metal port would take 6 months and cost maybe $400,000. Using a cross-platform engine, it could probably be done in 1-2 months, around $100,000.
That sounds reasonable for a single high profile game but it doesn't work commercially doing it for just one game, there needs to be lots of them for gamers to invest in the platform. For 40 studios to go through that process is near impossible let alone the top 100 games for the past 20 years - 2,000+ games that aren't on Mac. It would take years for that to happen. The Game Toolkit can make this happen in 1 month. But it needs to be an officially supported method and easy for people to install the games.
Once the gaming audience is big enough on Mac, there will be a commercial reason to do native ports but there will always be the Porting Kit as a fallback where it's not feasible to go native.
I’m sure she can afford an extra PC or console if she needs to really play it.
My understanding of developers' avoidance of porting to Mac is that it had more to do with Mac users (historically) being more interested in productivity than in gaming. That's changing now, but there's inertia in game development, expertise, hardware on which to test, etc., that needs to be overcome before it becomes a serious effort.
Here's the thing though, Diablo IV already works really well on Steam Deck (with some setting tweaks for a lower power platform), which runs a version of Linux. Using the Proton compatibility layer, there are thousands of games that work on Steam Deck. I'm aware that Mac OS is not based on Linux itself, but they have common roots. If Valve and Apple were to work together on a Mac OS specific version of Proton, a significant portion of Steam games, including a lot of the newest and AAA ones, would be playable on Mac.
Comments
Diablo IV:
There's no Windows OS involved. It's a Windows game but the compatibility layer intercepts all the requests to the Windows system and redirects them to the Mac system equivalents.
When the game says it wants to draw an object using DirectX 12, it gets caught and changed to being drawn using Metal instead. As far as the user is concerned, it gives the same feel as a Mac game, it just has some overhead due to the translation.
So far more than 40 games have been ported in just a week. To do native ports of those, each game studio/publisher has to get a porting team together as well as QA and a budget for doing the port. If the port isn't using a cross-platform engine, a Metal port would take 6 months and cost maybe $400,000. Using a cross-platform engine, it could probably be done in 1-2 months, around $100,000.
That sounds reasonable for a single high profile game but it doesn't work commercially doing it for just one game, there needs to be lots of them for gamers to invest in the platform. For 40 studios to go through that process is near impossible let alone the top 100 games for the past 20 years - 2,000+ games that aren't on Mac. It would take years for that to happen. The Game Toolkit can make this happen in 1 month. But it needs to be an officially supported method and easy for people to install the games.
Once the gaming audience is big enough on Mac, there will be a commercial reason to do native ports but there will always be the Porting Kit as a fallback where it's not feasible to go native.