He doesn’t want to develop for Apple Silicon, fine. But why make such a big deal about not doing something. Very quixotic behavior.
Because he has:
A. an existing user base of people that have bought his games on macOS B. some/most/all of those people are going to be migrating from Intel Macs to M1 Macs C. he has to let those people know that when they migrate those games likely won't be available on their new hardware and new games certainly won't be D. this prevents these people from complaining when they buy their new M1 Macs and they experience C. E. It lets them know that if they want to keep playing these games they will need to invest in different hardware
So while it is not a big deal for him at all - quite the contrary it will result in a lot less work and hassle - it is a big deal for his customers that have paid money for his games, whom he addressed repeatedly in his post.
Many programmers get burned out on learning new languages. It’s understandable. I know about 10, and they all complain about the changes. The ones I know who are the most successful don’t complain about the challenge of learning new things. They get excited about the possibilities of these changes. They stay young. This kid sounds like an old man who’s giving up on life.
Oh please. You know the real problem: he isn't getting the financial return that justifies the investment. You want this guy to lose money developing games for Apple just because it benefits macOS as a platform. Well how about this: why don't you "get excited about the possibility of new things" and use YOUR experience programming in 10 languages to take up the mantle. Contact this guy, buy his work and take care of porting/developing/updates/bug fixes for his existing customer base. If you aren't willing to be that guy - because it is a ton of work with little potential of a financial return to justify it - then you have no basis to criticize him or anyone else who makes the same decision.
You could care less whether this guy goes broke so long as he keeps developing for macOS right up until the day the lenders come to evict him from his house and confiscate and auction off his development computers to pay off his debts. And when that happens your response should be "well if he were a smarter, harder worker that wouldn't have happened to him." Fortunately he cares far more about his own finances and future than you do.
Sounds like a cranky teenager. You can do your dev work on a kitted out Mac mini for not too much scratch. Plus learning to support this new architecture looks good on the resume but he’s butt hurt about nothing lmao.
Hey, if it is so easy, why don't you do it? I will tell you why: because it is very difficult, extremely time consuming and there is absolutely no chance of making any money in the process.
He doesn’t want to develop for Apple Silicon, fine. But why make such a big deal about not doing something. Very quixotic behavior.
I think he's hinting that Apple should give him a new ASi Mac.
Even if Apple did, it wouldn't solve 90% of his problems, which long preceded the switch to M1. It is just that the switch to M1 was the final straw that made it not worth exhaustion of his very limited resources anymore.
For a long time this kind of thing has been worrying me. I have some of the games on that list, and I hope it's not the start of a trend for games and other apps.
There is a disproportionately large number of games and cross platform apps available for macOS considering its market share, which is great news for us Mac users. But Apple doesn't make it easy to be an indie coder on macOS. They're so out of touch with the indie devs, and how common it is for indie devs to write apps as a secondary income to their main jobs. Apple just assumes devs have unlimited resources to follow their whims to the Next Big Thing™ and an expectation that devs will always follow along, they unfortunately seem to take them for granted - but in a lot of cases it was these very devs that stuck with Apple though its dark ages.
To name a few recent anti-developer Apple policies:
Apple's regular deprecation of significant cross platform technologies (OpenGL)
Their silence on deprecated technologies and APIs (little more than a warning that the "API is deprecated in <macOS version>")
Announcement of something as the Next Big Thing (VR, external GPUs) and then silence on the subject, and eventual dropping of support.
Onerous App Store rules with arbitrary application of those rules.
Also, and it's a big one - Apple's expectation that devs spend a disproportionate amount of time on Apple's proprietary APIs like Metal, for a platform whose marketshare is pretty tiny.With a lot of open source apps, engineering and games especially, OpenGL is key. Apple has always lagged far behind with OpenGL support, but a few macOS versions ago it was deprecated. OpenGL support makes supporting macOS little more than a tickbox. But the threat of OpenGL's removal resulting in a rewrite and subsequent maintenance of two graphics engine branches is simply untenable for most devs, so the result is macOS support is dropped. So ultimately Apple ends up harming Mac users, again.
I'd hardly call Metal a tiny market share as you have iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, and Macs. You are talking over a billion devices. I'd say Apple is listening to devs, as they are making it easier to run Apps across their devices. With the ability to run iPad/iPhones apps natively on the Mac, plus Catalyst etc, this should enable more developers to develop for the Mac. The deprecation of OpenGL and requirement of Metal has been in effect for years now. Prior to that, Apple as warned about requirement of Metal and deprecation of OpenGL for years.
TLDR Someone doesn't think its worth it to replace his old laptop or learn new tech to support a tiny sliver of a microscopic partcile of a market.
If Linux and Mac ports paid for a house, I’d think he was making a decent enough income. Jobs that allow people to afford houses aren’t easy to come by, especially this decade.
It is more like "I make nearly all my money doing Linux ports and some extra money doing Mac ports, and the extra money was possible because most of my work creating the ports for Linux could also be applied to macOS" (or vice versa). "Now Linux and macOS have diverged so much - requiring different hardware and software - that the effort isn't worth the extra money anymore so I am going to focus on my primary revenue stream."
Also, the guy made it clear that he was struggling and he is one of the top indie game devs out there. Most indie devs are doing far worse. And as for just taking a corporate job: not as easy as it sounds. You hear a lot about a programmer shortage, but most of them want people with 5-10 years experience to take a contract job at entry level rates and they fully expect you to be very grateful if you can get even that. And an increasing number of these are being outsourced or being filled by the H1-B talent pool.
That so much of the Apple fandom could care less about the developers who are the ones that create the applications that make your iPads and Macs usable in the first place is appalling.
This guy - and indie developers in general - should embrace cloud gaming. Celeste, for example, is already available on Stadia. While the dev kits for Amazon Luna and Microsoft xCloud (obviously) are Windows, the dev kit for Stadia is Linux (and Google had a promotion where you could get one for free, don't know if it is still going on) plus Steam and Epic have Linux dev kits where you can then import them to GeForce Now.
So this fellow could do Windows versions for xCloud and Luna and Windows versions for Stadia and GeForce Now. That way, M1 macOS device owners can play the games through the browser for Stadia, Luna and xCloud and through the app for GeForce Now. That is what Apple fans should ask him about instead of getting upset over his writing off the 1% of the macOS gaming crowd because Apple insists on making it as hard as possible, as Apple prefers making it easier to port iPadOS games to macOS to supporting native macOS development.
And I didn't pick that 1% out of thin air. It was the percentage of combined macOS and Linux users for Rocket League, which has been one of the top titles on Steam for years. Some may question the economics and long term viability for cloud gaming, but it beats the economics of competing with a flood of iPadOS ports on macOS if you are an indie developer. Especially Stadia: this guy could have gotten a free dev kit (software and hardware) plus some online training from Google months ago just by asking - and since he is already a Linux expert he knows 85% of what he needs to already - and if he didn't take advantage that is on him.
In the world of things that pay for your livelihood, home, etc, people are less likely to throw that away for simply having a bad vibe about a company. It just sounds like he doesn't want to take the time to redevelop his skills for an ARM based platform because it was never meant to be a full time thing, and just wanted to take the opportunity to use his platform while he still has it. (Read: bitch while people are still listening.)
Sure he's welcome to his opinion, but his complaints don't stack up and many also apply to the Window/Linux platforms which he has no beef with. As for independents, it's arguably the best time ever for an indy developer on Apple:
Apple pumping money into indy developers for Arcade content
Apple dropping the 30% cut to 15% for businesses making less than a million on the store
Unifying the Apple platforms which allows smaller developers to have a wide customer base
The opportunity to sell the same title again and again on the separate app stores for AppleTV, Mac & iOS, each without needing significant development/investment
A more flexible approval process with more opportunity to challenge decisions
All of that has literally happen in the span of 18 months. What has -any other platform- done to make things easier for small developers in that timespan?
TLDR Someone doesn't think its worth it to replace his old laptop or learn new tech to support a tiny sliver of a microscopic partcile of a market.
While the first part - not replacing his laptop - sounded strange, the second is an issue. As Apple has gotten bigger, they've moved away from open standards and created their own products. In this case, they've deprecated OpenGL (after not their version for a long time) and created their own graphics API - Metal. That makes porting much more work and less interesting - and as a long time Apple user, it's something I don't like too. It will make porting harder, maintenance harder and create more platform-specific bugs. It will also make less ports happen.
So what you are advocating is that Apple cease being Apple and just become one of the also-rans? Nice. Since when has Apple ever in its long history just acquiesced to whatever the rest of the world was doing? They have always done their own thing and been supremely successful at it. Why do some continue to demand that Apple follow the crowd so that lazy developers can easily ‘port’ their garbage to the Mac?
They switched to Intel. The single biggest 'compatibility' move they ever made.
They made the system underpinnings unix compliant.
Those moves were key to platform success at the time.
TLDR Someone doesn't think its worth it to replace his old laptop or learn new tech to support a tiny sliver of a microscopic partcile of a market.
While the first part - not replacing his laptop - sounded strange, the second is an issue. As Apple has gotten bigger, they've moved away from open standards and created their own products. In this case, they've deprecated OpenGL (after not their version for a long time) and created their own graphics API - Metal. That makes porting much more work and less interesting - and as a long time Apple user, it's something I don't like too. It will make porting harder, maintenance harder and create more platform-specific bugs. It will also make less ports happen.
There’s a project to get OpenGL’s replacement Vulkan wrapped by/translated to Metal. It’s called Molten. It’s not yet complete (covering all of the Vulkan API), but it’s in progress.
As for Apple Silicon... I keep reading people saying that anything which compiles on Mac OS Intel is a quick conversion to Mac OS Apple Silicon. Is that not factual?
Getting stuff to compile and getting it to run to specification are two very different things, especially things like video games which have specific hardware/software compatibility needs, need real-time responsiveness and where bugs are disastrous.
Second, need to refer to his original theme:
1. He is primarily a Linux developer. Not a macOS one. 2. He was only able to do macOS development when/because it was similar to Linux. 3. As Linux and macOS diverge, the investment/reward ratio for continuing to port macOS games was getting increasingly lower (as the small number of people who buy his games on macOS isn't increasing) 4. macOS no longer being on Intel - which requires him to purchase and maintain new hardware as well as deal with a bunch of new drivers and other issues that will be entirely unique to Apple and applicable to no one else in the industry - lowers the investment/reward ratio past a point where it is simply no longer sustainable. He is a one person shop who can no longer afford the financial and especially time resources that it takes for his part time job supporting macOS. 5. This job needs to be taken over by a full time macOS developer. Or a guy who does mostly macOS but knows enough about Linux or Windows to deal with the source code of the games that he is importing. 6. The ultimate solution for this guy - and indie devs in general - is Stadia and other cloud platforms. And that is also the solution for macOS gamers. Forget indie games, the vast majority of even AAA titles are never released on macOS. He will support people's existing games on their current hardware and TRY to come out with M1 Mac versions of those games - I am thinking that AWS can make that possible which would keep him from having to purchase new hardware - but as for M1 Mac customers for new games he can just tell them to purchase the games using the Stadia free tier (which you can already do for Celeste and several of the games on the list).
For a long time this kind of thing has been worrying me. I have some of the games on that list, and I hope it's not the start of a trend for games and other apps.
There is a disproportionately large number of games and cross platform apps available for macOS considering its market share, which is great news for us Mac users. But Apple doesn't make it easy to be an indie coder on macOS. They're so out of touch with the indie devs, and how common it is for indie devs to write apps as a secondary income to their main jobs. Apple just assumes devs have unlimited resources to follow their whims to the Next Big Thing™ and an expectation that devs will always follow along, they unfortunately seem to take them for granted - but in a lot of cases it was these very devs that stuck with Apple though its dark ages.
To name a few recent anti-developer Apple policies:
Apple's regular deprecation of significant cross platform technologies (OpenGL)
Their silence on deprecated technologies and APIs (little more than a warning that the "API is deprecated in <macOS version>")
Announcement of something as the Next Big Thing (VR, external GPUs) and then silence on the subject, and eventual dropping of support.
Onerous App Store rules with arbitrary application of those rules.
Also, and it's a big one - Apple's expectation that devs spend a disproportionate amount of time on Apple's proprietary APIs like Metal, for a platform whose marketshare is pretty tiny.With a lot of open source apps, engineering and games especially, OpenGL is key. Apple has always lagged far behind with OpenGL support, but a few macOS versions ago it was deprecated. OpenGL support makes supporting macOS little more than a tickbox. But the threat of OpenGL's removal resulting in a rewrite and subsequent maintenance of two graphics engine branches is simply untenable for most devs, so the result is macOS support is dropped. So ultimately Apple ends up harming Mac users, again.
I'd hardly call Metal a tiny market share as you have iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, and Macs. You are talking over a billion devices. I'd say Apple is listening to devs, as they are making it easier to run Apps across their devices. With the ability to run iPad/iPhones apps natively on the Mac, plus Catalyst etc, this should enable more developers to develop for the Mac. The deprecation of OpenGL and requirement of Metal has been in effect for years now. Prior to that, Apple as warned about requirement of Metal and deprecation of OpenGL for years.
Yes, this change will benefit more developers in general. However, this guy is a specific case. He is not an iOS developer. He is a Linux developer who got into developing for macOS on the side because of the similarity between Linux and macOS that existed at the time (Mojave). Now that Linux and macOS have almost entirely diverged, he will have to give up most of his macOS work in order to focus on Linux. In other words, he isn't looking to be a macOS developer or a mobile developer. He is strictly a PC Linux developer.
Apple is willing to sacrifice the interests of a small number of people like this in order to beneft a much larger number of iOS and especially iPadOS developers. So as I mentioned in a previous comment, the perfect person to take this over would be an independent iPadOS developer (though I said macOS developer previously). Which is probably what will happen. This guy isn't the developer/owner of these games. He is someone that is being paid by the actual game/platform owners to port the games to macOS - and Linux - on a per game contract fee basis. Humble and/or the devs are simply going to find someone else to make the iPadOS, tvOS and macOS ports while continuing to use this guy for the Linux ports. Or at least that is what we should hope happens. They have been using this guy to make both because it is cheaper. If they have to pay separate devs to make Linux and macOS, that will drive up the cost.
Apple has to sacrifice the interests of a small number of people. You cannot please everyone. Some people will have a harder time, other people will have an easier time. Apple has had to make changes to increase security, which broke somethings. There isn't a way forward to please everyone. I wish them good luck.
In the world of things that pay for your livelihood, home, etc, people are less likely to throw that away for simply having a bad vibe about a company. It just sounds like he doesn't want to take the time to redevelop his skills for an ARM based platform because it was never meant to be a full time thing, and just wanted to take the opportunity to use his platform while he still has it. (Read: bitch while people are still listening.)
Sure he's welcome to his opinion, but his complaints don't stack up and many also apply to the Window/Linux platforms which he has no beef with. As for independents, it's arguably the best time ever for an indy developer on Apple:
Apple pumping money into indy developers for Arcade content
Apple dropping the 30% cut to 15% for businesses making less than a million on the store
Unifying the Apple platforms which allows smaller developers to have a wide customer base
The opportunity to sell the same title again and again on the separate app stores for AppleTV, Mac & iOS, each without needing significant development/investment
A more flexible approval process with more opportunity to challenge decisions
All of that has literally happen in the span of 18 months. What has -any other platform- done to make things easier for small developers in that timespan?
Yes, it is the best time ever for an indy developer on Apple but he is not an indy developer on Apple. That is what everyone is ignoring. He is a Linux developer who was able to augment his income by doing Mac ports because where in the past much of the work to do the Mac port could be carried over to Linux, now that isn't the case anymore. Let us go point by point.
1. He is not an Apple Arcade developer. He is a Linux PC developer 2. He does not have an app store account for these games because they are not his games. The actual owner of these games are the ones with app store accounts. The owners of these games are paying him to make Linux and macOS ports. They are not paying him for mobile ports. So any benefits from the 30%/15% whatever don't go to him anyway. 3. Again. Not an iOS, iPadOS or tvOS developer. Not even primarily a macOS developer. So this is irrelevant to him 4. See 2. and 3. He does not own these games. He cannot sell these games. He is merely a contract programmer being paid to make and maintain ports of these games to Linux and macOS. 5. Again, this is applicable to the people who actually created and own Celeste and these other games. Not to him who creates ports of these games to Linux and macOS.
Please go back and read the part where he stated that he would consider reviving his macOS business if the owner of these games gave him royalty payments. The people who are getting those royalty payments now are the ones who will actually benefit from this.
When Apple announced these changes, a lot of people - including myself - stated that it would make macOS more like their other products to the benefit of developers of those other products but were sacrificing multiplatform developers in the process. Apple Silicon is great if you are already an iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and/or watchOS developer but a huge pain if you are a macOS/Windows/Linux/Android developer. Acknowledging the positive aspects of this is great but denying the negative that comes with it is merely deceiving yourself, especially since there is no need: the positives greatly outweigh the negatives.
As I have mentioned on this many times on previous posts, Apple is going to be a thing of its own, completely different from the rest of the industry. This is not a change. This is actually how Apple was from their founding in the 1970s until 2004. During that time, there were Macintosh people and DOS/Windows people. There were companies who used one or the other exclusively. And Apple's market share around that time was as low as 3%. When Apple switched to Intel, there was this period of convergence, which even extended to mobile with Android. Now Apple is going back to the divergence path. Good for people who are already on the Apple train, but it is going to leave the multiplatform people behind. Those folks are going to have to resort to multiplatform solutions like PWAs and cloud. (As I mentioned before, all these indie games should be on Stadia if they aren't already - Celeste is - and if they are on Steam you can import them via Nvidia GeForce Now).
PWAs and cloud are going to be the primary ways to achieve multiplatform capability going forward. But neither will help this guy's use case as he doesn't own the games and doesn't have the legal right to port them to the cloud. Maybe he can talk to the owners of these games about doing ports to Linux-based Stadia but that is all he can do.
The cloud doesn't work in many places. Not 5G, 4G, or 3G. Nothing. No cell service or wired internet. So your cloud gaming will not work.
Apple has to sacrifice the interests of a small number of people. You cannot please everyone. Some people will have a harder time, other people will have an easier time. Apple has had to make changes to increase security, which broke somethings. There isn't a way forward to please everyone. I wish them good luck.
This isn't 1997, OK? You can't play these games without internet access in the first place. (facepalm) How many of the 15-20 million Macs are purchased without Internet service? Good grief, Macs don't even have DVD/Blu-ray disks anymore. (Haven't since the iMac G3 in 1998). The Internet is the only way to install and update software.
As for your second point, I fully agree: Apple sacrificed the interests of a small number of multiplatform PC developers in order to advance their own interests. Also, the changes will provide some benefit to iPadOS and iOS developers who can now sell those apps to macOS users. However, these changes will primarily benefit Apple and secondarily benefit Apple device owners: particularly those who own iPhones and/or iPads and/or Apple TVs in addition to Macs. The benefits to developers will be much smaller than Apple wants you to think they are, due to the relatively small base of Macs and the even smaller base of people who would buy an iPad app to run on their Macs. Even when that does happen, in a lot of instances you are going to have macOS owners buying the much cheaper iPad app over the macOS version, which I have read that a lot of photo/video editors and other content creators are doing already.
This isn't 1997, OK? You can't play these games without internet access in the first place. (facepalm) How many of the 15-20 million Macs are purchased without Internet service? Good grief, Macs don't even have DVD/Blu-ray disks anymore. (Haven't since the iMac G3 in 1998). The Internet is the only way to install and update software.
If people in your world should move on and always have internet just to play games, then why shouldn't developers move on to develop for newer APIs and hardware? Still, do you get out in the world? That is a very privileged view point, that internet works, or you don't matter. I can tell you in tunnels, and rural areas of the US do not get much service, even in 2021. I've had poor service on a commuter train. Unlimited plans are expensive.
@cloudguy It's clear you feel strongly about Apple moving to proprietary technologies like Metal, but I don't hear the same complaints about Microsoft and Direct3D. Sure you can use OpenGL on Windows, but no one does because it's not well supported.
There are plenty of games that have not been updated to work with Catalina. And some of them are major label games, not indies. Games with money behind them. Many developers just don't see the value in updating games no the Mac platform after release to keep up with Apple. I don't blame them. They don't get much money to begin with because of the smaller market, and Apple keep requiring a greater and greater investment in the platform to keep up. When the two lines cross over, it stops making business sense to make Mac games. Apple silicon adds a whole extra dimension to that equation, not in either Apple's or the Mac user's favor.
Apple's strategy seems fairly clear, make it easier to port apps from iOS to the Mac. So the Mac is destined to get just dumbed down iOS ports if that is true. And that will be bad for all the same reasons the tablet experience on Android is bad. Android tablets run blown up versions of phone apps for the most part (or at least they used to when I last looked into it). So the experience is far less than what you get on the iPad. It looks like the Mac is headed in the same direction perhaps.
As I have mentioned on this many times on previous posts, Apple is going to be a thing of its own, completely different from the rest of the industry. This is not a change. This is actually how Apple was from their founding in the 1970s until 2004. During that time, there were Macintosh people and DOS/Windows people. There were companies who used one or the other exclusively. And Apple's market share around that time was as low as 3%. When Apple switched to Intel, there was this period of convergence, which even extended to mobile with Android. Now Apple is going back to the divergence path.
Unfortunately Cook's shortsightedness and drive for more profit seems to be behind this. Steering people to the App Store rather than the likes of Steam. Pre-Jobs 2.0 almost everything on the Mac was proprietary. The peripherals were 3x the price as they were Mac-specific - and that's if you could find them at all. It was hard to interoperate with Windows PCs which the vast majority of people had at work and school. Jobs was instrumental in the iMac, and Max OS X both of which were much more standards based. Often Apple's path is the best one, but Apple is often forging that path parallel to the rest of the world - and the positives of Apple's path are erased by the incompatibilities. Great, Metal is supposedly better. Who cares if no one takes full advantage of it because the market is too small?
PWAs and cloud are going to be the primary ways to achieve multiplatform capability going forward. But neither will help this guy's use case as he doesn't own the games and doesn't have the legal right to port them to the cloud. Maybe he can talk to the owners of these games about doing ports to Linux-based Stadia but that is all he can do.
Just to add to this - the advantages Apple claims devs have by developing on macOS evaporate when devs use cloud-based solutions to distribute games. No one then uses Metal except iOS/macOS devs, and the only games that take advantage of it are ones usually designed for iOS. And I'm yet to see an iOS or macOS-over-Catalyst game that looks anything better than the graphics that were on the Xbox360. Apple touts Metal as being so amazing, but as most of the games that use Metal primarily target iOS with its small screen, devs don't bother optimising for macOS. Much like open source apps, if it's more than just a tickbox it's not usually worth it.
There are plenty of games that have not been updated to work with Catalina. And some of them are major label games, not indies. Games with money behind them. Many developers just don't see the value in updating games no the Mac platform after release to keep up with Apple. I don't blame them. They don't get much money to begin with because of the smaller market, and Apple keep requiring a greater and greater investment in the platform to keep up. When the two lines cross over, it stops making business sense to make Mac games. Apple silicon adds a whole extra dimension to that equation, not in either Apple's or the Mac user's favor.
You have a hidden assumption here: that most Mac users care about games. People who care about games typically buy dedicated devices for them. The rest either don't care about games, or just play them casually and will be happy with browser-based or casual/small games (of which there will always be plenty).
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A. an existing user base of people that have bought his games on macOS
B. some/most/all of those people are going to be migrating from Intel Macs to M1 Macs
C. he has to let those people know that when they migrate those games likely won't be available on their new hardware and new games certainly won't be
D. this prevents these people from complaining when they buy their new M1 Macs and they experience C.
E. It lets them know that if they want to keep playing these games they will need to invest in different hardware
So while it is not a big deal for him at all - quite the contrary it will result in a lot less work and hassle - it is a big deal for his customers that have paid money for his games, whom he addressed repeatedly in his post.
You could care less whether this guy goes broke so long as he keeps developing for macOS right up until the day the lenders come to evict him from his house and confiscate and auction off his development computers to pay off his debts. And when that happens your response should be "well if he were a smarter, harder worker that wouldn't have happened to him." Fortunately he cares far more about his own finances and future than you do.
Also, the guy made it clear that he was struggling and he is one of the top indie game devs out there. Most indie devs are doing far worse. And as for just taking a corporate job: not as easy as it sounds. You hear a lot about a programmer shortage, but most of them want people with 5-10 years experience to take a contract job at entry level rates and they fully expect you to be very grateful if you can get even that. And an increasing number of these are being outsourced or being filled by the H1-B talent pool.
That so much of the Apple fandom could care less about the developers who are the ones that create the applications that make your iPads and Macs usable in the first place is appalling.
So this fellow could do Windows versions for xCloud and Luna and Windows versions for Stadia and GeForce Now. That way, M1 macOS device owners can play the games through the browser for Stadia, Luna and xCloud and through the app for GeForce Now. That is what Apple fans should ask him about instead of getting upset over his writing off the 1% of the macOS gaming crowd because Apple insists on making it as hard as possible, as Apple prefers making it easier to port iPadOS games to macOS to supporting native macOS development.
And I didn't pick that 1% out of thin air. It was the percentage of combined macOS and Linux users for Rocket League, which has been one of the top titles on Steam for years. Some may question the economics and long term viability for cloud gaming, but it beats the economics of competing with a flood of iPadOS ports on macOS if you are an indie developer. Especially Stadia: this guy could have gotten a free dev kit (software and hardware) plus some online training from Google months ago just by asking - and since he is already a Linux expert he knows 85% of what he needs to already - and if he didn't take advantage that is on him.
It just sounds like he doesn't want to take the time to redevelop his skills for an ARM based platform because it was never meant to be a full time thing, and just wanted to take the opportunity to use his platform while he still has it. (Read: bitch while people are still listening.)
Sure he's welcome to his opinion, but his complaints don't stack up and many also apply to the Window/Linux platforms which he has no beef with.
As for independents, it's arguably the best time ever for an indy developer on Apple:
- Apple pumping money into indy developers for Arcade content
- Apple dropping the 30% cut to 15% for businesses making less than a million on the store
- Unifying the Apple platforms which allows smaller developers to have a wide customer base
- The opportunity to sell the same title again and again on the separate app stores for AppleTV, Mac & iOS, each without needing significant development/investment
- A more flexible approval process with more opportunity to challenge decisions
All of that has literally happen in the span of 18 months. What has -any other platform- done to make things easier for small developers in that timespan?They made the system underpinnings unix compliant.
Those moves were key to platform success at the time.
Second, need to refer to his original theme:
1. He is primarily a Linux developer. Not a macOS one.
2. He was only able to do macOS development when/because it was similar to Linux.
3. As Linux and macOS diverge, the investment/reward ratio for continuing to port macOS games was getting increasingly lower (as the small number of people who buy his games on macOS isn't increasing)
4. macOS no longer being on Intel - which requires him to purchase and maintain new hardware as well as deal with a bunch of new drivers and other issues that will be entirely unique to Apple and applicable to no one else in the industry - lowers the investment/reward ratio past a point where it is simply no longer sustainable. He is a one person shop who can no longer afford the financial and especially time resources that it takes for his part time job supporting macOS.
5. This job needs to be taken over by a full time macOS developer. Or a guy who does mostly macOS but knows enough about Linux or Windows to deal with the source code of the games that he is importing.
6. The ultimate solution for this guy - and indie devs in general - is Stadia and other cloud platforms. And that is also the solution for macOS gamers. Forget indie games, the vast majority of even AAA titles are never released on macOS. He will support people's existing games on their current hardware and TRY to come out with M1 Mac versions of those games - I am thinking that AWS can make that possible which would keep him from having to purchase new hardware - but as for M1 Mac customers for new games he can just tell them to purchase the games using the Stadia free tier (which you can already do for Celeste and several of the games on the list).
Apple is willing to sacrifice the interests of a small number of people like this in order to beneft a much larger number of iOS and especially iPadOS developers. So as I mentioned in a previous comment, the perfect person to take this over would be an independent iPadOS developer (though I said macOS developer previously). Which is probably what will happen. This guy isn't the developer/owner of these games. He is someone that is being paid by the actual game/platform owners to port the games to macOS - and Linux - on a per game contract fee basis. Humble and/or the devs are simply going to find someone else to make the iPadOS, tvOS and macOS ports while continuing to use this guy for the Linux ports. Or at least that is what we should hope happens. They have been using this guy to make both because it is cheaper. If they have to pay separate devs to make Linux and macOS, that will drive up the cost.
1. He is not an Apple Arcade developer. He is a Linux PC developer
2. He does not have an app store account for these games because they are not his games. The actual owner of these games are the ones with app store accounts. The owners of these games are paying him to make Linux and macOS ports. They are not paying him for mobile ports. So any benefits from the 30%/15% whatever don't go to him anyway.
3. Again. Not an iOS, iPadOS or tvOS developer. Not even primarily a macOS developer. So this is irrelevant to him
4. See 2. and 3. He does not own these games. He cannot sell these games. He is merely a contract programmer being paid to make and maintain ports of these games to Linux and macOS.
5. Again, this is applicable to the people who actually created and own Celeste and these other games. Not to him who creates ports of these games to Linux and macOS.
Please go back and read the part where he stated that he would consider reviving his macOS business if the owner of these games gave him royalty payments. The people who are getting those royalty payments now are the ones who will actually benefit from this.
When Apple announced these changes, a lot of people - including myself - stated that it would make macOS more like their other products to the benefit of developers of those other products but were sacrificing multiplatform developers in the process. Apple Silicon is great if you are already an iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and/or watchOS developer but a huge pain if you are a macOS/Windows/Linux/Android developer. Acknowledging the positive aspects of this is great but denying the negative that comes with it is merely deceiving yourself, especially since there is no need: the positives greatly outweigh the negatives.
As I have mentioned on this many times on previous posts, Apple is going to be a thing of its own, completely different from the rest of the industry. This is not a change. This is actually how Apple was from their founding in the 1970s until 2004. During that time, there were Macintosh people and DOS/Windows people. There were companies who used one or the other exclusively. And Apple's market share around that time was as low as 3%. When Apple switched to Intel, there was this period of convergence, which even extended to mobile with Android. Now Apple is going back to the divergence path. Good for people who are already on the Apple train, but it is going to leave the multiplatform people behind. Those folks are going to have to resort to multiplatform solutions like PWAs and cloud. (As I mentioned before, all these indie games should be on Stadia if they aren't already - Celeste is - and if they are on Steam you can import them via Nvidia GeForce Now).
PWAs and cloud are going to be the primary ways to achieve multiplatform capability going forward. But neither will help this guy's use case as he doesn't own the games and doesn't have the legal right to port them to the cloud. Maybe he can talk to the owners of these games about doing ports to Linux-based Stadia but that is all he can do.
As for your second point, I fully agree: Apple sacrificed the interests of a small number of multiplatform PC developers in order to advance their own interests. Also, the changes will provide some benefit to iPadOS and iOS developers who can now sell those apps to macOS users. However, these changes will primarily benefit Apple and secondarily benefit Apple device owners: particularly those who own iPhones and/or iPads and/or Apple TVs in addition to Macs. The benefits to developers will be much smaller than Apple wants you to think they are, due to the relatively small base of Macs and the even smaller base of people who would buy an iPad app to run on their Macs. Even when that does happen, in a lot of instances you are going to have macOS owners buying the much cheaper iPad app over the macOS version, which I have read that a lot of photo/video editors and other content creators are doing already.
Apple's strategy seems fairly clear, make it easier to port apps from iOS to the Mac. So the Mac is destined to get just dumbed down iOS ports if that is true. And that will be bad for all the same reasons the tablet experience on Android is bad. Android tablets run blown up versions of phone apps for the most part (or at least they used to when I last looked into it). So the experience is far less than what you get on the iPad. It looks like the Mac is headed in the same direction perhaps.