jSnively

foregoneconclusion said:

jSnively said: Most people who love video games absolutely hate what the mobile ecosystem has done to it. It's been a disastrous and predatory race to the bottom. Is it financially successful? Absolutely -- for the 1%. That's not what's being discussed here though, and when they trot out AAA games as showpieces every few years that's not what they're trying to communicate either.

And what is the race in AAA gaming? To consolidate the industry into a very small group of mega corporations. That's because AAA gaming is incredibly expensive in terms of development budgets. But as I already pointed out, AAA gaming has another disadvantage which is that it doesn't generate more revenue despite its constantly rising budgets. Is AAA gaming really sustainable? When Microsoft bought Activision/Blizzard, the only franchise in Activision's portfolio that outperformed the mobile title Candy Crush for revenue was Call of Duty. 

Yes, mobile games that use the freemium approach can be annoying but it's basically a modern interpretation of the system that the original arcade game machines used back in the 1970s and 80s: ask for more quarters to continue the game you had been playing. People tend to forget that those arcade machines were fairly harsh in terms of the experience. You had to feed a lot of $$ into them if you had any aspirations of playing for more than a few minutes. A quarter in 1980 is the equivalent of a dollar today. 

I think we should just agree to disagree on this one. I stand by all my points. At the end of the day, even if I take your position as true (which I do not), then to me they have still failed in every metric that matters except revenue. You can make the argument that is the only one that matters, but I stated explicitly that is not what is being discussed and is probably where the confusion stems from. In fact, the impact mobile has had on the medium can be viewed as a massive negative. If you can't make sense of that, then you're going to continue to be surprised when people continue to say Apple sucks at gaming. 

C'est la vie 🤷

foregoneconclusion said:

jSnively said: When I say they don't take gaming "seriously" I am talking about embracing and enabling the medium itself. I'm not talking about profit margins and revenue streams. Arguments for innovation outside of pure technological grunt are valid (look at Nintendo for the prime example), but they're not doing that either. 

What platform did Apple focus on initially for development of their own SoCs? Mobile. What platform did Apple first release Metal on? Mobile. So the mobile side of the business was the original driver for what they're talking about now on Macs in terms of gaming quality...1st party M series chips + Metal. It's pretty obvious that Apple embraced/enabled gaming on mobile since those are the apps that generate the most revenue in the App Store and Apple's platform is #1 in mobile gaming.

And don't forget that Apple Arcade represented the first gaming service that could be run across every type of hardware...iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV. That was a new idea in the industry and also a key to getting Apple customers more familiar with gaming on larger screens than phones/tablets. Again, it's mobile that's driving their strategy and it's been very successful. Apple has been serious about gaming it's just not the perspective that AAA gamers tend to have regarding gaming. Apple viewed mobile as the driver and AAA gamers/companies viewed desktops/consoles as the driver. 

I think it's bonkers to look at the history Apple has with games and to look at their "efforts" in the mobile space and come to the conclusion they did anything but stumble into  financial success there due to the gigantic user base. You don't have to look any further than Game Center and what a neglected bare-bones service that was for the vast majority of its life to understand games are not a priority at Apple, despite driving a fair amount of revenue. Likewise, if you look at the history of Apple Arcade and how they have managed and maintained it, it's pretty bleak...

Again, when most folks talk about getting "serious" about gaming they talk about the medium, not the money. Most people who love video games absolutely hate what the mobile ecosystem has done to it. It's been a disastrous and predatory race to the bottom. Is it financially successful? Absolutely -- for the 1%. That's not what's being discussed here though, and when they trot out AAA games as showpieces every few years that's not what they're trying to communicate either.

As mentioned multiple times in the thread, one of their biggest issues is that they keep putting up hurdles for developers. OpenGL was woefully out of date forever, Vulkan was eschewed in favor of Metal, and now they also have to deal with x86 to arm translations, too. All of those are self inflicted wounds. None of them would be a death-blow if Apple cared about getting more games on the platform and put the resources behind that effort -- but they don't. There are literally thousands of engaging indie games available today that would be fantastic on Apple's machines and would scream on the hardware, but where are they? it's the same reason Macs make up only ~2.6% of the Steam hardware survey.

Tht is mostly correct. They either need to spin up some internal studios or they need to start dumping a lot more money into Apple Arcade and use it aggressively as a publishing arm. At the very least they need to get serious about being a gaming platform, and start building out the tools and infrastructure to make developer's lives easier -- to their credit, the recent updates to Game Center were all very welcome and much overdue additions. However, until they start doing that they will never be taken "seriously" inside the gaming space no matter how much money can be scammed generated from the mobile audience.

foregoneconclusion said:

jSnively said: Apple has *never* actually been serious about gaming, but it would be cool to see that change.

Surprised people are still trying to frame it this way. The reality in gaming is that MOBILE is now larger for revenue than consoles + PC combined, so Apple is doing quite well really. They're a major player in the largest segment of the industry and their approach per Apple Arcade makes perfect sense given that fact. Sure, they're still well behind when it comes to AAA games but that part is less important than people think. 

While true, I think there's maybe a language disconnect. When I say they don't take gaming "seriously" I am talking about embracing and enabling the medium itself. I'm not talking about profit margins and revenue streams. Arguments for innovation outside of pure technological grunt are valid (look at Nintendo for the prime example), but they're not doing that either. 

Let's not forget that this is nothing new for Apple. They always dog-and-pony show something every handful of years, but it's always a gigantic nothing burger. We get one or two games ported and it's over. I would love to see them make a real pivot with the AppleTV in this space, but I don't think they ever will. Apple has always viewed games as just 'more software' and they have never looked at it as the unique storytelling medium that it is.

It's the same cycle with them when it comes to games again and again and again.

Games are a hits-driven business and when 95% of hit titles don't even run on your platform then you're not a "great" gaming machine. Once in a blue moon you'll get a AAA title years late, but even in the most recent case, the Mac version of RE:VIII is one of the worst looking versions of that game you can play. 

Also, Bloober team is... rough. Layers of Fear was a great horror game (some may say the best), but the 5 or so titles they've done since have been pretty mediocre-to-bad. Observer probably gets a nod, but that's about it. I don't think anybody has faith they will do a good job with the SH2 remake.

The MetalFX stuff is good (and needed for the resolution Apple pushes in their monitors), but it's generations behind what DLSS offers at this point. If Apple were serious they would bootstrap a solution based off the work being done on the Linux side of things (Wine/DXVK/VKD3D etc.) instead of trying to get developers to port to their proprietary APIs which will never happen en masse. 

Apple has *never* actually been serious about gaming, but it would be cool to see that change.

DAalseth said:

jSnively said:

Mike out here leaking our development plans forcing me to mark this article with the in-progress meter >: { 

Couldn’t help but notice that the BS o’Meter on the article rated it rather low. Does this mean that it’s not true and you won’t be adding a BS o’Meter to articles?

BS O'Meter is our internal name for it, but it was overly negative to start from the posisiton of "everything is some degree of bad." I already swapped it from quantifying how bad something is, to our confidence level in it. I put the level low on this article to troll Mike for announcing it too soon without asking anybody. You should start seeing editors use it on rumors soon, and it will show up in news rivers and the mobile apps over the next week or so, when it's actually done. I would expect it to change a bunch of times between now and then, since we weren't actually ready to talk about it yet, but here we are 😀