mcdave

Marvin said:

mcdave said:

DAalseth said:

Not a surprise. AS is the future and it was only a matter of time for software to start only running on it. They don't make things for PPC any more. Soon enough Intel Mac software will be the same.

But so odd they didn’t do a universal version, they must have the libraries for both. Steam apparently shows 38% Apple Silicon traction but this is the one release where supporting both ISAs makes sense.

The following video mentions Feral said they had performance and stability issues on the AMD GPUs but they are working on it and if they fix the issues they will update it to be universal:

mcdave said:

I thought Feral would have pushed a Universal version of the Tomb Raider trilogy by now. It would be great if Apple could assist as gaming is a weak spot which could tip consumers (not the top 15% of gamers) off Macs.

The developer of the Tomb Raider franchise hasn't been making a lot of profit. Square Enix posted earnings that showed only a few million per year in net income. They sold the development studios and IP recently to a holding company for $300m:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embracer_Group
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EMBRAC-B.ST/
https://www.polygon.com/23053137/square-enix-embracer-eidos-crystal-dynamics-tomb-raider

Square Enix wants to focus on blockchain/AI/cloud.

This could have been a good purchase for Apple. The studios would only have a burn rate around $100m per year and they would have owned Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and these developers have done the Marvel games.

Apple could still potentially buy them out as the Embracer Group has an 80b SEK ($8b) market cap and that's 124 studios, including Aspyr. Ubisoft is another company that will potentially be up for a buyout. The family wants to maintain control of it though but maybe Apple could buy out the rest of the shareholders and take it private with them:

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-05-04-guillemot-family-is-considering-buying-ubisoft

This would give them Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, Rayman, Prince of Persia. $4b for Ubisoft, $8b for Embracer would give them a lot of high quality IP to use for Apple Arcade. To make back $12b from $5/month subs would take 20m subs over 10 years, not including operating costs so I can see why they would do lower investments in gaming but it would help drive some hardware sales.

DAalseth said:

Not a surprise. AS is the future and it was only a matter of time for software to start only running on it. They don't make things for PPC any more. Soon enough Intel Mac software will be the same.