Epymian

Simplistic games are okay on a smartphone due to limited controllers on a touchscreen phone model.  But serious games require serious hardware and much of the innovation in GPU and CPU tech is driven by gaming requirements.  You can use a 10 year old system to watch most media aside from cutting edge 4K HDR but even a 2 year old gaming PC is starting to chug on ultra quality settings with 2016 or 17 gaming releases.  Gaming developers have pushed the realism and physics/environmental rendering of the experience without pause and Apple simply is not even close as a player in that space.

The odd thing is that Apple has pushed the boundaries for our collective good in so many ways over the last 30 years.  I mean they have done some amazing shit.  But there problem with the company is not engineering know how but rather a mindset that music, video and photo archiving is important but gaming is not "something we do".  In my opinion this is unfortunate because I would much rather have a 5K iMac with a 1080 GPU that I can swap out when I want to upgrade that portion than having a MBPro and a Win10 gaming PC sharing the real estate on my desk so I can do all the things I like to do with a computer.

In the same way that Apple hired successful members of the music industry to senior positions to help with that space, or the fashion/marketing industry for that matter, I think they could consider hiring some hardcore gaming expertise.  It will be an uphill battle only because the game developers would also have to come on board and port current and future content over to Mac OS.  But Apple could help with that as well if they are serious.

I am beyond the culture wars of Mac vs PC or iOS versus Android. I started out on a PDP 11/40 so all this seems like magic in a way. I simply buy the tool that does the job the best.  For me this has been 10K dollars to PC's for cutting edge gaming/better financial software/better dragon voice dictation and 0K to Apple in the last 2 years.

I have used Macs since my Mac Plus in the 80's, have owned most models in the last 30 years including iMacs, powerbooks, mac pro's  and continue to live off my PB Pro 2013 (waiting for the next rev of that machine).  I also have one air-cooled and one water-cooled PC for gaming since  warcraft runs fine on my PB but driving a 34" monitor is not great and playing Skyrim or Witcher or Mass Effect requires Windows and a real graphics gpu.  I might be unusual in that I can sink 5 figures into PC stuff just to play games requiring windows, but I know a lot of PC gamers that have spent a small fortune on high end PC's just for gaming. I have upgraded my PCs for gaming annually but have seen little reason to upgrade my 3 year old MBpro or my 4 year old iMac.   Straddling both worlds, I would even propose that a lot of sales on the PC side are driven by gaming needs and not corporate or personal use.  Most personal domestic PC users probably prefer a Mac if they are not gamers.

Until Apple addresses the gaming issue, then major PC/console games like Mass Effect and Witcher, etc. will not be ported over and they will miss out on the market.  I think the high end gaming market is under-estimated and given the sales of LOL, DOTA, and all the other stuff that currently will not run on a mac, it is something that Apple should seriously consider.  Even baked in system/hardware level support for external GPU configurations would go a long ways.