Johar

Apple calls itself a gaming company because it's generating tons of revenue from the mostly casual mobile gaming market. However, I would never call them a gaming company - in the same way that I wouldn't call a TV maker like LG a movie company.

As a game developer I have suffered the consequences of using Apple's buggy and severely crippled Game Center service. It honestly felt like its product manager was an intern... who didn't even particularly like games. Ultimately they realised how terrible it was and decided to kill it rather than fixing it.

As a AAA segment gamer, I previously used to be able to play most games on my Mac. Either ported to native code or running in Windows by way of Bootcamp. Since Mr. Cook took over, I can't find any other explanation to Apple's attitude visavi serious gaming, than a personal dislike of these games. Hence, Apple hardware has gradually become a completely lost cause for any serious gamer.

Like someone else said in a post above, there's a long list of actions that Apple need to take to get even close to earning the right to call themselves a gaming company.

There seems to be some confusion about "gamers". The desire to play graphically advanced games at high frame rates doesn't equate to an anti-social, sedentary life, spent in front of a blinged out gaming rig. It's like assuming that everyone who likes a great cinematic experience in front of a large screen TV with a surround sound system by definition have to be wasting their life away binging TV shows all the time.

Hardcore gamers are mostly kids in the 10-25 year old bracket with gaming, often both competitive and social, as a major interest. I would advise against letting your prejudices paint them all as degenerate lowlifes. And the size of the gaming market seems to contradict the notion that playing games is a niche.

It has been sadly obvious for oh, about as many years as Steve Jobs have been dead, that Apple is firmly opposed to any kind of state-of-the-art gaming on the Mac.

I've been a Mac user since I got my first Macintosh SE (so quite a while) and it has always been a bit of a challenge to be a gamer on that platform. But Steve Jobs regularly trotted out gaming celebs like John Carmack to tout the gaming prowess of Mac OS X. We also got OpenGL, PC compatible ports and eventually the ability to boot straight into Windows and play any game we wanted.

Under Cook, mobile games seem to be OK, but game developers on the Mac are given such a cold shoulder that even Mac gaming stalwart Blizzard refrained from launching their latest hit game Overwatch on the Mac. This was the first game since the start of that company that wasn't simultaneoulsy launched on both PC and Mac. Apples anemic GPU choices didn't enable the game to meet Blizzard's user experience standards.

What I don't get is the joy that clowns like Lkrupp seems to derive from the fact that Mac users now need to purchase a second computer for gaming. Is there any reason at all to celebrate that one specific, and incidentally very popular, activity simply can't be adequately performed on a Mac computer?

I used to boot into Windows on my 2009 Mac Pro in order to play PC games. With plenty of RAM and the possibility to upgrade the GPU, this was a viable solution up until a few years ago.

However, since the passing of Steve Jobs, gaming on the Mac has been deliberately ignored, with seriously underpowered computers and no interest whatsoever in working with game developers. Even Mac gaming stalwart Blizzard finally gave up on the Mac platform, when their new Overwatch title literally could not run decently on any available Mac.

Moving to ARM might not affect the business side in any drastic way, but every single person wanting to play new AAA PC games will be forced to either buy two computers  or to ditch the Mac altogether. Considering how many young people (and quite a few older) are into games, this seems to me like a major loss of opportunity. It's even more bizarre given Apple's apparent recognition of the importance of games on their mobile platform. But I guess they believe Apple users are more interested in Candy Crush than in Overwatch.