cloudguy

Fidonet127 said:

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.

EsquireCats said:

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.

Fidonet127 said:

elijahg said:

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. 

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.

dysamoria said:

goodbyeranch said:

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.