When Apple came out with EGPU support, I saw a dim light at the end of the tunnel. I could dual boot my Mac and run a decent graphics card, even if there was a slight loss in frames from thunderbolt.
Now with Apple Silicon, the support for EGPUs have been dropped, and you no longer can dual boot and run Windows natively. So now if you want to game, you have to have a separately maintain another system or settle for Apple Arcade (yawn). Right now, I maintain a PC for gaming. I pull out a separate keyboard, mouse, audio interface each time I want to casually play. Each time I use a Microsoft product, I want to hang myself and makes me appreciate the Apple ecosystem more.
Gaming isn't just for nerds anymore. It's a common form of entertainment. The phrase "Macs don't game" really needs to die. Hopefully Apple Silicon can produce some killer GPUs to persuade gaming studios to develop their games on this platform.
This is my dream.
As much as Intel Macs made it convenient to have one computer effectively run both platforms, it really wasn't great in terms of performance running Windows games compared to that of the competition. Certainly if you had a 15"/16" MacBook Pro, at best, you were dealing with low-mid-range discrete graphics and, at least from 2015 onward, from AMD which is a bit of step down from NVIDIA in terms of overall performance. Much as I wish we had one last decent hurrah for the discrete-GPU equipped Intel Mac for the purposes of achieving your "dream", it's a moot point.
I agree with you that the whole "Macs don't game" sentiment is irritatingly dismissive, as though decent casual Mac gaming wasn't a perfectly viable thing to do on Macs (at least, pre-Catalina). Though, between Catalina dropping support for 32-bit Intel binaries and this transition to Apple Silicon on top of that, it's a lot to ask companies like Aspyr and Feral Interactive, who effectively had to play Sophie's Choice with their Mac games in terms of which gets to continue to run natively on Intel Macs. They're both focusing more on iOS, Android, and Linux than they are with the Mac and, as much as I hate to say it, I can't blame them at all.
That said, I don't think the loss of eGPU support makes as huge of a difference here. Certainly, the M1's GPU is only so powerful, but, down the road, native performance will be insane on future SoC GPUs from Apple.
The only issue there is that, as decent and performant as Apple's SoCs all are (and, for the most part, have been) for gaming, actually getting developers to produce games for the Mac, especially now that they're not (or at least won't be in the future) coding for the same architecture anymore, is tricky. A LOT of people dislike Xcode and porting things over to Metal isn't exactly the easiest thing to do, or so I'm led to believe. If you start out building your projects for Apple, it seems like it's not too bad. But porting over seems challenging. Certainly moreso than porting to OpenGL was.
The issue isn't the hardware, necessarily. The issue is getting AAA content creators interested in macOS as a platform. The fact that macOS still represents a small niche of the overall PC market means the top studios choose to ignore it. Add to that the cost of developing games for a platform that is very different from the dominant market devices (Windows PCs and consoles). The return on investment simply doesn't exist.
If we ever get true AAA titles for macOS they will come directly from Apple, or a game studio collaborating with them.
The issue isn't the hardware or what it can do. You're right about that much. The issue is developing for that hardware. That's where it becomes somewhat hostile for game developers. Both the fourth generation Apple TV and both generations of Apple TV 4K have console calibur GPUs. But no one developed for them. Part of that was Apple's crazy rules, but another part of that was that the developer tools and frameworks were almost hostile to porting.
How is Apple preventing other gaming platforms on macOS? MacOS is open and anyone can put whatever software they like on it. I think you mean iOS.
Apple dictates how one must develop for macOS. They don't prevent you from installing software like they do for iOS. But that's not to say that they're not still restrictive in how one develops for macOS, despite that.
I don't think Apple needs to collaborate with AMD/ NVIDIA when they're doing so well with Apple Silicon.
I think the person you're replying to more means in terms of getting games to work on Intel Macs. Certainly, with Apple seeming to be the only allowed GPU maker supported on Apple Silicon versions of macOS, Apple only has to work with Apple.
Once Apple builds the hardware that can compete with PCs, I think that might change. Besides, Blizzard caters to MacOS, why do you think they do that?
Blizzard catered to the Mac. All new releases in the pipeline are either Windows only or Windows and consoles only. No Mac support. This includes Diablo IV and Diablo II: Resurrected (which is surprising given that the other three restoration projects are macOS native). Hell, I'm not 100% sure that they're going to port over more than WoW and possibly Hearthstone to Apple Silicon. It certainly seems like they're not making it a priority with StarCraft II, Diablo III, or Warcraft III: Reforged.
At one time Intel dominated the CPU market. That picture looks a lot different now.
They still largely dominate the CPU market. They lost Apple, which was a substantial customer of theirs. And they're seeing increased pressure from AMD in both the consumer and business PC markets (the latter of which is somewhat new; though there are still vendors that exclusively use Intel for at least one of those two segments; Dell's business PC lineup comes to mind).
The day when Catalina obliterated my 32-bit gaming library on Steam is the day I quit gaming on the Mac and bought a separate PC for gaming.
Ironically, those 32-bit games were the non-graphic intensive games that were perfect for my Macbook.
I think Catalina was the real death of Mac gaming and for this reason. My Steam library is largest in Windows, second largest on Mojave or earlier, third largest on Linux, and fourth largest on an Intel Mac running Catalina or later. Though, I suspect that Torchlight II isn't the only 64-bit Mac game that is incorrectly classified as a 32-bit Mac game (and therefore isn't showing up in my lists).
It definitely is Apple's problem. Just because your APIs are open doesn't mean developers will automatically develop for it. Since Mac is a niche market, it's Apple's job to court AAA studios to develop games on the Mac.
I'd further add to this that Apple's APIs are not friendly to developers of the kinds of games that you'd frequently see for Windows, XBox, and PlayStation. The work to port is not insignificant and a lot of that is because Apple insists that things be done that way. The fourth generation Apple TV could've absolutely been a console killer and it just wasn't and that's a good deal of the reason why.
Nintendo already has a strong gaming brand. Apple, on the other hand, has a reputation of being anti-gaming(cutting off Nvidia GPU support, not supporting eGPUs, removing 32-bit games in Catalina, etc).
Don't forget that AAA game studios are companies. The question they are asking is "Will developing games on the Mac make us profit?".
Indie games got everyone covered on non-graphic intensive games. They even have less incentives than AAA game studios to support niche markets.
I agree wholeheartedly with all of this.
