A large part of the PC consumer market is concerned with gaming, and this drives PC technology to deliver ever greater speeds. New cutting edge games take advantage of this, such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Metro Exodus, to draw more photorealistic vista's, better characters and more detailed monsters. In essence the industry revolves around this push to create movie-quality visuals, which requires hardware makers to keep ramping up computing speed as the number #1 priority.
But is that really necessary? If you look at past gaming industry launches, like the Nintendo Wii and the Switch, performance was not the number one priority. In fact, whenever you look in the last fifteen years, there have been effective launches on hardware of varying levels of power. There have been great games on the PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Wii and others.
What really matters is do these games work as good art. If you look at games like Journey on the PS3, or Limbo and Inside on the PC, or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch, the visuals work as art pieces, every frame a painting, to coin a famous phrase from the movie industry. You can make a great game for any platform, as long as you take that into account.
So on a platform like M1, where Apple has prioritised performance-per-watt to create relatively fast and energy efficient processors, it should still be possible to create great games. However is it possible to create great ports? To take a game that was meant to be photorealistic and adapt it to a lesser hardware platform will give poor results. I think to create great games for this platform will mean building artistic games that run on the hardware.
Yep. Good games have nothing to go with graphics. For the last two weeks I have had a blast playing Vampire Survivors which is a very silly game using very simple sprite graphics.
But photorealistic games are a current fashion and one just can’t ignore that.
Apple needs first-party games designed by artists, from not only a visual perspective, but also story and gameplay. It’s not enough to throw money at third-party exclusives for Apple Arcade, especially since a lot of those games (I’m looking at you Star Trek) are just mobile games with the micro transactions taken out. To be successful at gaming (rather than casual mobile apps) Apple needs the type of commitment they put into creating shows like Ted Lasso or Severence for TV+.
Good games are not about graphics. Good games are about gameplay. Great technical specs such as amazing graphics, can attract players, though.
The problem with the Mac is not the performance, and it has never been. The problem with it is the audience, the userbase.
Each of the Switch and the Playstation 4 have sold over 100 million units. The Xbox One was not that successful, but it still has sold over 50 million and Microsoft is supporting it with sweet deals for exclusives. There are certainly over a billion, and perhaps two billion, PCs in the world, which is a lot. But, more importantly, there are over 120 million active Steam users, a huge market of potential buyers for PC games.
So, if you release a game for Playstation 4, Switch, or Steam, you can reach an audience of over 100 million potential buyers on each of these platforms. Xbox One has half that potential, but still.
What about the Mac? It was reported that in 2018 there were more than 100 million active Macs worldwide. That number may have risen, but I do not have the statistics for 2022. While it may be more than 100 million, it has probably not reached 200 million. Out of 100 million Mac users, not all of them are gamers.
So, the potential audience of Mac gamers is much lower than Playstation 4, Switch or Steam. It is definitely not easy to convince publishers to make or port games to Macs, especially AAA-games which are very expensive to make and demand huge sales.
The Apple Arcade is a clever way around this, because it takes advantage of the huge iPhone userbase. The userbase of iPhones, iPads and Macs combined make it a compelling proposition for anyone willing to make or port games to these platforms. However, as there are far more iPhones than Macs, the game must be optimized for this platform. It means that games for Apple Arcade should be easily playable with touch controls, which make them simpler and more restrictive than games that can be controlled with an 8-button gamepad.
