gaming on computers is a massive past time, so this can’t be ignored.
this is a troll, right? The global personal computer market will have shipped over 500 million units by the end of 2021 — less than 10% of that is gaming-focused hardware.
the reason for this should be somewhat straightforward — gaming is itself a niche market, and gaming personal computers compete less with general purpose PCs than they do with other gaming-specific hardware like handheld and tv consoles. The growth in the gaming PC market represents it’s success over those other non-pc gaming focused hardware options.
Apple grew a 2 and a half trillion dollar company by focusing on high quality execution over a small product catalog that targets a wide variety of people. Their lineup has *always* consisted of a limited number of models with broad feature sets to target as much of the total addressable market as they can. To the degree that they do any segmentation at all, its always towards large groups (e.g. college students, working professionals, etc.) who might actually make a difference in their ability to capture a greater percentage of the TAM.
I’d be a bit concerned if they decided to focus on AAA gaming, a market who’s estimated annual sales is **less than half a single fiscal quarter** of the overall annual market.
there are technical factors at play, sure — apple’s choice to prioritize open gl when it ended up being a losing technology, then to Metal as it invested in its home grown silicon for graphics, along with it’s fractured relationship with nvidia probably meant that apple’s performance in gaming was worse than it needed to be.
still, as those choices might have angered the teenager who spends too much time on steam, the apple shareholder knows that those choices were the right ones for its overall business.
even if apple were to investing gaming today, there’s still the broader question about the future of running AAA titles on bare metal in your home and how long that stack will be relevant. Casual games account for a larger and larger share of gaming revenue and hours played, and apple accounts for such a large percentage of revenue there thanks to its roll as toll booth via the App Store that its business practices on that front as the subject of regulatory scrutiny all over the world.
and for serious games, there's the looming shift to running demanding software like an AAA game on a VM that you stream to your home instead. This allows developers to standardize performance across platforms AND not need to worry about the compute and graphics limits or any one player. Microsoft, for one, is investing heavily in this with its Xbox game pass subscription. I’m not exactly sure what the future here looks like -- nobody is -- but it sounds like a pretty awful time to spin up all the developer relationships + needed technologies for what may ultimately be a futile stack.
in that sense, apple is probably hedging correctly with the size of its investment in Metal, an investment thay makes sense for other releases w/r/t apple’s ambitions in AR/VR, and will pay dividends for its much more important market or customers anyway — creative professionals.
i can only be thankful, then, that apple isn’t run by folks like the OP, because it’s an actual business that makes sane decisions that aren't necessarily designed to cater to the whims of a random reply guy, but rather to serve the overall needs of its customers, employees, and shareholders.
