At the same time Macs have very capable HW and developing SW now more than before so that's the reason for the optimism.
There’s a difference between optimism and wishful thinking though. Is this optimism based on the HW and SW of Macs? I’d think so. But why is it not based on what’s actually happening inside development studios, particularly on the analytics and finance side of things? In the end, that’s where decisions are made and there, nothing has changed for expensive titles, it even got worse in comparison to the past.
- "Gaming on macs is terrible. End of it."
Well, compared to what? Compared to the Windows gaming market it is terrible. The whole market is in a terrible state. This is not a subjective thing, it’s measured in $ for studios. The lucky ones are Apple getting a cut for every transaction made via the AppStore.
So why despite having 96% market share do pc gamers feel the need to do that on Mac forums?
Again, people own multiple hardware and are here anyway. People are very emotional when it comes to this for whatever reason. No one is trying to rain on your parade. Emotions should be for the games, not when talking about market analytics. I’ve used Macs since the 1980s, took a short break with DOS/Windows/Linux and came back to the Mac as my daily driver with the PPC. I developed my first games on the C64, then Amiga, then PC (DOS, later Windows), followed by “everywhere”. I was among the first who got access to the SDK for iOS development of a project in cooperation with Apple, before it was publicly released later. I’ve owned most of the major game consoles since the 8-bit days - Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, MS, Panasonic, SNK, NEC and developed for some of them. Some of the stuff I developed (graphics applications for healthcare and research purposes) was even Mac exclusive for a while, because it was the best market fit. I’ve been a fanboy here and there, but yet I have no problem calling a company out when they screw up or point out the flaws if there are any and that includes Apple. I made the decision to stop Mac support for larger projects which were Unity or Unreal based last year (it’s been a long time coming). It’s just not financially feasible, it costs more than it brings in. For smaller projects, it’s a different story.
While I agree to some degree it's worth mentioning that by a quick look you can see that some games on that list haven't even announced their supported platforms.
Which ones? I randomly took a few games out of a release list I have here. I did a quick check and they all have at least Windows as a platform listed (some more when counting consoles). I did not include games that have no confirmed target platform and also did not include games where the information is still under NDA for obvious reasons. So everything I’ve included should already be public knowledge. Which one do you think does not have a platform announced? I can double check in case I made a copy&paste error.
Some of the games have never had Mac ports either so it's highly unlikly that they would get a port now. I mean Dead Space Remake? The game has never been ported to Mac and that's the case with many EA games.
Not sure I understand. Are we only allowed to count games that previously had a Mac release? I thought this was about games in general and how attractive the Mac is for studios. Shouldn’t every game count then (leave out console exclusives)? I mean, if the Mac is a promising platform for gaming, then it will catch studios attention and they will port a game to it, no matter if they’ve previously done it or not.
And yes, EA like many others have little interest in the Mac, because they’d lose money that way - at least for bigger titles. This is all done by analysts looking at the financing. And before you get a green light for such a project, you get a yellow light for a detailed tech evaluation. So anything happening on a Mac starts before it’s actually green-lit. At least for big studies, the indie developer sitting at home is a different story.
It's always been like that so just because games don't support Mac at the time of release it doesn't mean developers have totally abandoned Mac. So I wouldn't be too quick to make major conclusions based on a shortlist of unreleased games.
It’s really not always been like that. Such a decision is directly influenced by the technology stack. The rest comes down to simple math. How long does it take to port a game to the Mac and how many people are needed? That includes the port itself, testing, QA, maintenance, etc. Then some analyst is making a prediction on expected sales. If $ sales - $ port > 0 it’s a go (well, more like a much larger number than 0). If not, no go. It’s actually fairly simple with the usual uncertainty involved as no one can predict exact sales numbers, not for games, not for movies, not for anything. The problem here is that really expensive games are hard to port because of proprietary engines or 3rd party tools or even high level of optimization (hello Path of Exile). And by hard to port I mean expensive, to the point it’s not financially feasible.
For simple games, it’s a whole different story. And by simple I mean the engine, lack of optimization (sometimes because it’s not needed), levels of graphics and so on.
Let’s look at Valheim. It’s using Unity, so that’s a big plus for a port. If not using 3rd party tools it could be as simple as a switch of a button. You still need to test, do QA, etc. But such a port can be straight forward. The graphics look very dated, very simple to port. The graphics are not why people buy this game though. It is understandable they made the decision to port it, based on the “little” work (compared to some other AAA titles). I probably would have done the same.
Borderlands 3, UE4 which is ok, not as easy as Unity, but still ok (UE5 is much more problematic). As for the graphics, it’s not cel-shaded (which are really simple to do), it’s mostly hand drawn textures with simple lighting models and pre-baked light maps. In other words, there’s little effort. It’s a artistic decision though.
For Frostpunk there’s always been a macOS version because the engine supported it from the start. They just didn’t bother releasing it and do the additional testing. That decision was made later on, due to the simple port. The‘ve also decided to go UE4.
You can add Baldur’s Gate 3 too. It’s a very simple to port game, the graphics are fairly simple and there’s nothing in the game that requires a high level of optimization for any specific platform. The majority of the development cost was eaten up by the game logic, which is platform agnostic.
To sum it up, the simpler a game is, the easier it is to port it. There are actually metrics for such things. And that’s why from the very beginning it’s somewhat easy to tell if a game might receive a port to the Mac or not at least from a financial view.
Also are any of the big studios interested in the Mac gaming market, Sony, Microsoft, 2k (R*), Ubisoft etc?
Any game studio would port to the Mac if it’s cheap and remains cheap. It’s simple, if it costs $1M to port and maintain over the next x years and the sales generate $10M, you have a winner and a port. If it costs $30M to port and you only make $10M with it, then hell no. As I said before, it all comes down to money in the end. And if it isn’t for simple games that are cheap to port, no major game studio will even think about it. You don’t even have to talk to the people making these decision. Go to a game conference for developers or maybe even SIGGRAPH and talk to the people making these games. The Mac is treated as “can we make a few extra bucks with it?”, but not with any priority. I’ve done the math somewhere in a much older thread for an actual $100M+ project that had Mac support. The next part of that game series is in the list I posted and won’t get Mac support anymore. It’s also using a custom engine with no intention to ever make it portable. A decision based on money and nothing else. Now if Apple comes around the corner, puts $100B on the table to buy them, that might change… but what are the chances?
GrumpyCoder: I’m still hoping for more from you as far as elevating the discussion goes, not just dropping a random list of games with no context nor message other than Macs suck for gaming. I’m not going to fact-check your list, beyond saying that the vast majority are titles that I’m unfamiliar with, and to ask if you’re claiming that they’re all announced AAA games or if they all shipped AAA games?
The point is not being familiar with the games or if they’re shipped or in development, I could have picked many other games. The point is, if the Mac is so attractive to studios (and developers*) and if Apple has such great support for games, then why are so few games (going by the overall numbers of games) ported to Macs? Shouldn’t everyone release their games for Macs when everything is so great and the future is so bright? The simple truth is, it is not. That doesn’t mean we won’t see games on the Mac, but not enough choice for the mainstream market to establish a larger user base playing games and not enough for the gaming freak. The casual gamer already picks some games from the AppStore. In other words, same old, same old.
* as for developers… I’d say developers like Macs in general. As a developer I’d love to do everything on a Mac. Apps, graphics, research, 2D/3D simulations, AI, you name it. It a great platform developing for when you put hardware and software aside. As someone responsible for the success of projects and the millions of $ put into these, it’s not so easy. The problem is, the hardware is not there yet for all use cases. We’ll have to wait and see what the real Mac Pro replacement brings and if it can compete with NVidia DGX stations and similar systems from Dell, Lenovo and HP (and clusters of course). And then there is of course NVidia with Cuda and all those tools (hello Omniverse) that make life so much easier. It’s so much cheaper going that way. Now no single company/research group needs all of these tools, only a subset, but what are teams working in research, medical field, AI, games, etc. supposed to do? Hire 500 to 1000 additional people to port the stuff they need the next 5 to 10 years? Sure it can be done, but this is where we go in circles. It all comes down to money, how much does it cost to use a specific platform and tools and how much can be made with it.
I’d love to hear other stories though. What are the experiences with projects in the $5M to $10M range over a period of 3-4 years. What’s the return on the Mac side? What about projects in the $10M+ range or even cheaper ones?
