Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]

[Random_Matt]

How has this hit 46 pages? The answer could have been said in one reply.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

How has this hit 46 pages? The answer could have been said in one reply.

🤷‍♂️

 

[Unregistered 4U]

How has this hit 46 pages? The answer could have been said in one reply.

Part of it is when new identical threads get created, they get pulled into here. All one has to do is reject the notion that “Publishers don’t want to release games for Mac” and one can run these threads forever!

 

[orionquest]

Part of it is when new identical threads get created, they get pulled into here. All one has to do is reject the notion that “Publishers don’t want to release games for Mac” and one can run these threads forever!

Ah but that would be moving goal posts to some.... and the circle will repeat itself.

 

[orionquest]

I try to say this with a cool and calm Johnny Depp voice; Are you trying to move the goalposts? So it’s not enough to just mention Mac ports to prove that Mac gaming is not dead and doomed, now we have to find a studio that makes only Mac games to prove it can be profitable? In the PPC era there were several Mac/PPC only games but that changed with the transition to Intel. Why would that be important now? It would be a lousy business strategy that only Apple could pull off but not without losing a ton of money like Epic and that’s not their business model. For smaller studios it would be suicide to ignore 96% of the gaming market unless they wanted to minimize their profit and not be able to fund their future games. There’s no pride in that.

Funny though that Bungie in the beginning before Microsoft bought them focused on the Mac market ”because it was smaller and easier to compete in”. Today with around 120 million Steam users the number of Mac gamers should be about 3 million (2.55%). That’s like a small country. Developers should also think about long-term revenues and not short-term profits. Tomb Raider series has sold 88 million copies to this day.


Decent list in what way? You could add 1000 more titles to it but it doesn’t tell the whole truth about the ”doomed” Mac market because it’s build on a wrong premise. Sadly it’s another example of what’s wrong with threads like this, people rather want to be right than factual. The premise of that list is that Mac gaming is doomed because new and unreleased games aren’t ported to Mac. As I said that’s not how porting games to Mac works. It takes months or years for Win games to come to Mac. Mac ports are rarely announced or released at the same time with Win games. It’s more rule than exception.

The list is full of newly released games, unreleased upcoming games, franchises that never have existed on Mac or developers that have never released Mac games before. Of course such a list becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy proving that the writer is right. I mean Feral just released Warhammer III for Mac. Do you expect them to spit out WH games every other month? I could also claim the opposite by saying that Warhammer 40K: Shootas, Blood & Teef is coming to Mac later this year. There’s even a demo for it.

I just gave three examples before of how the porting usually works. I can give another one, also regarding a studio that is interested in Mac gaming market, 4A Games. They’ve made only 4 games of which three have been ported to Mac, i.e. Metro trilogy. Exodus was pc and Epic only in Feb 2019, no words about a Mac port. So back then it could also be on that list as a proof. In Feb 2020 they released it on Steam, still pc only and no words about Mac. In Nov 2020 they suddenly announced it for Mac, Linux, Xbox X and PS5. Finally it was released in April 2021 on Mac after two years. Then last summer at WWDC21 Apple revealed that 4A and Larian had asked Apple for help for optimizing Exodus and BG3 for Apple Silicon and Metal and Apple had happily helped them for free, showing Apple is interested in gaming but on their on terms.

So despite being a ”decent” list it is still misleading and premature. Big studios like Microsoft and Sony are first and mostly interested in promoting their own HW/SW. They want to increase their market share by selling Windows/Xbox, PS and their subscription services. It took Sony 17 years to release God of War on Windows. So maybe in 2039 they release it on Mac. As for Ubisoft they have no interest in either Mac or Linux.

Not at all.

Like I said I was pondering the notion of it. But in reality it does matter and it's not about moving targets but what consists of the AAA gaming world. Apple isn't making games for the Mac, so who is? You may want to ignore the fact there isn't even 1 studio creating Mac games all you want but it's perfectly valid to consider it and how detrimental it is to the mac gaming community.

It seems you've been around and can remember Bungie before MS bought their potential. Do you remember the excitement in the Mac community, and Mac gaming in general, that Macworld or wherever they had that demo was great. Finally someone raised the torch and was doing something. And they were great games, Marathon, Myth, then Halo. Then poof, nadda. I don't get a sense of that level of excitement from the release of the M1. I also don't get the sense of gaming in the overall gaming community the mac is even on anyone's radar. This means gaming websites. Sure the've paid some lip service to Apple Arcade, and probably covered the "what ifs" with the M1. But without any further follow through that momentum just dies. Ports are great, if they happen, but lots of gamers expect commitments, not just what might happen.

I'm just talking off the top of my head, I don't mean this to be factual just an open discussion about it.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

I keep hearing some rumors about integrated Crossover, similar to what Proton is doing for Linux. Could be an option, but only time will tell.

 

[Irishman]

I keep hearing some rumors about integrated Crossover, similar to what Proton is doing for Linux. Could be an option, but only time will tell.

If it works as well as (or better than) Boot Camp, then it certainly sounds exciting!

Where did you learn about those rumors?

 

[JimmyjamesEU]

If it works as well as (or better than) Boot Camp, then it certainly sounds exciting!

Where did you learn about those rumors?

There are rumours about Apple buying EA. No idea if there is any truth to them. I haven't heard anything about a crossover-like solution, and I am skeptical to say the least.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

If it works as well as (or better than) Boot Camp, then it certainly sounds exciting!

Boot Camp is a native Windows solution, so no, it won’t work better. DX12 is and remains a problem for now.

Where did you learn about those rumors?

Can’t drop names. One person is the team lead (engine and graphics) for some titles that got a Windows and console release with a custom engine and UE4. The other is doing HLSL development at another studio.

This is far from actually happening, but something companies apparently look into now. When and if at all it’s happening, remains to be seen. But I guess with Proton being a thing now, it was inevitable that it’s at least looked at.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

There are rumours about Apple buying EA. No idea if there is any truth to them. I haven't heard anything about a crossover-like solution, and I am skeptical to say the least.

I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but I’d doubt it. Apple wouldn’t get anything out of it and they’d end up expending a lot of effort producing content specifically for non-Apple systems. And, if they decided to stop production of content for those other systems, the value of the purchase goes down significantly.

 

[mi7chy]

Apple buying EA to gain a handful of games makes little sense compared to integrating Wine/Proton/Lutris/etc. to gain a larger portfolio. Even then there's still many other critical roadblocks to Mac gaming such as poor cost per frame with Macs delivering about 1/5th the frame rate of gaming laptops that cost the same or less. Even the AppleGamingWiki guy thinks it's a bad idea.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

compared to integrating Wine/Proton/Lutris/etc. to gain a larger portfolio.

Yeah, but both of them don’t make much sense, even combined. Integrating Wine would just be Apple officially confirming the notion that, if you’re not a console, your best bet is to try to run the Windows executables. And, folks that want to do that don’t need Apple’s help for it.

Apple’s willing to aid developers that are trying to code natively for macOS using Metal, it’s just that most developers don’t feel the effort and the support after the sale’s worth taking those steps.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I don’t know if there’s any truth to it, but I’d doubt it. Apple wouldn’t get anything out of it and they’d end up expending a lot of effort producing content specifically for non-Apple systems. And, if they decided to stop production of content for those other systems, the value of the purchase goes down significantly.

According to this story, it was a past thing.

EA reportedly tried to sell itself to Apple | AppleInsider

EA has reportedly been seeking out a merger and Apple was a potential suitor, a report about Comcast CEO Brian Roberts' attempt to merge NBC with the game publisher reveals.

appleinsider.com

Given how much money they have, I wouldn’t doubt that there’s been any number of folks seeking for Apple to buy them.

 

[droplink]

Apple buying EA to gain a handful of games makes little sense compared to integrating Wine/Proton/Lutris/etc. to gain a larger portfolio. Even then there's still many other critical roadblocks to Mac gaming such as poor cost per frame with Macs delivering about 1/5th the frame rate of gaming laptops that cost the same or less. Even the AppleGamingWiki guy thinks it's a bad idea.

He spends 6 minutes saying what could be said in one sentence: "there are fever games available on mac than there are on PC or console, so you could consider getting one of those for your gaming needs"

 

[Homy]

Randomly grabbing these from a release list...

• Sons of the Forest
• Forspoken
• Saints Row
• Scorn
• Starfield
• Stalker 2
• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Ark 2
• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
• Babylon's Fall
• Blood Bowl 3
• Company of Heroes 3
• Dead Space Remake
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
• Diablo 4
• Everwild
• Frostpunk 2
• Galactic Civilizations IV
• Ghostwire Tokyo
• Gotham Knights
• Gothic Remake
• Grid Legends
• GTFO
• Hellblade 2
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Kerbal Space Programm 2
• Knights of Honor 2
• Overwatch 2
• Park Beyond
• Path of Exile 2
• Pharaoh: A New Era
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake
• Redfall
• Roller Champions
• Shadow Warrior 3
• Syberia: The World Before Anfang
• Skull and Bones
• Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Remake
• System Shock Remake
• The Outer Worlds 2
• Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2
• Warhammer 40K: Darktide
• Witchfire

All these games have one thing in common, Windows but no Mac support. Note Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, they've dropped Mac support after D3 and PoE supported Mac natively. I'd say there is a lack of dev support. Not a total lack, there is still support, but nowhere near what it could be. As far as Apple goes, they only care about making money and the usual mobile type game that is cheap an offers any form of DLC / in-game purchase option is what they're after.

Their support is bad, really bad compared to Nvidia. When I run into a problem on the Nvidia side I can get support right away, Nvidia will also invite me to come over, bring my team along and solve problems together. With Apple not so much anymore. It used to be the case back in the PPC and early Intel days. If Apple is giving support today, than it's for marketing purposes only, something they show off on stage during a keynote. Otherwise it's asking for support and hope to hear back from them with an actual solution. Apple today reminds me a lot of Nintendo support back in the SNES, N64 and GC days, it was a nightmare to request dev support with Nintendo back then (I have no idea if Nintendo changed later on as I've not done anything on Nintendo hardware in ages).

To sum it up, not many studios care about bringing games to the Mac. And support from Apple could be much, much better as well. For some reason they showed interest in porting Tensorflow over for compute, that went south quickly however. Now they jumped onto the Blender bandwagon, we'll wait and see how that will go. I've yet to see such effort (even if they drop it) in the gaming world. The last massive gaming effort I've seen from Apple directly was the introduction of SpriteKit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.


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?

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?

You can question all you want, this list is directly from the studios.
This is the typical Mac-fanboi behavior, read the quote from the Myst review I posted several times. It's spot on. Adam Savage made it famous:

Funny how things are constantly moved towards, Macs are gaming machines and Apple can't do no wrong. M1 is the savior, but as soon as games are pointed out, we're moving to 32-bit games that are not supported anymore and can't even be run on current hardware. ?‍♂️

The only things that are accepted are those that say "all hail the Mac, all hail gaming on the Mac". In psychology it's called selective acceptance/rejection and it speaks volumes.


Please tell me. I've quickly checked all titles and for each one I found announced platforms. I didn't check in online stores, the info is directly from press releases of the studios. They should know. I'd be happy to double check, which one do you think does not have a confirmed platform?


Give me a hard definition for AAA and I'll tell you. Careful though, it's much more likely that non-AAA games are coming to macOS, because they're cheap to develop and easy to port, so it's much more likely there will be a macOS version.

Another question is, does it really matter? If support from Apple is so good and games are so attractive for devs to bring over, then why do these or any other non-macOS game not get a port? Studios should line up and port titles and yet that's not the case... Why don't you post a list of Mac-exclusives? You can handpick the games if you want. Just stick to desktop vs desktop and mobile vs mobile. Doesn't make much sense to compare a mobile game with a desktop game.


I fact checked my list, thank you. Not from some website, but actual information from the source. I did not chose these games to make my point, I picked them randomly out of a much larger list. I'd think as someone who ported or developed so much software for macOS the concept of "randomization" is clear. Maybe not? How many titles in what budget range have you ported? Did you get Apple support for it?

I find that claim interesting though. Apple used to have great support back in the day. I could pick up my phone and speak directly to the people who created the software on Apple's side. Whenever I was in Cupertino or at WWDC people were always open. Things changed though, the support is basic these days. Nowhere near what Nvidia offers or even Microsoft. Is there support for developers when Apple presents sofware/games at a keynote on stage? Of course, it's for PR reasons. I've provided software that Jobs used on stage for benchmarking back in the older days. What do all the other studios do that don't get to show their stuff on stage at an Apple event? They have to live with basic support. Remember the Touch Bar? Apple supported that as well, they pushed it massively. They brought devs on stage and showed off how great the Touch Bar is, it's the future, the best thing ever. Just like they showed off some gaming content more recently. What happened again to the Touch Bar (RIP)? Fast forward 6 years... "what happened again to gaming?" is that what we're in for?

In any case we're going in circles. Those who desperately want games on the Mac will always claim it's going to happen, even if studios and their financial analysts say something else. So do devs at conferences. You probably won't have access to the former information (unless you have a NDA), the latter is easy, visit conferences and talk to the people. That doesn't mean there won't be games for Mac, but the selection will always be very limited until massive changes are made (higher sales). Money rules the world, some accept it, other don't.


I'm not asking for it. Think what you will, dream up whatever you want. I'm sticking by doing actual projects myself and talking to people who do the same at other companies in the industry.

?‍♂️

I guess this thread didn’t age well after today’s WWDC. The problem is that many comments are shortsighted and based on status quo instead of considering Apple Silicon’s possibilities in the future. Apple just announced Metal 3 and showed off two AAA games, No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village coming to Mac this year. Feral also announced Grid Legends. Of course the pessimists had to focus on No Man’s Sky being an older game to prove a point but Capcom went up on stage and praised the hell out of the Apple Silicon.

”With its incredible performance now the Mac with Apple Silicon is a great platform for games. And with the support for new Metal 3, our game screams on Apple Silicon, from the MacBook Air to the blazing-fast Mac Studio. Look how fluid we’re able to move through these hauntingly beautiful scenes. We’re using high-quality textures, geometry, and complex shaders. And with MetalFX upscaling we’re able to render amazing high-resolution visuals across the entire line, with MB Air running effortlessly at 1080p and Mac Studio delivering a breathtaking 4K experience. Previously this was only possible with high-performance consoles and gaming PCs, but we’re now able to bring this to every Mac with Apple Silicon. We’re simply astound by the fidelity these new Macs enabled us to achieve. These new Macs handle whatever we throw at them effortlessly. That’s incredible”

Notice that RE Village and Grid Legends are DX 12 only and that was a big problem for porting such games to Mac. Now with Metal 3 no more problem. If Capcom has updated their RE Engine for Mac it opens up a good opportunity for other Capcom titles to come to Mac too. It will run much smoother than Metro Exodus for sure. That game used MoltenVK on top of Metal and it ran well even on M1 with 8 GPU cores on medium 1080p. Now RE will be much more optimized than Metro Exodus. Codeweavers wrote about this regarding Crossover:

”Generally, games need access to at least one million shader resource views (SRVs). Access to that many SRVs requires resource binding at the Tier 2 level. Metal only supports about 500,000 resources per argument buffer, so Tier 2 resource binding isn’t possible. Metal’s limit of half a million is sufficient for Vulkan descriptor indexing, but not for D3D12. This limitation means CrossOver Mac can't support Tier 2 binding and therefore a lot of DirectX 12 games will not run.”

Regarding the previous discussions you were building an interesting case with some valid points but it really didn’t help your credibility when it ended up in that list and an anticlimax with memes with capital letters suggesting that people criticizing your list are delusional with Mac-fanboi behavior all hailing the Mac, Mac gaming and Apple and suffer a great deal from ”selective acceptance/rejection”. These discussions sometimes feel like Marvel’s Multiverse of Madness with alternate realities and it’s interesting that you use similar arguments that you accuse others of.

I want to make clear again that my objections have always been to the comments about ”Mac gaming is dead and doomed”, not the state of Mac gaming compared to Windows. We’re neither delusional or fool enough to think that Steam’s Mac user base of 2.55% is going to increase dramatically in the future or even less overtake Windows 96,31%. Mac users are all aware of the limitations and benefits of their platform of choice.

The reason I said some games don’t mention supported platforms was that I first checked Steam which lacks some info. Then I took a closer look at the list and couldn’t help to think of the term ”gish gallop” that was mentioned before. That’s when it got more interesting. I mean it’s not a kind of list that would qualify as a scientific source in a research paper. It would be considered speculative with lack of foundation and rejected. Yet it’s almost presented as ”evidence”. Some might even call it somewhat biased and ”delusional” if one would use the same terms used above. As a rumor though it would fit well among other rumors on this site. Anyway here are som statistics and facts about the games:

- 44 games
- 7 released (10, 18, 19, 22, 23, 35, 36)
- 37 unreleased
- Microsoft/Win/Xbox exclusive at release: 7 (4, 5, 6, 24, 33, 40, 43)
- Win/PS5 exclusive at release: 1 (19)
- Xbox exclusive at release: 2 (8, 16)
- PS5 exclusive at release: 3 (2, 38, 41)
- Officially unannounced platforms: 1 (44)
- 14 game engines without Mac support
- Upcoming games 2022: 21
- Upcoming games 2022-23: 2 (24, 42)
- Upcoming games 2023: 8 (5, 13, 15, 17, 26, 30, 33, 37)
- Upcoming games 2023-24: 4 (16, 28, 38, 40)

1. Sons of the Forest: Unity, Unreleased Oct 2022, Win only, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
2. Forspoken: Luminous Engine, Unreleased Oct 2022, PS5 exclusive at least 2 years, PS5/Win only after, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
3. Saints Row: CTG Engine, Unreleased Aug 2022, never had a Mac port
4. Scorn: UE 4, Unreleased Oct 2022 Win/Xbox only, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
5. Starfield: Creation Engine 2, Unreleased 2023, Win/Xbox only, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
6. Stalker 2: UE 5, Unreleased Dec 2022, Win/Xbox only, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
7. A Plague Tale: Requiem: UE 5, Unreleased 2022, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
8. Ark 2: UE 5, Unreleased 2022, XBOX exclusive, no Win/Mac/Linux port at release
9. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: Snowdrop Engine, Unreleased 2022, never had a Mac port, devs never had Mac games
10. Babylon's Fall: Platinum Engine, Released March 2022, mixed reviews, never had a Mac/Linux port
11. Blood Bowl 3: UE, Unreleased 2022
12. Company of Heroes 3: Essence Engine 5, Unreleased 2022, Win only, No Mac/Linux/Xbox/PS port at release
13. Dead Space Remake: Frostbite, Unreleased Jan 2023, never had a Mac port
14. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum: UE, Sep 2022
15. Diablo 4: Blizzard Engine, Unreleased 2023
16. Everwild: UE, Unreleased 2023-24, XBOX exclusive, no Win/Mac/Linux port at release, never had a Mac/Win/Linux port
17. Frostpunk 2: UE, Unreleased 2023, Win only, no info about Mac/Linux/Xbox/PS port at release
18. Galactic Civilizations IV: Galactic Engine, Released 2022, Epic exclusive, Win only, no Mac/Linux/Xbox/PS port, never had a Mac/Linux port
19. Ghostwire Tokyo: UE 4, Released March 2022, Win/PS5 exclusive 1 year, never had a Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
20. Gotham Knights: UE 4, Unreleased Oct 2022, no Mac/Linux port
21. Gothic Remake: UE 4, Unreleased no date, never had a Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
22. Grid Legends: Ego Engine, Released Feb 2022, no Mac/Linux port
23. GTFO: Unity, Released Dec 2021, Win only, no Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
24. Hellblade 2: UE 5, Unreleased 2022-23, Microsoft exclusive, never had a Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
25. Hogwarts Legacy: UE 4, Unreleased Dec 2022, no Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
26. Kerbal Space Program 2: Unity, Unreleased 2023, no Mac/Linux port
27. Knights of Honor 2: Unreleased 2022, Win only, never had a Mac/Linux port
28. Overwatch 2: Unreleased 2023-24, never had a Mac/Linux port
29. Park Beyond: UE 4, Unreleased 2022, no Mac/Linux port
30. Path of Exile 2: PoE Engine, Unreleased 2023, no Mac/Linux port
31. Pharaoh: A New Era: Unity, Unreleased 2022, Win only, no Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
32. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake: Anvil Engine, Unreleased 2022, no Mac/Linux port, never had a Mac/Linux port
33. Redfall: UE 5, Unreleased 2023, Microsoft exclusive, Win/Xbox only, no Mac/Linux port, devs never had Mac games
34. Roller Champions: Unity, Unreleased May 2022, no Mac/Linux port
35. Shadow Warrior 3: UE 4, Released March 2022, mixed reviews, no Mac/Linux port
36. Syberia: The World Before: Unity, Released March 2022, no Mac/Linux port
37. Skull and Bones: Unreleased March 2023, no Mac/Linux port
38. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Remake: UE 5, Unreleased 2023-24, PS5 exclusive at release, Win later, No Mac/Linux/Xbox port
39. System Shock Remake: UE 4, Unreleased 2022, Mac/Linus port status unclear, initially supported. There are depots on Steam but Mac depot is empty. Their website says ”OSX and Linux versions will be unlocked when our first stretch goal is reached. We’re open to other platforms in the future.”
40. The Outer Worlds 2: UE 5, No release date, 2023-24, Microsoft Win/Xbox exclusive, No Mac/Linux/PS port, never had a Mac/Linux port
41. Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection: Unreleased 2022, PS5 exclusive at release Jan 2022, PS5/Win only, never ported to Mac/Linux/Win/Xbox before
42. Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2: UE 4, No release date, 2022-23, never had a Mac/Linux port
43. Warhammer 40K: Darktide: Verminitide 2 Engine, Unreleased Sep 2022, Microsoft Win/Xbox exclusive, devs never had Mac games
44. Witchfire: UE 4, Unreleased Q4 2022, Platforms TBA, devs never had Mac games, limited resources

"All these games have one thing in common, Windows but no Mac support. To sum it up, not many studios care about bringing games to the Mac."

While maybe true because of gut feeling, insider info or pure speculation right at this moment it’s not a fact you can tell for sure based on that list until months or years after the actual games are released. The only thing that list is telling us is obvious information that we’re all aware of and nothing new. Unless you have a Palantír and can see into the future you can’t make factual conclusions about the future Mac support of those games. I mean RE Village, No Man's Sky and Grid Legends could have been on that list too before but now are suddenly coming to Mac.

You can go ahead and add those other 90 000+ Steam games that lack Mac support but as I said before it doesn’t tell the whole truth about the ”doomed” Mac market because it’s build on a wrong premise. The premise of that list is that Mac gaming is doomed because new and unreleased games aren’t ported to Mac. As I said before that’s not how porting games to Mac works. It takes months or years for Win games to come to Mac for different reasons. Mac ports are rarely announced or released at the same time with Win games. It’s more rule than exception. The list is full of newly released games, unreleased upcoming games, console or Microsoft exclusive games, franchises that never have existed on Mac, developers that have never released Mac games before or game engines without Mac support. Of course such a list becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy proving that the writer is right when you pick games with almost no chance to come to Mac.

So what your list is telling is

- Mac gaming is for sure doomed and dead because 5 Xbox/PS exclusive games haven’t announced Mac support at launch.
- Mac gaming is for sure doomed and dead because 7 Microsoft/Win/Xbox exclusive games haven’t announced Mac support at launch.
- Mac gaming is for sure doomed and dead because 14 Win only game engines never been ported to Mac.

It’s as if Xbox/PS5 fans would point at all the exclusive titles on their platform and say the other console is doomed because the absence of the titles on that console. The console exclusive games won’t be released for Win for another 1-3 years after the first release. So that is okay but apparently Mac support must be announced directly at release 1-3 years in advance otherwise Mac gaming is doomed? Platform exclusivity means Microsoft and Sony want to sell their consoles and Windows licenses. Of course there’s no chance such games would come to Mac but that doesn’t mean Mac gaming is doomed.

Many of those games are still unfinished and won’t come to Win for another 1-3 years either. You expect the devs to know right now how the games will sell and if a Mac port will be profitable several years ahead? Lots can happen in the tech world in just a couple of years. Does Apple Silicon ring a bell? Feral couldn’t port Deus Ex MKD to Mac because of Metal 1 and the port was delayed. It became possible when Apple released Metal 2. Many things can change in 1-3 years. Microsoft just announced Volterra, their first ARM dev kit for Visual Studio coming later this year, creating new opportunities to write apps and games for ARM platform. Not saying that it will benefit Mac but who knows what doors it will open. Or now when Metal 3 was just announced along with new AAA games making it possible for DX 12 games to be ported to Mac.

Let’s look at some other games mentioned.

Path of Exile 2: The game won’t be released until 2023. The first game was released for Win in 2013. The Mac port came in… 2020, 7 years later! If it took 7 years last time how do you expect it to be released at the same time now? If they didn’t want to support Mac why did they release a port just 20 months ago, after 5 years? They also added M1 support just 4 months after M1 Macs were released.

Warhammer 40K Darktide: You pick one game of all WH 40K and Total war: Warhammer games and DLCs Feral have ported through the years and take it as a proof of devs not caring for Mac? Did you miss that Feral just released Warhammer III for Mac? Do you expect them to spit out WH games every other month? Darktide will also be Microsoft/Xbox exclusive so it’s more about selling Microsoft products and less about ignoring Mac. Worth to mention that a new WH 40K is coming to Mac although it’s 2D. It’s called Warhammer 40K: Shootas, Blood & Teef and has even a demo.

Valheim and Baldur’s Gate 3: You downplay Unity and the graphics in those two games saying they are not impressive AAA titles but include several Unity games (1, 23, 26, 31, 34, 36) with ”simple” graphics as proof of AAA games not coming to Mac?

You talk a lot about AAA games not making it to Mac and that only AA games will have a chance but yet include several AA games in your AAA list as proof of the doomed Mac market? (Blood Bowl 3, Galactic Civilizations IV, GTFO, Kerbal 2, Knights of Honor 2, Park Beyond, Path of Exile 2, Pharaoh: A New Era, Roller Champions, Syberia: The World Before)

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? This is not a subjective thing, it’s measured in $ for studios. 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.

You and some other posters like Ethosik (if I remember correctly) talk a lot about your own experiences as small or one-man developers not having the resources for Mac game development. While understandable larger devs on the other hand also have more resources, experience and dedicated Mac programmers. You can’t just apply your own reasons to the whole market as a fact. I as a casual gamer just have to take a look at Feral’s all AAA games to understand that it can be profitable to port games to Mac.

We have all these famous franchises like Alien Isolation, Bioshock trilogy, Borderlands trilogy, Desperados 3, Deus Ex MKD, Dying Light, Metro trilogy, Tomb Raider trilogy, Total War Saga: Troy, Total War: Warhammer 3, Total War: Warhammer 40K and XCOM 2 Collection being ported and you still say it’s not profitable? It’s especially interesting when you look at those trilogies. If number 1 or 2 wasn’t successful why they kept porting number 3? Another interesting detail is the poll from the Game Dev Conference. Despite Mac having 2.55% of the Steam user base 18% of the devs answered they were going to develop for Mac.

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. 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.

Of course you can take new games as example but again if you pick a game made with an engine with no Mac support it’s obvious what answer you get. Many of the games in your list are made with Anvil Engine, Blizzard Engine, Creation Engine, CTG Engine, Essence Engine 5, Frostbite, Galactic Engine, Havok, Luminous Engine, Platinum Engine, Snowdrop Engine, all lacking Mac support. Of course it will be a huge cost to first port the engine itself and then the game for only 2.5% of the market. As other devs wrote in the beginning of this thread the transition to AS and attracting game studios takes time. Now with Metal 3 and Capcom praising Apple we’re starting to see some changes. If Capcom has updated their RE Engine for Mac it opens up a good opportunity for other Capcom titles to come to Mac too, both old and new titles.

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.

Would you care to give some recent examples of games being released for Mac at the same time as other platforms? Again most if not all the Mac games mentioned above were released months or years later than other platforms. Feral was actually pretty fast releasing TW: WH 3 now just three months after the initial release. Again many devs want to see first how well their games are received before porting to smaller platforms. They want to have earned their costs to have more money to spend on other platforms. Bigger games are more expensive to port but it’s not as if the devs have to make the games all from scratch again. Things like story, game design, sound, images, videos and other assets can be cross-platform. It’s not like inventing the wheel all over again. That’s why games come later to Mac when they have earned their production costs and it take less effort to port them to other platforms like Mac and Linux.

Many devs and porting studios are also cautious and don’t want to reveal or promise too much. Again Feral is like that. They don’t reveal their ports until the last day, with the exception of Grid Legends now. They have their ”Radar” where they put cryptic clues about future ports and only reveal the platform. It's also interesting that you mention profit and say no one can predict exact sale numbers but expect devs to release Mac ports at the release otherwise you take it as a sign of the doomed Mac market. Psychonauts 2 was just released for Mac 10 months AFTER the pc port, without mentioning Mac before.

Why don't you post a list of Mac-exclusives? You can handpick the games if you want.

As I said before to another poster so it’s not enough to just mention Mac ports to prove that Mac gaming is not dead and doomed, now we have to find a studio that makes only Mac games to prove it can be profitable? In the PPC era there were several Mac/PPC only games but that changed with the transition to Intel. Why would that be important now? It would be a lousy business strategy that only Apple could pull off but not without losing a ton of money like Epic and that’s not their business model. For smaller studios it would be suicide to ignore 96% of the gaming market unless they wanted to minimize their profit and not be able to fund their future games. There’s no pride in that. Funny though that Bungie in the beginning before Microsoft bought them focused on the Mac market ”because it was smaller and easier to compete in”.

Their support is bad, really bad compared to Nvidia. When I run into a problem on the Nvidia side I can get support right away, Nvidia will also invite me to come over, bring my team along and solve problems together. With Apple not so much anymore. It used to be the case back in the PPC and early Intel days. If Apple is giving support today, than it's for marketing purposes only, something they show off on stage during a keynote.

Talking about psychology this is also called ”Double bind” as a part of ”Master suppression techniques”, meaning no matter how someone acts they will be punished or belittled. So you complain about Apple’s bad support but when they actually help devs that reach out to them like Larian and 4A it’s for marketing? Well those two studios contacted Apple long before their games were released and worked with them for a year before Apple mentioned it at WWDC 2021. I’m not questioning your experience but it’s always as if nothing Apple does is good enough.

Anyway I’m glad and optimistic after today’s gaming news at WWDC. Metal 3, Capcom and Resident Evil Village and No Man’s Sky! Feral also just announced Grid Legends for Mac and Psychonauts 2 was just released for Mac. Many of those old 32-bit games mentioned before can also be played with Mac Source Port. Another thing to remember is that for me Mac gaming is about quality and not quantity. I always have been happy that only good games make it to Mac exactly because they have to be profitable. PC market may have 90000+ more games but many of them are also junk or offer nothing new and that’s why people want more games to entertain themselves with on the pc side.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I guess this thread didn’t age well after today’s WWDC. The problem is that many comments are shortsighted and based on status quo instead of considering Apple Silicon’s possibilities in the future. Apple just announced Metal 3 and showed off two AAA games, No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village coming to Mac this year. Feral also announced Grid Legends. Of course the pessimists had to focus on No Man’s Sky being an older game to prove a point but Capcom went up on stage and praised the hell out of the Apple Silicon.

It has to be said, though, that glowing words about Apple products doesn’t necessarily convert into an increase in published titles, though. There are several opportunities over the rest of this year where publishers will be communicating the systems they’re supporting. For each one of those announcements, I’ll be looking to see how many include macOS.

 

[ipponrg]

Anyway I’m glad and optimistic after today’s gaming news at WWDC.

I feel the same as I did before WWDC. Every year we hear the same hype in technologies, and the same Mac gaming arguments of how Mac is a force to be reckoned with. The “good” games list on Macs are usually subjectively good games of the past. It would be nice to have games in the present with launch parity to PC.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I feel the same as I did before WWDC. Every year we hear the same hype in technologies, and the same Mac gaming arguments of how Mac is a force to be reckoned with. The “good” games list on Macs are usually subjectively good games of the past. It would be nice to have games in the present with launch parity to PC.

And, we KNOW that the developers of all the “run the windows .exe instead” solutions will be able to use these methods, too. I mean, Mac folks that want to play No Man’s Sky right now are using GeForce Now, will they buy it when it’s released in the future? And, for the rest, are they playing it elsewhere already? I wonder if they’ll report sales…

 

[leman]

And, we KNOW that the developers of all the “run the windows .exe instead” solutions will be able to use these methods, too. I mean, Mac folks that want to play No Man’s Sky right now are using GeForce Now, will they buy it when it’s released in the future? And, for the rest, are they playing it elsewhere already? I wonder if they’ll report sales…

Mac folks who play no man’s sky on GFN already own the game. Why would they need to buy it again? 🤨

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Mac folks who play no man’s sky on GFN already own the game. Why would they need to buy it again? 🤨

That’s the point. They’re making a game, ostensibly, for fans of the game that own Macs. Fans of this game that was released long ago have already played the game on something else OR, if they must be on their Mac, they’re already playing via GFN.

What do they think their sales of this game is going to be?

 

[leman]

That’s the point. They’re making a game, ostensibly, for fans of the game that own Macs. Fans of this game that was released long ago have already played the game on something else OR, if they must be on their Mac, they’re already playing via GFN.

What do they think their sales of this game is going to be?

Potential new users plus probably Apple paid them something

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Ahhhh, could be!

Why Apple Arcade is perfect for follow-ups to No Man’s Sky, Oxenfree, SpellTower, and more

Big games have been added to the service, including a Game of Thrones title

www.techradar.com

Of course, that doesn’t say anything about broader interest developers may have in general. Especially those that depend on IAP (which isn’t allowed on Apple Arcade)

 

[leman]

Anyway, let's talk about what's new in Apple's GPU land in regards to gaming. Metal 3 seems to bring mesh shaders and there are also some mentions of direct GPU handles (but details are unclear at the moment since the docs are incomplete). I hope that the later helps implementing DX12/Vulkan binding models on top of Metal simpler and more performant. Other noteworthy additions: MetalFX — Apple's take on DLSS, as well as resource loading (akin to DirectStorage).

Also (since there was a discussion about Nanite earlier) — 64-bit and float atomic operations Apparently 64-bit atomics were there since Metal 2.4, but I don't remember seeing them in the docs earlier.

We will known more as the relevant WWDC sessions are online.

 

[diamond.g]

Mac folks who play no man’s sky on GFN already own the game. Why would they need to buy it again? 🤨

Do we know that they are not going to release the Mac version on the Mac App store?

 

[Homy]

It has to be said, though, that glowing words about Apple products doesn’t necessarily convert into an increase in published titles, though. There are several opportunities over the rest of this year where publishers will be communicating the systems they’re supporting. For each one of those announcements, I’ll be looking to see how many include macOS.

We'll see but as I wrote that's not how it works. Read my post above. Mac games are released months or years later than the initial announcment and are often not even mentioned as supported until the late release.