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Apple CAN’T do AAA gaming [Merged Megathread]
- Thread starter Admiralbison
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Apple Arcade is a way of saying Macs have games just for arguments sake. I mean, some titles are good, but not what the crowd in this thread wants.Ahhhh, could be!
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)
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 titlewww.techradar.com
I mean the WWDC announcement is nice and all and sure they brought some industry people on stage like they always do, but it has never changed the mind of gamers to attract them to the the Mac platform or other publishers.
Metal 3 seems like a nice update, but how does it compare to MS Direct X or what Sony has?
Gamers are somewhat consider cutting edge or like to be. A closed hardware system isn't attractive when you can just upgrade the GPU in your hardware to the new hotness on PC systems. Never mind you have options of what you want. Sure maybe Apple's silicon it's won't matter like it does on Consoles, you use it for a few years then upgrade.
Gamers also like to go to a platform where their friends hang out. It would have been better for Apple to partner with one of these platforms instead of trying to build up one of their own with game centre or whatever it is. That Apple will do nothing with and no one will use.
What Apple needs is the hottest game demo showing how well it runs for people to take notice, not games from 5 years ago. Again current titles matter not past titles, if you shrug that off you don't get it like Apple.
Metal 3 seems like a nice update, but how does it compare to MS Direct X or what Sony has?
Gamers are somewhat consider cutting edge or like to be. A closed hardware system isn't attractive when you can just upgrade the GPU in your hardware to the new hotness on PC systems. Never mind you have options of what you want. Sure maybe Apple's silicon it's won't matter like it does on Consoles, you use it for a few years then upgrade.
Gamers also like to go to a platform where their friends hang out. It would have been better for Apple to partner with one of these platforms instead of trying to build up one of their own with game centre or whatever it is. That Apple will do nothing with and no one will use.
What Apple needs is the hottest game demo showing how well it runs for people to take notice, not games from 5 years ago. Again current titles matter not past titles, if you shrug that off you don't get it like Apple.
Hello Games previously released an Apple Arcade game. No Man’s Sky could be Apple Arcade as well as CEO of Hello Games, Sean Murray stated that there wouldn't be any paid DLC for No Man's Sky, just patches.
Exactly.
Shoot Epic probably gives away more FREE games then new games coming out for the Mac. Most of those Free games people have already played, don't care for anymore, or to busy with new stuff.
Apple needs current titles!
In other words, NMS is on Mac, but if you want the entire game, tough as DLC's are not available thru Apple Arcade.
I dunno, three new AAA games that all have only been only DX12 games on Windows on announcement day of Metal 3 (with Apple’s version of Texture Upscaling, which is clearly a response to AMD’s Fidelity FX, and NVIDIA’s DLSS). It seems that whatever technical hurdles were preventing DX12 games from running well have been cleared I think that it’s safe to call this a return shot across the bow, most especially since Apple is doing this in software, and does not require you to buy an M2 system to get the advantages for Resident Evil Village. The Capcom rep said that the footage that was playing back behind him was on a Mac Studio, which is still only running the M1.
This is clearly Apple doing much more than talking the talk, where it touches on gaming.
Wouldn’t you agree?
You do realize that, with Metal 3 specifically, we have 3 AAA games that were DX12 only on Windows. But, now we have them on Mac, playable at native speeds. Metal 3 also brings Texture Upscaling, clearly a shot across the bow to AMD’s Fidelity FX, and NVIDIA’s DLSS.
This is the feature parity you were asking for. And, yes, it will be nice once we have launch parity to PC, but what we got yesterday is a great first step, unless you think that it’s only getting worse from here on out?!
Which “good” games from the past did Apple show yesterday?
Ignoring the Xbox versions NMS is a Vulkan game that could have been ported to MacOS (MoltenVK) ages ago.
I’m only going to address the key points here, because the majority has already been addressed multiple times in this and other threads and we’re in for “repeat until dead”.
I’ve asked before, when exactly is a game AAA? There’s a pretty big difference between RE Village and No Man’s Sky. The latter was done buy a really small group of people and initial development costs were in the very low 7-figure range. Also don’t forget No Man’s Sky is coming to iPad or should I say, NMS is coming to the iPad and while they were at it, they threw in the same thing for macOS?
The advantage of setting a specific target platform is less testing to keep those costs down. You can do the same with anything, we used to set iOS target platforms higher to minimize testing. In general you could create a “hello world” in a view and set the target to iOS 16 in Xcode and it wouldn’t run on iOS 15 or below, even though technically it would run on iOS versions which don’t have support anymore.
Grid Legends is using EGO which is the same as pointed out above. Good for them I guess, in many ways it behaves like Unity which allows to switch the target platform with a flip of a button as long as there are no customizations for a specific platform in there that breaks this functionality. And that’s precisely what I’ve always said, the less a port costs, the more likely it is we’ll see it outside of Windows and consoles.
So jumping to the conclusion that because of Metal 3 it’s no problem to port games anymore that actually utilize DX12 is plain wrong. RE Village works because the engine always supported it and when there isn’t really anything platform specific in a game/app it’s easy to port.
Go into the scientific world and look at VTK, most of the renderer is written in OpenGL 1 or 2, it works pretty much everywhere and only starts to fall apart now because some AMD drivers don’t support such old versions of OpenGL anymore. That’s the reason Vulkan support was ramped up in development. There are even a few people working on Metal support on top now.
Diablo 4 is the same. Of all the games, Blizzard would be the ones on the very top with Mac support. D3 supported it, the whole engine was created from the very beginning with Mac support and yet D4 engine has no Mac support at all, they dropped it. If macOS was such an interesting platform, then wouldn’t it be logical we’d see much more support?
All we see so far are ports that require very little effort to port and therefore don’t cost much. You still have to test, but the massive costs of porting something optimized is absent. So where are those Capcom games based on UE that can’t be ported with a “flip of a switch”, where are the EA games based on other engines that require a lot of work for ports?
If I could flip a switch and be done, I’d bring everything to the Mac. It’s just not as easy with everything. It’s not financially feasible. I could ask for the money, probably get it, hire an additional 50 Mac developers and start porting things. That’s not a problem, but what do I get in return? I could just as well ask for the same amount of money, get it and do another project or add features to an existing project with Linux/Windows as a target which will likely result in more money for new projects vs. nothing for a Mac port. Well, maybe not nothing. Maybe someone is going to tell me “oh, that’s nice”.
And here we are again, nothing changed compared to the past few years. We’ll get a few games here and there, whenever it’s “free” (low cost) to port and no studio will put a ton of money into optimized ports to bring over. Same old, same old.
Just like I will keep using Macs for some proof of concepts that can be easily brought to Linux/Windows, but certainly not full projects. Same old, same old.
Money isn’t a problem, if we want $25M or $50M then we write a 20 page document explaining why we want it and what the expected result is. That amount is really nothing and easy to get as long as those signing off see a return of investment. Real world example, improving a snow renderer for animation for Disney, which includes 10 people to hire, in addition two PhD thesis, partly funded by Disney, the rest by any 3rd party be it a private company or government for research. End result, seen in Disney animation movies. Apply to any other company out there and repeat. Billions and billions of $ are used for the exact same thing every year across the globe. And if someone sees a financial or other benefit in using that money for Macs, then that’s what will happen. I used to do macOS and iOS exclusive projects in the past, some together with Apple.
How exactly did it not age well? It aged exactly as expected, because nothing changed in the gaming world of Apple. The only thing that changed is that Mac gaming fanboys saw a game at a keynote which sparked wishful thinking again and we restart all over with the same thing. Or in other words, what we saw at WWDC is what we’ve always seen in the past to varying degrees since the introduction of SpriteKit. This “iteration” of threads will lead to the exact same results and if Apple would show the version of Tic Tac Toe from 1983 Wargames at the next keynote in fall, it would still be the 2nd coming of Christ for gaming on the Mac for some. 🤷♂️
Of course Apple introduced Metal 3, that was a given. Metal is used throughout the whole eco system, not only for games. And their new upscaling and temporal AA (however it might work) will probably be a very welcome addition to anyone who works with photos or videos and probably be a part of Final Cut. It’s nice they can use it in games as well.
I’ve asked before, when exactly is a game AAA? There’s a pretty big difference between RE Village and No Man’s Sky. The latter was done buy a really small group of people and initial development costs were in the very low 7-figure range. Also don’t forget No Man’s Sky is coming to iPad or should I say, NMS is coming to the iPad and while they were at it, they threw in the same thing for macOS?
And we’re surprised by this why? It’s good they are doing this, but hardly surprising, given they’re paid to do so given an Engine that already supports all platforms out there including Android, iOS and even Stadia.
Not seeing the point here. A guy comes out on stage and is paid for praising the hell out of something. What does that tell us? I’ve been on stage promoting technology I normally wouldn’t work with, for the simple financial reasons. Apple brought out developers in the past who praised the hell out of the TouchBar as the best thing ever and interface of choice. They did the same for the butterfly keyboard and countless other things. All of them had a financial interest only the technology was abandoned and declared a failure later. Don’t forget the great Apple and Nintendo partnership which was supposed to revolutionize gaming. They brought out Miyamoto, the father of the whole gaming industry, who praised the hell out of Apple, introduced a Mario game only for Nintendo to pull the plug later. Any company bringing games to any platform will do the same thing if it turns out to financially not feasible.
I was surprised to see RE Village at first, because I thought it’s UE based. Turned out it’s not and it’s not optimized for DX12 either, it’s been made with RE Engine which is the successor for MT, both have always offered multi-platform support for pretty much anything that is out there. RE Village is entirely written in C# with the lowest common denominator in mind to run on every platform. It’s easily validated using a DirectX hook and look what DX12 functionality is there, because the API is well documented. Maybe that’s also the reason it looks like crap. We’ve had better looking horror games with a much smaller budget released in 2015 and had to read through countless threads on Reddit last year about the console and Windows version looking so bad, to the point people stopped playing. I’ve also stopped playing, but not primarily because of graphics, but I found the graphics to be bad.
The advantage of setting a specific target platform is less testing to keep those costs down. You can do the same with anything, we used to set iOS target platforms higher to minimize testing. In general you could create a “hello world” in a view and set the target to iOS 16 in Xcode and it wouldn’t run on iOS 15 or below, even though technically it would run on iOS versions which don’t have support anymore.
Grid Legends is using EGO which is the same as pointed out above. Good for them I guess, in many ways it behaves like Unity which allows to switch the target platform with a flip of a button as long as there are no customizations for a specific platform in there that breaks this functionality. And that’s precisely what I’ve always said, the less a port costs, the more likely it is we’ll see it outside of Windows and consoles.
And how exactly is that no more problem? The part you quoted is not relevant to this/Metal3.
Capcom didn’t update anything. The engine always supported it. Development for the original MT engine started in 2004, full support for all mobile platform including iOS and Android was added later. That engine got an upgrade with improved AA, volumetric lighting and VR support in 2014 and was renamed RE Engine (Reach for the Moon, not Resident Evil). They ran into some trouble with Nintendo Switch support (maintaining graphical performance on really large maps) that gave them a headache, but they managed that and the engine is supporting it as well.
So jumping to the conclusion that because of Metal 3 it’s no problem to port games anymore that actually utilize DX12 is plain wrong. RE Village works because the engine always supported it and when there isn’t really anything platform specific in a game/app it’s easy to port.
Go into the scientific world and look at VTK, most of the renderer is written in OpenGL 1 or 2, it works pretty much everywhere and only starts to fall apart now because some AMD drivers don’t support such old versions of OpenGL anymore. That’s the reason Vulkan support was ramped up in development. There are even a few people working on Metal support on top now.
So? I never claimed those games are all out. I said for these games we have a announced platform and none of which is macOS which is odd, as macOS is supposed to be the savior of gaming as some claim. The PoE2 engine is based on the same old PoE1 engine with Mac support. There really isn’t anything super Windows optimized in the game so far, so isn’t it odd that they don’t announce macOS support when the original engine already supported it? Sure, PoE1 isn’t really optimized for any platform and runs like crap on macOS, but still basic support is there. Then again GGG has been burned with the Mac version which caused them a ton of trouble.
Diablo 4 is the same. Of all the games, Blizzard would be the ones on the very top with Mac support. D3 supported it, the whole engine was created from the very beginning with Mac support and yet D4 engine has no Mac support at all, they dropped it. If macOS was such an interesting platform, then wouldn’t it be logical we’d see much more support?
All we see so far are ports that require very little effort to port and therefore don’t cost much. You still have to test, but the massive costs of porting something optimized is absent. So where are those Capcom games based on UE that can’t be ported with a “flip of a switch”, where are the EA games based on other engines that require a lot of work for ports?
If I could flip a switch and be done, I’d bring everything to the Mac. It’s just not as easy with everything. It’s not financially feasible. I could ask for the money, probably get it, hire an additional 50 Mac developers and start porting things. That’s not a problem, but what do I get in return? I could just as well ask for the same amount of money, get it and do another project or add features to an existing project with Linux/Windows as a target which will likely result in more money for new projects vs. nothing for a Mac port. Well, maybe not nothing. Maybe someone is going to tell me “oh, that’s nice”.
And here we are again, nothing changed compared to the past few years. We’ll get a few games here and there, whenever it’s “free” (low cost) to port and no studio will put a ton of money into optimized ports to bring over. Same old, same old.
Just like I will keep using Macs for some proof of concepts that can be easily brought to Linux/Windows, but certainly not full projects. Same old, same old.
Huh? I’ve certainly done small one-man projects, some longer, some over a weekend. I’ve worked alone, in small teams of 10-20 people, 50-100 and with thousands across the globe. That all depends on the project. We do a lot of research in graphics, imaging, video, audio, visualization, AI, hardware, etc. with application in games, simulation, robotics, car and aerospace industry for various companies, game studios, movie & TV industry, non-profit, military, government, etc.
Money isn’t a problem, if we want $25M or $50M then we write a 20 page document explaining why we want it and what the expected result is. That amount is really nothing and easy to get as long as those signing off see a return of investment. Real world example, improving a snow renderer for animation for Disney, which includes 10 people to hire, in addition two PhD thesis, partly funded by Disney, the rest by any 3rd party be it a private company or government for research. End result, seen in Disney animation movies. Apply to any other company out there and repeat. Billions and billions of $ are used for the exact same thing every year across the globe. And if someone sees a financial or other benefit in using that money for Macs, then that’s what will happen. I used to do macOS and iOS exclusive projects in the past, some together with Apple.
Huh? How are games with a target platform DX12, none of them using any higher tier DX12 resources, an indication of how easy or difficult it is to port a game over? I’m not following the logic here. Wouldn’t it be a much better indication using a full blown DX12 game with all the bells and whistles and port that over to see how difficult it is? I mean the RE and EGO engines have always supported iOS and macOS (and PlayStation and Android and…) and were built using those engines.
That’s another thing I’m not following. We’ve had upscaling, AA and all sorts of things in the past, for ages. How do we jump to “upscaling” = “DLSS”? I mean, it could very well be the case, but do we actually have technical evidence that’s the case? Sample projects to look at or documentation? There’s probably a WWDC session about it, anyone went there/saw it?
To be fair, you could probably port NMS to Shadertoy.
Many, many more Macs could be ported to the Mac, some with a flip of a switch, some with little effort. Capcom could port many of the titles using RE engine over with little effort. Nintendo could port some of their games, they have everything in place. In the end, it’s all about “how much does it cost” and “how much are we going to make with it”. In other words, nothing changed, same old, same old.
Yeah, Apple really needs current AAA titles that support modern features like DX12 does, and which look nice and sharp while performing great. And they need to have the support of studios and devs who have never made a Mac game before.
Oh, wait….
Maybe someone at Apple listened to you?
They just have to keep their wallet open and keep paying studios for content.
They seem to be understanding the need for a change in attitude towards devs.
I’m cautiously optimistic. How about you?
Apple had modern features with nice looks and great performance for ages, ever since they introduced Metal. It’s just that things work differently compared to DX12. That’s why porting is difficult, no one is keeping anyone away from creating graphics with Metal that can visually look very, very similar to full blown DX12 games. It’s just that it costs so much more and the return of investment isn’t there due to lack of sales. If something can be ported for $100, it’s a no-brainer.
Two games and people are jumping for joy?
One of which has been out for nearly a decade? And the other a neat flavor of the month title?
I think it’s absurd to take this as a turning point. The core issue (which has been repeated ad nauseum by LITERAL GAME DEVELOPERS ON THIS FORUM) is cost of porting vs. potential profit.
An issue that has not been solved with ports of two games.
One of which has been out for nearly a decade? And the other a neat flavor of the month title?
I think it’s absurd to take this as a turning point. The core issue (which has been repeated ad nauseum by LITERAL GAME DEVELOPERS ON THIS FORUM) is cost of porting vs. potential profit.
An issue that has not been solved with ports of two games.
You keep saying this but when I responded to excatly this argument you chose to include only my first sentence and cut out the rest which addressed this. So I ask you again:
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? Just because your apps maybe didn't sell well it doesn't mean it's not profitable.
Three games, you mean. Which is the nearly decade old DX12 game, when you had thought you were correct about there only being two games announced?
And lastly, when do AAA games stop being AAA games? When they arrive on the Mac?
Same I suppose. Now I just have to get a M2 Mac (and retire my 2016 MBP).
He is referring to No Mans Sky, the Vulkan (not DX12) game from 2016 (so not ten years old yet).
On which platform? If an inquiring mind wanted to check out the DLCs, do you remember what their names were?
Mea culpa, three games. Does that make it any better?
I feel I should clarify my argument:
I feel that taking the WWDC presentation as an example of a positive turning point for Mac gaming is hopelessly optimistic.
My argument is based on the statements given by multiple game developers, both on and off this site, that the issue was never the power, or the libraries, or what not.
The issue was always market share.
The WWDC presentation did not address this issue.
Now is it nice that Mac gamers got three more games? Sure. Is it a sign of change? I highly doubt it.