You're right, Valve has never claimed that the Steam survey is entirely representative of the overall market. The difficulty is that many forum users do take it as gospel, and in terms of research data for gaming, it's the best we have publicly available. Hence, my assertion that we should pay attention to the trends, rather than the raw data.
Yeah that data is good for generalization, but it is also a double edged sword. For example the historical data seems to indicate that macOS won't grow past 2-3% market share which makes getting larger publishers to spend time making macOS versions harder.
I would hope, and I stress hope, that large publishers have better access to data than the Steam survey. If Cliff Maier is right about Apple courting developers, then I assume they are providing sales data to them in an attempt to persuade them. Publicly, in regards to gaming, the Steam survey is the best we have, imperfect though it may be.
I do wonder how Apple would be able to figure the number of users that actually game on their Mac. We all know that there are more M1 Macs than there are PS5's but no one (publicly) has said how many of those machines play games.
Apple occasionally sends out surveys for various products, or perhaps they learn through other more secretive methods. I suspect Apple's main appeal to developers is about how capable Apple Silicon machines are, and unlike Intel's garbage integrated graphics, are performant enough to play demanding titles. On top of the Mac gaining market share, Apple has a case to be made that Mac users are an untapped market.
It means more people went on vacation in July.
www.macrumors.com
A shame, right?Apple Backs Out of Talks to Purchase Game Studio Electronic Arts, Amazon Reportedly Set to Make Offer Instead [Updated]
Apple has backed out of a potential purchase of the game studio Electronic Arts (EA) following talks that have been ongoing since as early as May of...
Unfortunately, not surprising. Apple has been cutting down on acquisitions lately, and rarely makes a large purchase. Beats is the biggest, at $3 billion. The only other notable acquisitions were NeXT for $404 million and Intel's modem business for $1 billion. Apple doesn't do big acquisitions, and EA would have been gigantic, compared to what they've done in the past. If they do gaming, it'll be their own unique way, as Apple is often wont to do.
Nintendo can do gaming in their own unique way because they have a buttload of IP to draw on. Unless I am missing something Apple doesn't have the same breadth of IP. I guess we get to see how they plan on fitting in the computer gaming puzzle.
I honestly have no idea what Apple may plan, if anything. Assuming that Cliff Maier's contacts at Apple are in a position of influence, the company considers gaming a priority, but he hasn't elaborated for obvious reasons. My guess, and purely a guess, is that Apple will build something homegrown like the did with Apple TV+, perhaps based upon an upscaled Apple Arcade, or a premium internal development team. It could also be that Apple will consider buying out small IP devs, or simply create their own. I just know that gargantuan acquisitions aren't the way Apple operates, so it doesn't surprise me that they apparently won't purchase EA.
You think Apple and Nintendo's culture are similar?
This is rather simple. Apple is using the Japanese market (Capcom RE) to see what people would be willing to invest in gaming. The Japanese market is special in that they buy hardware for few games. Apple isn't targeting Mx Pro/Max/Ultra for gaming, but the regular Mx SoCs. So the real question here is, will people buy a Mx equipped Apple TV to play games and use it as a console with the option to plat games on a Mac as well? And for that, Apple needs to bring the price down, sell ATV at a loss similar to Sony/MS and make the money back with games and services (ATV+, sports and all the other stuff they have in their pipeline). If that's going to work remains to be seen, but that's how Apple is going to do it themselves. They've been shopping around this idea for a while.
EA was never an option. EA went out shopping and essentially yelled "please buy us", they offered this to every major player in the industry. Even considering that Apple would buy them is dreaming at best. It's an interesting thought experiment though, similar to "What if... the nazis would have won WWII... or the Russians would have been first on the moon". In a similar way, there's no way Apple would buy Nintendo or rather Nintendo would sell to Apple. Anyone who ever worked in Japan or with Japanese companies knows how unlikely that is. Nintendo will go back to designing hanafuda full time before they'll sell to Apple. The cultural differences between NOA and NOJ are big enough already, leave alone Apple.
If with recently you mean 1996, then yes.
You make a good point that I have never brought up. I've often mentioned former Opteron architect Cliff Maier, who knows folks at Apple and he says that they consider gaming important. What he has never claimed is that this is only for the Mac. This forum tends to concentrate on that specific product, since it is MacRumors, after all. However, I'd always assumed that if Apple got into games, it would include all of their products. I hadn't put much thought into Apple TV becoming a gaming device, but it does make sense, which would then trickle to the rest of the product line. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, @GrumpyCoder.
Really since/after the Gamecube (2001?). IIRC the N64 was as powerful as the PS1, but the storage medium ham-stringed it.If with recently you mean 1996, then yes.
But hey, if you can sell ~10 year old hardware for $300 and people are still buying it for the IP... why not?
That being said, I personally enjoyed the old Nintendo 8- and 16-bit days more than the more recent systems. But maybe it's the trips to the game stores back and and picking up cartridges rather than discs or downloads later.
Not culture. No Japanese and American companies can have similar work cultures.
I get it. Nintendo has some awesome IP that could drive Apple hardware sales (maybe, assuming the price is right). Maybe the Apple of now, that is allowing games to require controllers would be a good spot for Nintendo's games. As was said in another thread by another poster, folks that play mobile phone games are probably not interested in the kinds of experiences Nintendo brings to their consoles (outside of the minigame games like Switch Sports), but then Nintendo gets punished by low sales of games that fit the play style folks go for on mobile (looking at you Mario Run).
Maybe not. But it's more important to get folks who play console games to play on Apple's platforms. This would be the main goal of buying Nintendo.
Off topic, but if you haven't checked out "For All Mankind" on Apple TV+, it dramatizes the latter thought experiment
Technically, Apple is in the gaming business already. They make a huge amount of profit with their cut of mini mobile-games from other developers. Now all they'd need to do is scale that market. We already have iOS games that could run on macOS, but few developers actually support it. Apple TV could draw more attention especially if they can establish it in a territory that is known for small console support (Neo Geo, PC Engine, Marty FM Towns, etc.). From there the word could spread. So that's a logical step. But they need hardware (M2) capable to play these non mobile-games and a proper controller. They tried to go that route before with Nintendo and Mario, but Nintendo for obvious reasons didn't bring the real thing to the table and later jumped the ship. Nintendo is special in a way, they don't care about the rest of the market. Capcom is another story, for now it made them money. In a year, who knows.
I meant the N64. It came out 1 1/2 years after the PS1, but it sure had it's issues. The polygon count was the biggest. IIRC it could do 160k polygons/s while the PS1 could do 360k/s. That lead to distance fog, everything far away (and in the case of the N64 not too far away) was covered in fog. I found this particular thing very annoying, much more annoying than the non-existing Z-buffer on the PS1. Well, it had one, but due to low precision that was only good for static 2D scenes and not 3D. For 3D depth checks had to be performed in software on the PS1, there wasn't a standard library for that. Every developer had to come up with their own solution, which brought the PS1 jaggies issues. I must have fiddled around with Z-buffers, precision and god-knows-what about a year or so back then (such "simple" things have kept people busy for decades: https://developer.nvidia.com/content/depth-precision-visualized). There are further differences such as texture tiling and a few others, but overall I think the PS1 was the better hardware, probably also due to design decision. Nintendo went with RDRAM instead of slower clocked RAM including VRAM which allowed much higher bandwidth at the cost of massive latency, which caused problems and the missing VRAM became an issue. The GC fixed most of these issues, but never really made the expected jump in performance compared to Sony and MS. I'd go as far and say the last Nintendo console that could really compete hardware wise was the SNES. But of course back then the only competition was the Mega Drive / Genesis and PC Engine, but they all lost to the Neo Geo.
At least the M1/Pro/Max/Ultra is readily available again after a few months, yes.
Not really, that would only work for folks who play Switch games. Nintendo in that sense is special, the Switch isn't a direct alternative for a PS or xbox. It's mainly for those interested in Nintendo IP or mobile gaming. That wouldn't do Apple any good unless Nintendo is going the way of Sega, which won't happen. They're far too traditional Japanese for such a step.
I have, that's why I mentioned it.
