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In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
- Thread starter senttoschool
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April 2023 Steam Survey puts Apple Silicon still at ~55% (+0.05%) market share on macOS.
*Numbers rounded up or down to nearest decimal
We can see the share of M2 based Apple Silicon machines increasing compared to the March 2023 survey.
| SoC | Market share | Change |
| M1 | 30,6% | -0,4% |
| M1 Pro | 9,4% | -0,4% |
| M1 Max | 3,4% | -0,6% |
| M2 | 9,2% | +0,6% |
| M2 Pro | 1,6% | +0,5% |
| M2 Max | 0,7% | +0,2% |
We can see the share of M2 based Apple Silicon machines increasing compared to the March 2023 survey.
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Another thing that occurred to me is Apple’s refusal to make anything backwards compatible, unlike Windows. Heck, I can play 20+ year old games on Windows just fine with or without compatibility settings applied. Apple has nothing like this, and it doesn’t seem to care to implement it either.
Even developing non gaming software on Mac is horrible backwards compatibility wise. Try using the latest Xcode SDK to develop an app for Mac OS El Capitan for example (spoiler: you can’t, lowest is High Sierra, and the line is gonna move again).
For sure, now it seems that Mac is slowly settling on a new platform, so things should improve, right? Nope, look at the iOS. Many old games that have been abandoned are not playable anymore on newest versions of iOS. Don’t hold your breath.
Even developing non gaming software on Mac is horrible backwards compatibility wise. Try using the latest Xcode SDK to develop an app for Mac OS El Capitan for example (spoiler: you can’t, lowest is High Sierra, and the line is gonna move again).
For sure, now it seems that Mac is slowly settling on a new platform, so things should improve, right? Nope, look at the iOS. Many old games that have been abandoned are not playable anymore on newest versions of iOS. Don’t hold your breath.
Eliminating backwards compatibility is not a bad thing. Look at how bloated Windows has become, and how many exploits of the OS are tied into features that support that backwards compatibility. This has been a longstanding curse for Microsoft going all the way back to Windows 95, which was the first 32-bit OS from Redmond. When Microsoft made the switch to x64, support for 16-bit applications was finally dropped, although 32-bit support still exists to this day.
It isn’t good either when you break so many things and you cannot promise that you are not gonna break stuff again in the future, and what is exactly Windows suffering from just because it chose not to abandon 32bit compatibility? Why did they deprecate OpenGL? The amount of people who care enough about Metal to develop games on it can be counted on fingers.
What Mac can do now that Windows cannot just because Apple chose to ditch 32 bit?
“Less code to maintain” I hear you say.
Why should we care about Apple making stuff easier for them? How does this make any difference for end users? It makes none. We have less options, they have less development and maintenance costs. Who is really benefiting here?
I feel the Apple gaming curse represents the chicken and the egg phenomenon: people won't game on the Mac because there are aren't many games, and there aren't many games because people won't game on Mac. The best thing Apple can do is purchase a prominent gaming studio and get them to pump out games/ port games to the Mac, much like Microsoft buying Activision.
I tried playing "Firewatch" (awesome game btw, highly recommend) and my M1 Pro ran it like a champ @ 3440×1440, and the fans didn't even kick on. Although that game isn't exactly a AAA title, it was running under Rosetta and still ran at max frames.
My only wish (other than more games on the Mac) is for AS to support hardware raytracing.
No it isn't. But breaking things year after year isn't either. That's why many things in Unity or Unreal are broken in macOS. It's not that macOS is bug free either. Similar to Windows, we have two decade old bugs in macOS as well.
Depending at how much effort it takes to fix the "updates"/changes Apple brings, developers begin not to care anymore. ML Agents for Unity has been broken for years in macOS after Apple broke it over and over with new OS versions. Developers just gave up. There are many other Unity or Unreal based projects that did the same, abandoned macOS support and left it as is. What happened to the "Apple supports Tensorflow now"? Still broken the last time I checked.
In general, while dragging around backward compatibility for too long isn't desired, neither is breaking stuff every year and rely on developers to fix things they didn't break. And then there are industrial applications, decades old, written in Prolog, that still need to run on modern hardware today. Simply switching to something new, is not going to work. So we need this backwards compatibility in certain fields of application.
Bare minimum all Mac Gaming needs to be a thing is a proper compatibility layer. (One that isn't paid CROSSOVER)
At one point macOS did have Steam Proton, but after two months Valve pulled the plug on the Mac version because Apple basically spat in the mouth of every game dev with Mojave killing OpenGL.
People put up with this all the time with consoles. Other than Microsoft (who has since stopped their backwards compatibility work), the other consoles haven’t been great. Upgrading from PS3 to PS4, I couldn’t load up my PS3, PS2 or PS1 games.
My switch can’t play my old Nintendo 64 cartridges. Some of my favorite games are finally available, but it requires online membership.
Besides, I have played old Direct X 8 titles and old games on Windows 11. It’s not as sunshine and rainbows as people like to treat it. Some games I need to do a lot of configuration to play nice on current hardware and Windows 11. Sometimes it’s just better to have an older PC for older games.
My switch can’t play my old Nintendo 64 cartridges. Some of my favorite games are finally available, but it requires online membership.
Besides, I have played old Direct X 8 titles and old games on Windows 11. It’s not as sunshine and rainbows as people like to treat it. Some games I need to do a lot of configuration to play nice on current hardware and Windows 11. Sometimes it’s just better to have an older PC for older games.
Or like they did with Capcom pay for bringing new games and game engines to Mac. Once the engine is ported it gets easier/cheaper to port the games. At least the chance will increase.
As a dev, it’s purely marketshare. I mean for cripes sake we have current games that don’t play well on 13900k and 4090s. If devs don’t treat Windows gamers with respect with how popular Windows is, why do people get surprised when they don’t even look at macs at all with its marketshare?
I’m sick of AAA gaming. I spent a lot getting the top end and new games can’t even hit 60 fps without micro stutters and performance on the last two games I was looking for makes my $3,000 gaming system feel like a bad investment. I’m at the point where just get the consoles and be done with this horrible PC port mess.
For reasons of their own, Apple keeps a tighter ship, especially with regards to antivirus protection, which is why I won’t buy a Windows PC. You can’t put a price on that, in my view.
Games or no games. 32 bit or 64 bit. Deprecated OpenGL or no.
Performance on consoles isn’t a whole lot better (at least for multi platform games).
Google keeps Apple's ship tighter since a lot of vulnerabilities are discovered by them.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...t-agencies-to-update-iphones-macs-by-may-1st/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...bkit-zero-day-exploited-to-hack-iphones-macs/
Enjoy your malware even if you don't switch.
https://blog.cyble.com/2023/04/26/threat-actor-selling-new-atomic-macos-amos-stealer-on-telegram/
No. But it’s easier to take vs when I spend on $1,600 on a graphics card alone. But I can get every console for that price.
Yeah with a game console if you have an N64 and an N64 cart it just works. So long as you have the console and it functions you can play the game, playing a newer game like Jet Force Gemini does not force you to give up the ability to play Ocarina of Time.
Meanwhile on Mac a new title could want the next OS version as a minimum which can break other titles even on the same hardware. Yeah maybe you could kludge around that with multiple OS installs but that's pretty annoying with a company that gives peanuts of storage by default.
On Windows titles do break but it's generally pretty slow. Direct X 8 is over twenty years old at this point and similar vintage Mac games were purged with the removal of Classic in Leopard back in 2006 unless they were lucky enough to see a OS X release, then maybe they held on until 2009 with the removal of Rosetta 1.
Well, with older game consoles, they usually can't be updated. I don't know of any OS updates for a Nintendo 64.
But isn't it likely that a more modern console, which is always-on, would have a similar issue? GameSpy shutting down years ago killing multiplayer on many Wii titles, for example?
Legacy consoles (well pre PS3 as far as I can tell) never had much in the way of system software to update. With no game most consoles didn't show anything, I think the Playstation 1 may have shown an insert disc screen but I am not positive. The PS2 showed a basic settings screen IIRC.
And if you have the vintage Mac the game was released for you can still play it; which is the equivalent of using an N64 console to play an N64 cart.
I’m almost certain that there are more Metal game developers than there are Vulcan or DirectX.
A really niche feature, but the original PS1 could play music CDs. It was dropped from later models though, and was more a hardware thing.
They still aren't making (enough or the right kinds of) macOS games though.
I would assume the statement that more developers use Metal than Vulkan or DirectX is based on the large amount of cheap mobile games in the App Store. Well, not quite right in that case as most of these games were created with tools like Unity, which allows to create games without actually writing Metal (or Vulkan or DirectX or ...). These are very basic games, likely not optimized or implemented on a graphics API level. So while they're running on a device and even use Metal, that's all happening under the hood. It's a very different story for AAA games that are much more expensive to create.
In a similar way, apps can be created with Xamarin in C# and .NET and run on Android and iOS without the need to write Swift, Java, or any other code. Optimal? No, but works perfectly for basic apps.
EDIT: While I'm at it, GNM/GNMX is similar enough to DirectX, that anyone with DirectX experience will feel right at home. So while there are differences, Windows/Xbox/PS is somewhat of a large ecosystem that allows easy target switching.
In a similar way, apps can be created with Xamarin in C# and .NET and run on Android and iOS without the need to write Swift, Java, or any other code. Optimal? No, but works perfectly for basic apps.
EDIT: While I'm at it, GNM/GNMX is similar enough to DirectX, that anyone with DirectX experience will feel right at home. So while there are differences, Windows/Xbox/PS is somewhat of a large ecosystem that allows easy target switching.
I wish I could trade for you guys' problem with struggling to maintain 60fps at 4K on new Star Wars Jedi Survivor game that will never see the light of day on MacOS. I'd be happy if my M1 Macbook Air doesn't dip into single FPS with multiple objects on screen on a 15 year old game Team Fortress 2 that should run on a potato. Who wants to trade?