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LeeW

macrumors 601
Feb 5, 2017
4,342
9,446
Over here
According to Steam there were about 760,000 Mac users last month, only on Steam. Add Mac App Store and you have at least 1 million. If that's laughable because your game sells millions more it's understandable but i've heard a game is considered good when it sells a couple of hundred thousands.

Still, it's not a lot though really. Mac only represents 2.39%. It is still a lot for Mac though. I suspect with those numbers any game is going to struggle to get anywhere close to 200k in sales. 760k Mac users only mean they have Steam installed, not that they are buying anything.
 

jeanlain

macrumors 68020
Mar 14, 2009
2,463
958
No because PlayStation and Xboxes are locked down PCs nowadays, using the same AMD CPUs and GPUs and architecture that gaming PCs use.
It doesn't change the fact that the Playstation has its own API that developers must use. The problem isn't the API, it's the user base. No iOS developer complains about using Metal.

And in a sense, unified memory and uniform hardware make Apple Silicon Macs closer to games consoles. Having to manage RAM and VRAM + AMD and Nvidia specificities on Windows is a pain, I'm told.
 

Longplays

Suspended
May 30, 2023
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It doesn't change the fact that the Playstation has its own API that developers must use. The problem isn't the API, it's the user base. No iOS developer complains about using Metal.

And in a sense, unified memory and uniform hardware make Apple Silicon Macs closer to games consoles. Having to manage RAM and VRAM + AMD and Nvidia specificities on Windows is a pain, I'm told.
Macs, iPhones, iPad and probably Vision Pro are essentially game consoles.

Variations in SKU is known and limited.

So what works on one SKU will work on all unless there are significant display or I/O differences.

Apple's scaling up their userbase using the same SoC architecture and OS code base.

It isn't that fragmented.
 
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Spaceboi Scaphandre

macrumors 68040
Jun 8, 2022
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It doesn't change the fact that the Playstation has its own API that developers must use. The problem isn't the API, it's the user base. No iOS developer complains about using Metal.

That's because iOS developers aren't making anything too intense. They're making apps for a phone, versus graphically demanding experiences on consoles and PCs. When you start adding more tech, then Metal becomes a problem, which is why the Game Porting Toolkit was made to try to greatly lessen that workload, but I don't know how many will actually use it as for a lot of developers it's too little too late.

And in a sense, unified memory and uniform hardware make Apple Silicon Macs closer to games consoles. Having to manage RAM and VRAM + AMD and Nvidia specificities on Windows is a pain, I'm told.

No, it really isn't. Who the hell said it was a pain lmao?
 

Homy

macrumors 68030
Jan 14, 2006
2,510
2,462
Sweden
Still, it's not a lot though really. Mac only represents 2.39%. It is still a lot for Mac though. I suspect with those numbers any game is going to struggle to get anywhere close to 200k in sales. 760k Mac users only mean they have Steam installed, not that they are buying anything.

I think it’s wrong to stare at the percentage instead of the actual numbers. It’s not 2.39% of 100k, 1 million or 10 million users but 32 million. If I had said there are about 100 million Mac users around the world you could say not all of them are gamers but we’re talking about a selected gaming service as Steam. Why else do people log in to Steam, especially Mac users, other than buying or playing games? It is also safe to say that despite being a smaller group Mac users are more likely willing to buy new games to higher price than waitng for Steam sale due to lack of new Mac titles and are more willing to spend money. That’s two things PC gamers usually mock Mac users for, not having games and wasting their money on overpriced HW. That’s why we’ve always had famous AAA franchises on Mac despite being only 2.39%, not to mention all the great indie titles.
 
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Pressure

macrumors 603
May 30, 2006
5,182
1,545
Denmark
I'm not sure why people are so pend up about "high-budget, high-profile games that are typically produced and distributed by large, well-known publishers".

The definition of AAA games doesn't stipulate that it needs to be graphical demanding, high fidelity or use the newest technologies.

Minecraft have outsold all other games in existence and Nintendo populates half of the TOP50 best selling games of all time with Mario Kart probably outselling nearly every other triple A game ever made.
 

Longplays

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I'm not sure why people are so pend up about "high-budget, high-profile games that are typically produced and distributed by large, well-known publishers".

The definition of AAA games doesn't stipulate that it needs to be graphical demanding, high fidelity or use the newest technologies.

Minecraft have outsold all other games in existence and Nintendo populates half of the TOP50 best selling games of all time with Mario Kart probably outselling nearly every other triple A game ever made.
It is meant to convey an idea simply.

I do not game but I understand that a triple A title is highly desired and anticipated due to it being a technological showcase for entertainment.
 

JouniS

macrumors 6502a
Nov 22, 2020
638
399
I'm not sure why people are so pend up about "high-budget, high-profile games that are typically produced and distributed by large, well-known publishers".

The definition of AAA games doesn't stipulate that it needs to be graphical demanding, high fidelity or use the newest technologies.
Definitions are rarely useful outside technical discussions, because they don't usually match common usage. Strawberries are technically not berries, peanuts are technically not nuts, palm trees are technically not trees, and so on.

When people talk about AAA games, they tend to assume that the games are graphically demanding. And maybe also that they are in some popular genres. For example, I'm not sure if I would call something like Minecraft or Microsoft Flight Simulator an AAA game.

Gaming terminology tends to be weird in general. For example, console players talk about backward-compatible games, when they mean games designed for an older console generation that run on newer consoles. But that's technically forward compatibility. In more technical discussion, backward compatibility is a property of a new system, and it means that the system can use something designed for older systems.

Or my favorite: Common character roles in RPGs include the tank and the DPS. The tank can hold ground and take damage, but it usually doesn't hit that hard. Meanwhile, the DPS hits hard and is often highly mobile, but it also tends to be fragile. Which also describes real-world tanks. The closes real-world match to the RPG tank role is infantry.
 
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diamond.g

macrumors G4
Mar 20, 2007
11,437
2,665
OBX
I'm not sure why people are so pend up about "high-budget, high-profile games that are typically produced and distributed by large, well-known publishers".

The definition of AAA games doesn't stipulate that it needs to be graphical demanding, high fidelity or use the newest technologies.

Minecraft have outsold all other games in existence and Nintendo populates half of the TOP50 best selling games of all time with Mario Kart probably outselling nearly every other triple A game ever made.
It depends on the perspective, from a PCMR side it is all about giving reason for the $1500 video card. From a console gamer side AAA are the games that tend to sell consoles so the more of them you have the better your console is (generally this is meant for first party games as multiplatform ones are on all platforms and don't count for console sales purposes).
 
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Spaceboi Scaphandre

macrumors 68040
Jun 8, 2022
3,414
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Yep. PS3 was insanely difficult to develop with the architecture, even for an indie. I attempted it. Yet we know how many games that system got.


It's never been about "Apple treating devs bad" as people like to just blame Apple for everything these days. It's purely about Marketshare. It starts and ends there. If Macs were at 90% like Windows is, it won't matter how "difficult" it is, we would see a lot of games for it since it is so popular.

You do know that PS3 titles had to he delayed for months to a year from the Xbox 360 version and generally ran worse than on Xbox 360 right? The PS3 being difficult to develop on doomed it for the first half of its life, and even though they managed to turn it around in the end, it was too little too late. They were already giving a post mortem just three years into the console’s life. Xbox 360 was the better place to play since games came out faster on it, and ran better on it too. Even the fighting game community who historically always been on PlayStation switched to Xbox 360 for locals and tournaments for this reason.

The “PS3 has no games” meme existed for a reason

 
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diamond.g

macrumors G4
Mar 20, 2007
11,437
2,665
OBX
You do know that PS3 titles had to he delayed for months to a year from the Xbox 360 version and generally ran worse than on Xbox 360 right? The PS3 being difficult to develop on doomed it for the first half of its life, and even though they managed to turn it around in the end, it was too little too late. They were already giving a post mortem just three years into the console’s life. Xbox 360 was the better place to play since games came out faster on it, and ran better on it too. Even the fighting game community who historically always been on PlayStation switched to Xbox 360 for locals and tournaments for this reason.

The “PS3 has no games” meme existed for a reason

I thought it was because the PS3 was too expensive when it first came out compared to the 360. Both were not really that easy to develop for, yes the 360 was easier, but it still had it's quirks (to get best performance you had to deal with tiling which was "new" at the time).
 

Spaceboi Scaphandre

macrumors 68040
Jun 8, 2022
3,414
8,107
I thought it was because the PS3 was too expensive when it first came out compared to the 360. Both were not really that easy to develop for, yes the 360 was easier, but it still had it's quirks (to get best performance you had to deal with tiling which was "new" at the time).

Both being PowerPC didn't help but 360 was at least similar in architecture to a normal PC.

Cell on the other hand was a nightmare board for game development since you had to allocate tasks to individual compute modules and were very limited in what you could do with memory compared to 360 which you just had normal PPC CPU cores and unified memory.

cell-broadband-engine-project-cell-architecture-2001-ibm-103-cell-arch-MYBTJY.jpg


The SPEs made game development a nightmare, but supercomputing a breeze. For the first 4 years the PS3 had a feature called Other OS that allowed it to dualboot Linux, an intentional design as Sony and IBM wanted Cell to be used for servers as well. A lot of PS3s were bought not as game consoles but to use as supercomputer clusters with universities, laboratories, and even the US Air Force, to the point the Folding@Home application made it's way to PS3.

playstations.jpg
DSC_0140.jpg


So Sony expected everyone to learn their brand new complicated architecture that was more geared to supercomputing and only available on that one console, and even worse, expected everyone to learn it when their competitor already started the new generation a year prior.

Also didn't help that for the first few years Sony withheld developer kits and guides from third parties and limited it to just their studios and "partnered developers" which lead to many skipping PS3 for the first few years.

There's a reason Sony moved to x86 with the PS4 since they wanted the console to be as easy to develop for as possible, which is how they became the king of consoles again. This is a lesson Nintendo had to learn the hard way with the Wii U and Microsoft with the Xbox One.

 
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Ethosik

Contributor
Oct 21, 2009
8,142
7,120
You do know that PS3 titles had to he delayed for months to a year from the Xbox 360 version and generally ran worse than on Xbox 360 right? The PS3 being difficult to develop on doomed it for the first half of its life, and even though they managed to turn it around in the end, it was too little too late. They were already giving a post mortem just three years into the console’s life. Xbox 360 was the better place to play since games came out faster on it, and ran better on it too. Even the fighting game community who historically always been on PlayStation switched to Xbox 360 for locals and tournaments for this reason.

The “PS3 has no games” meme existed for a reason

Still has more games than Mac. Even with how difficult it was.
 

Spaceboi Scaphandre

macrumors 68040
Jun 8, 2022
3,414
8,107
Still has more games than Mac. Even with how difficult it was.

Actually the early Intel Macs and late PPC Macs had a lot of games, many of them day in date with their PC counterparts since they had Nvidia GPUs at the time, and this was back during the PC Gaming Dark Age mind you. They even had Call of Duty releases while the last CoD Mac got is Blops 3...three years after the fact...

Hopefully with the game porting toolkit Mac can at least get Warzone 2. I want DMZ on my Mac
 
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Spaceboi Scaphandre

macrumors 68040
Jun 8, 2022
3,414
8,107
The results they show in the video are weird.

People on M2 Pro and M2 Max are getting better performance than their M1 Ultra with the 64-core GPU.

M2 seems to have been a bigger upgrade than I thought, geared more towards upgrading GPU performance since graphics professionals complained about the M1 Max not being what they wanted.

Damn...now my M1 Pro is feeling sad.

Of course a lot of this is funky since we're using a Wine layer that's not optimized in the slightest. Which means if we're gonna use GPT as a Proton for Mac we're gonna have to wait for optimizations

Someone call Glorious Eggroll
 

nasmdhgf

macrumors member
Jan 23, 2023
64
29
It doesn't change the fact that the Playstation has its own API that developers must use. The problem isn't the API, it's the user base. No iOS developer complains about using Metal.
I have been talking about Mac here all along, I don't know what is the relationship between iOS and it? The market for Mac and iOS is two different scenarios, and iOS is the mobile phone market, not the mobile computer market. The usage rate of mobile phones will be higher.

Moreover, iOS programmers have been exposed to metal from the beginning, and they cannot complain too much about it. As PC programmers, we have had prior exposure to Directx and Opengl, which means that if we want to create games on iOS or Mac platforms, we must learn an additional language and still support the arm architecture. Therefore, Mac and iOS score 0 for us.

Although Nintendo has an arm architecture, it supports Vulkan and Opengl, so it can earn 40 points. PS5 also has a CPU architecture similar to PC, and even if it uses its own API, it still has bonus points, although it is not as high as Nintendo. But it is also higher than the Mac.
The comparison of these platforms may be as follows: MAC or IOS=0, PS5=25, NS=40, LINUX=70, XBOX=85, WINDOWS=100.

The console has never been the preferred choice for game authors. Firstly, it should be a PC platform. We can spend the least effort and cost to create the game and put it on the store, but the console cannot. You must purchase or apply for its machine, sign a confidentiality agreement, and verify before you can start making the game. It's too troublesome.

Programmers generally do not like to put in more effort to create projects with minimal returns. You can think of me as lazy, but with less than 5% of game users (you may think there are many users), it's difficult for me to have any thoughts on Mac. I agree with opengl game authors who left Mac before. Their approach is very correct because their game's sales on the Mac are very tragic. If it were like Windows, I don't think he would ever want to leave.
 

Homy

macrumors 68030
Jan 14, 2006
2,510
2,462
Sweden
Therefore, Mac and iOS score 0 for us.

For you that is. It hasn’t scored 0 for Kojima Productions with Death Stranding, Hello Games with No Man’s Sky, Bloober Team with Layers of Fear/The Medium, Fallen Leaf with Fort Solis, BlueTweleve Studio with Stray, Piranha Bytes with ELEX II, Saber Interactive with Snowrunner, SGRA Studio with Dragonheir: Silent Gods, Rockfish Games with Everspace 2, BlackMill Games with Isonzo, Capcom with Resident Evil Village, Feral/Sega/Codemasters with Toal War: Pharaoh/Grid Legends, 4A with Metro Exodus or Larian Studios with Baldur’s Gate 3, to metion some. But sure, keep applying your own ideas about Apple, Mac and Metal to the entire industry.
 
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