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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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Honestly x86-64 was announced in 1999. Last century, 25 years ago.
At some point you either have to blame the developer or acknowledge that computing has moved forward, leaving some stuff behind.
And yet games like Half-Life 1, Quake 3, Deus Ex, etc. all still work on modern up to date x64 Windows 11 and even ARM64 Windows 11, despite being from the last century, 25 years ago.
At some point you have to blame the platform holder for not being a good steward and acknowledge that it's obscene to expect individual developers to migrate every piece of software or that consumers should just expect everything they bought to stop working every 10 years. Computing has moved forward, no reason to expect everything should break all the time now.
Yet a reason for 64bit apps is more addressable ram which apple keeps their os at windows 95 recommended level.
Seems like an awful lot of work to get old games working on a single OS with no guarantee folks would pay for the game again to cover the costs.
At some point I'd think Ai will be able to port games to different systems. I'd be quite surprised if devs weren't already working on that.
Wouldn't that be an IP nightmare? I guess something like that could be locally hosted, though.
That is what GOG is doing with their certified games.
I agree. The importance of 32-bit support on Mac is often greatly exaggerated, especially now after 7 years. The critics, often PC and Steam Deck gamers, love to bring this up in every discussion and paint a vivid image of millions of helpless and frustrated Mac users not being able to play their old games. The funny thing again is that it’s the people who don’t even own or use Macs that usually sound concerned and chime in to defend the argument and point out how bad macOS, Macs, Mac gaming and Apple are.
I have a certain understanding for the players' point of view and those genuine Mac gamers wanting to play old games but from a business perspective it doesn’t make much sense for Apple. On the one hand we hear all the time from the same critics how bad and small Mac gaming is because of expensive and weak HW and lack of games, especially new titles, but on the other hand the same people expect all old 32-bit games to be playable due to huge demand?
So which is it really? Is Mac gaming good and popular or bad and small? Do people mostly want the latest AAA titles on Mac or old 32-bit games? If it takes decades for a developer to update an app that only takes months for others to do you’d better question your software developer instead of Apple. If you look at the history and some numbers you get another picture.
Developers have had plenty of time to make the transition to 64-bit. 2003 Apple and AMD introduced the first 64-bit CPUs in personal computers with PPC 970 in Power Mac G5 and Athlon 64. 2004 Intel introduced Pentium 4. It was 21 years ago. The first truly 64-bit MacOS was Snow Leopard in 2009, 15 years ago. Apple announced at WWDC 2017 they were dropping support for 32-bit and developers had almost 2.5 years until Catalina in 2019 to update their apps. They started even earlier in June 2015 requiring all new iOS apps and app updates submitted to the iOS App Store to support 64-bit. Mac gamers had also three years to finish their old games or could simply keep a compatible system around as a classic gaming Mac. I finished all Half-Life games on my iMac 2011 which I used until 2022. So there has been plenty of time.
The first 64-bit game for Athlon 64 was Shadow Ops in 2005. The same year we had also 64-bit Far Cry, The Chronicles of Riddick and Unreal engine. It was 19 years ago. Many developers abandoned 32-bit years ago in the 2010s. Many old 32-bit games have also been updated to 64-bit with native Apple Silicon support with remasters or remakes or by fan projects like Mac Source ports, even Half-Life and Quake 1-3, not to mention solutions like Crossover, Wine, Parallels, PlayOn Mac and VMware fusion. So who/where/how many are all these Mac gamers who want to play 32-bit games but can’t? Let’s look at some Steam numbers.
Steam had 38,502,938 people online at most yesterday. According to Steam survey 1.41% used Macs during November. That could be 542,891 Mac users yesterday in theory. If you look at the top 100 most played Steam games you hardly find any 32-bit games. Only Left 4 Dead 2 and Garry’s mod seem to be 32-bit out of 100 games. Even Team Fortress 2 was updated to 64-bit earlier this year in April. The survey also shows that 68.05% of Mac gamers use Sequoia or Sonoma 14.5.0 or 14.6.1. 33,94% use other Sonoma versions, Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur or Catalina. Steam dropped support for Mojave back in February. It was the last macOS supporting 32-bit games so we know that no Mac user on Steam can play 32-bit games. They’re also excluded from the survey.
It’s also interesting that people always mention Valve games as a testimony to the importance of legacy games/apps. Let’s see how popular the games really are. Left 4 Dead 2 had a peak of 41,359 players the last 24 hours, but the rest were less popular. HL2 had 8,162 players, Portal 2 4,058, Half-Life 1,933, Portal 1,245, Left 4 Dead 1,039, Day of Defeat: Source 541, HL2 Episode One 77 and HL2 Episode Two 59 players. 1.41% of those numbers would be between 3 and 583 players on Mac. Now compare those numbers to the total number of users online, 38.5 million, or 542,891 Mac users. Deus Ex: HR had 290 players, Deus ex GOTY 107 and Deus Ex: Invisible War 13 players.
In other words it’s about market share. Windows is keeping 32-bit support because it has 73% of the total market and 96.56% of the Steam market share. The numbers for Mac are 15.4% and 1.41%. It doesn’t make sense for Apple to make a huge effort to keep supporting 32-bit legacy apps year after year on a modern evolving architecture because a few people want to play Valve games. That’s up to the developers. When they see a large demand based on previous numbers and user base they update their apps to 64-bit, like CSGO and Dota 2 for Mac, but later Valve dropped support for Mac for both Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2. So if Valve drops support for around 10,000 CS players on Mac why should Apple keep support for 583 L4D2 players?
The oldest game I found with native Apple Silicon support is Broken Sword 2 from 1997. Another one updated to 64-bit is Gorky 17 from 1999. Aspyr updated SimCity 4 Deluxe from 2003 with native Apple Silicon support. CD Projekt Red updated Witcher 1 and 2 first to 64-bit x86 and then to native Apple Silicon. The games are 16 and 12 years old. Even Techland updated Dying Light from OpenGL to Metal. So it's all about how popular the games are.
10 years is also a long time in Silicon Valley. Apple actually has switched CPU architecture less often. It took 10 years to switch from 68K to PPC (1984-1994), 12 years from PPC to Intel (1994-2006) and 14 years from Intel to Apple Silicon (2006- 2020). Now we’ve already had Apple Silicon for 14 years in iPhones and 4 years in Macs and there won’t be any CPU switches for a very long time.
Nowadays with games being digital it’s not either unusual that your purchased games just disappear because the devs stop supporting them or the publisher stops selling them or the games flop and are removed forever after few months like many new PC games. So there’s no guarantee even for new games or apps to continue to work for a decade.
I had a Mac in 2019 (well a couple). I bought Shadow of the Tomb Raider when it released for Mac. Then I realized I had to choose between most of my old Steam games or playing the new game I just bought. Apple constantly breaking stuff for their benefit and none of mine is a big reason why I abandoned macOS/iOS.
Yes, technically 64 bit processors were available to buy in 2003 or 2004. But what do you think most people were buying? Even in Apple land it wasn't until 2007 when the entire lineup went 64 bit. On the Windows side, Windows XP x64 had serious teething pains that made it a no go even for people that had an Athlon 64 or the 64 bit Pentium 4. Windows Vista was well, Windows Vista. So in Windows land it wasn't until really Windows 7 that a viable 64 bit OS was available in 2009. And of course 32 bit XP was still quite popular and continued to be used by gamers with decent rigs so they couldn't be ignored so 32 bit games made sense for a few more years. And 32 bit games at the time were running fine with less than 4GB of RAM, ran fine on 64 bit Vista and Mac OS so why bother shipping 64 bit versions? Apple didn't announce in 2007 that they'd kick 32bit to the curb in 2019. They did it in 2017.
Then you also have to remember that games are usually built on top of 3rd party middleware (e.g., game engines, stuff like Bink video). That middleware may not have a 64 bit drop in replacement available. Or getting an updated version may require an entirely new contract, etc. It could be non-trivial in a time or financial sense to go from 32 to 64 bit for something that has already sold the majority of copies it will ever sell. And who knows if there's even enough knowledge left to easily go back and update the code? Studios change hands and shut down, employees change jobs, etc.
So because of that it only makes sense to update the most popular of the older titles. Your Simcity 4s and Witcher 2s. Games that still sell well (Broken Sword 2 runs on ScummVM, so it's an exception and Gorky 17 looks like it uses Wineskin). But there's thousands of 32 bit titles. Sure, they aren't the most popular but if you add them all together I'm sure it's a sizeable chunk of games being played. People revisiting older favorites or games they heard about from some retro youtuber for the first time yesterday.
People want to play the games they want to play. New or old titles. They don't want to lose older titles because a trillion dollar company can't be bothered. 32 bit games work on Windows, they work on Linux with it's even smaller market share.
P.S. That 64 bit port of Farcry was a buggy PoS. If you buy Farcry off GoG they give you the 32 bit version. And it still runs fine today! Even on ARM64 Windows!
That sounds like a drastic solution. I have a hard time to believe you decided to abandon macOS and iOS entirely one day because you felt you couldn’t play your old games on Catalina anymore. Yes, Shadow of the Tomb Raider requires Catalina which was released the same year (2019) as the game but Catalina supported old Macs as far back as 2012. You say you had two Macs already that apparently worked with Mojave. You could simply upgrade one to Catalina to play Tomb Raider and keep the other one for the old games with Mojave. You could also create a new partition either with Catalina or Mojave on your gaming Mac and just switch between the systems to play old and new games on the same Mac. Only if you had a Mac from 2011 or older you couldn’t upgrade to Catalina. Still you could buy a new Mac and keep the old ones for the old games.
It’s not completely true that 32-bit games work on Linux. Many distros like Ubuntu have dropped support for 32-bit and you have to install additional files and multilibs to enable 32-bit support. Yes, it’s possible but it’s also possible to install additional SW even on Apple Silicon to play 32-bit games so it’s certainly not more hassle than choosing the right Linux distro and make it work. There are free alternatives like Wine, PlayOnMac and VMware Fusion. Mac Source Ports have native Apple Silicon ports of old engines for playing lots of games like Half-life, Quake 1-3, Marathon 1-3, Myth 2, Star Wars games, Baldur’s Gate 1-2, Doom 1-3, Heretic, Unreal Tournament, Wolfenstein games and many more, games you thought weren’t available on Mac (Half-Life, Quake 3). Then there are paid solutions like Crossover and Parallells. I myself use both VMW and Crossover for old games.
So again it’s basically because of the market share and user base. If Mac already has very small share on Steam (1.41%) you can imagine how small the number of people playing retro Mac games is despite ”a sizeable chunk of games being played”. Over 10,000 Mac gamers wanted to continue to play Counter-Strike too but the multibillion company Valve didn’t want to waste any more time and resources on such a ”small” group. They have around 2 million Mac customers but it’s still not large enough for a simple native game launcher (Steam) after 4 years. Even EA with only one native Mac title The Sims 4 made a native launcher earlier this year.
Apple is a multitrillion company for sure but it’s still one company working in many areas. Do you know who contribute most to the Linux development? I personally thought it was most the community but it’s actually many multibillion and multitrillion companies. Nvidia, Intel, Huawei, Google, Facebook, AMD, Samsung, IBM, Oracle, Arm, Texas Instruments, Red Hat and MediaTek to mention a few. Up to almost 14,000 programmers from more than 1,200 companies have worked at one time on the kernel development at most.
When people all over the internet scream for more new Mac games every year the last thing they worry about is native support for 32-bit retro games. As Spock said, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” You can be sure that those few lovers of classic Mac games have already found other solutions, like buying a 64-bit remake/remastered/enhanced version, using an old Mac, using free or paid software or like you switching to PC or Steam Deck.
I bought my first Mac, a Performa 6200, only to play the Marathon series. The trilogy is free now even on Steam with native source port. Still I haven’t replayed those classics since the 90s. I have a large backlog of Mac games and new ones keep coming and with Crossover there are a ton of Windows games. I could never find the time to replay retro games even if I wanted. I also have noticed how bad the graphics are in many old games and couldn’t stand the eye strain. I just looked at some lists of top classic games to play and most of the Mac games had new remasters/remakes. A few without 64-bit ports can be played in Wine/VMW. Only those without original Mac ports still didn’t have Mac ports. Even Star Wars: Tie Fighter from 1994 has a 64-bit ”Special Edition” port for Mac.
I didn't say it was the only reason I abandoned MacOS. It wasn't just gaming related either. Apple's changes would literally break my workflow every major update because they'd reshuffle things for no reason and I'd have to waste a work day getting where I was the day before. There was other reasons too. Mainly it didn't feel like MY computer, it felt like Apple's, I just paid full price for it.
I wasn't going to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider on my crummy iGPU Mac Mini and I wasn't going to waste hundreds of GBs of storage keeping around multiple copies of macOS to deal with it. I did think about it, but when you're already space constrained because Apple is a bunch of penny pinchers and jerks in the storage department it becomes really not a good use of space.
On Ubuntu, you install Steam from the software centre and you get 32 bit libs. It's not hard or complex. It's not annoying and doesn't require you to reinstall Steam 7,000 times like PlayOnMac/PlayOnLinux or Wine. It's one click. I have plenty of experience with the old world of workaround gaming on Linux/Mac that was like that. It's annoying. I don't want to spend a bunch of time reinstalling libs, reinstalling launchers and tweaking configs.
The big corps supporting Linux don't give a rats ass about desktop Linux for the most part and definitely not gaming on Linux. They aren't submitting kernel patches to ensure TF2 works on the latest Ubuntu. That's not what's happening. They are making patches to make sure their hardware works for their products and the features they need for their business needs are there. Apple is consumer focused but they can't be bothered. Why bother supporting them IMO?
And Homy, Tie Fighter uses DOSBOX! That's why it has 64 bit port. They haven't really ported the game to 64 bit. They just shoved an entire program around a 16 bit game. That works for some titles but for ones from 1998-2010ish there's not really a great solution.
Gaming was the only reason you mentioned. I don’t know what kind of work you did that would break with every major macOS update but that sounds like a more legit reason for switching than not being able to play old games. Personally I haven’t hade such problems after owning only Macs for three decades. I remember that we’ve had this discussion before about macOS breaking stuff with every update and as I’ve said before that can happen with every operating system in the world. Either you wait for an update and solution or you simply practice ”if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” and keep using your working system.
You only needed two copies of macOS, Mojave for 32-bit and any newer for 64-bit. Neither does macOS require hundreds of GB. Mojave/Catalina needs only 12.5GB. macOS 11-15 needs 20-30 GB so in total less than 50GB which is the same size as one AAA game today or less. A fast, small and cheap external SSD also costs only about $65 so no need to pay the ”Apple tax”.
I don’t know what made you to reinstall Steam 7,000 times on Wine. I have always installed it once in Crossover and then the Steam client auto-updates upon launch if needed. I remember that we’ve had this discussion too about Crossover and you refer to your ”experience with the old world of workaround gaming on Linux/Mac that was like that”. That certainly hasn’t been the case for a long time.
Apple is consumer focused but so is Microsoft and Valve. They like to prioritize and focus on what sells best and as I already mentioned supporting old 32-bit games isn’t and hasn’t been Apple’s priority due to a very limited user base in contrast to Windows with 96% of gamers. Linux has a small market share too for sure but it has large support from a large community and many large companies as I mentioned. It’s easier then to develop the OS. I read recently that the creator of Rosetta 2 worked on the project alone for almost two years and wrote most of the code for the first version that shipped with Apple Silicon by himself until another programmer was hired and eventually a whole team.
Apple hasn’t closed the door on 32-bit entirely either. Rosetta 2 doesn’t support 32-bit applications but it lets 64-bit executables and processes to create 32-bit code segments. This was actually introduced already in macOS Catalina before Rosetta 2 and made it possible for Crossover to run 32-bit applications in Wine on macOS. It was shipped with Crossover 19 the same year as Catalina was released and worked very well according to Codeweavers. Rosetta 2 supports this as well and Codeweavers needed to do minimal changes to Wine. So this is the path Apple chose. Instead of keeping to make 32-bit versions of the entire macOS and having to maintain support for old codes they offered a solution for those developers who needed it. Codeweavers is relatively a very small company compared to many other developers but they managed to take advantage of it. They also wrote in 2022 that one of their goals was to make 32-bit Windows apps to use Vulkan through WineD3D/DXVK and MoltenVK and they made it happen with Bioshock Infinite for example later which runs great on Mac.
Broken Sword 2 on Steam has a native port for Apple Silicon according to Steamdb. When ”osextended” indicates "macosapplesilicon” the game has a native port. The game is also on App Store for iPhone/iPad and was updated to 64-bit already in 2015 there so most likely it’s the same port on Steam. All games on App Store and especially for iOS are native AS ports. Even the ScummVM port doesn’t use emulation. The website says ”ScummVM is a complete rewrite of these games' executables and is not an emulator”. Gorky 17 on the other hand has only ”macos64” so it’s a x86 port. The developer made a Wine port in 2015 indeed.
I always check the games on Steamdb. It doesn’t matter how the port was done, especially when we talk about being able to play 32-bit retro games on Mac. The most important thing is that you can play them. That’s the whole idea of compatibility layers like Proton and the reason Valve started the project, to be able to play Windows games on Linux/SteamOS.
Star Wars: Tie Fighter SE uses indeed DOSBox. They actually released it in April 2020 before Apple Silicon was announced but I didn’t say either it was a great solution for all games. Again I checked the status on Steamdb which showed it’s playable but the game has also a source port. That port uses DREAMM which is an emulator for LucasArts games with native support for ARM64.
I looked at Steamdb and again the situation doesn’t look so bad. There are only 1353 games released for Mac on Steam between 1997 and 2013. It was only from 2014 that the number rose to over 1500 games a year but that was only 3.5 years before Apple announced it would drop the support for 32-bit. From 2014 to 2017 11,733 Mac games were released on Steam but there are lots of games that have been updated to 64-bit one way or the other, even 20-year-old games and there are different ways to play those that haven’t, even for free. 20-year-old Myst IV and V got Apple Silicon ports in September and URU got 64-bit port. There are also hundreds of games and engines with Mac source ports. So there is a huge library of classic Mac games people could play one way or the other but of course there will always be that one game that somebody can’t play.
Why spend money to get back features I already had and can do on other OSs for free with no hassle? Sure, macOS is "only" 15GB or so but when I only usually had 20-30GB free at any one time on the crummy 256GB drives Apple provided, it's not a good use of storage.
IMO, macOS provided nothing of value to put up with the headaches. The software wasn't better IMO, I didn't need any exclusive Mac software, the hardware at the time definitely wasn't better. Just no reason for me to keep dealing with workarounds, wasting money and time. I guess now you at least get a faster CPU but decent configs still cost too much IMO to warrant it. I will wait a couple minutes to not have to constantly truck an external drive around to hold my work or constantly have to shuffle things.
And you still seemed to have completely missed my point about the difficulty of making 64 bit ports, that it's possible for a few games doesn't mean it made sense for the majority. And you still seem to be thinking volume of crap asset flips is better than quality. Steam used to have higher standards for what ended up there. That's why there is less older titles. I'd rather have less good games than a bunch of garbage to wade through like today.
Apple could have easily maintained 32 bit support for macOS apps but they're cheap and can't be bothered. They'd rather but the burden on everyone else and there's enough cult mentality that some will blame developers for Apple's poor choices.
Let’s not exaggerate again, like ”hundreds of GBs” needed for macOS or having to ”reinstall Steam 7,000 times” in Wine/Crossover. I didn’t ”completely miss” any points. If you were sick of macOS and Macs that’s fine, you made your choice but with every suggested solution you come up with even more weird problems.
Here we’re talking about those few Mac users who still want to play 32-bit games, not people who switched to PC years ago mainly because ”it didn't feel like MY computer, it felt like Apple’s”. The user macfacts claimed that ”Mac is a fail” for 32-bit games today which can be true in their case and for their particular needs but it’s also far from the whole truth because of the solutions I’ve already mentioned.
If you still were a Mac user you didn’t have to spend money to get back features. You could just have kept your Intel Mac Mini for 32-bit games free of charge. You said your iGPU was weak for new games and your drive full so you would have bought a new Mac anyway. Apple still sold iMac with macOS Mojave pre-installed with Radeon Pro 580X/Vega 48 in 2019. You bought a PC but still either way it wouldn’t cost you anything to play 32-bit games on Mac. If you usually had only 20-30GB free space you needed more storage sooner or later even if you had a PC. So it didn’t have much to do with Apple’s ”crummy drives”. You knew what you bought and either had underestimated your needs or your needs had grown over time. A Mac Mini is also a desktop computer. You didn’t have to ”constantly truck an external drive around”. Today you can even buy a 512GB compact flash drive with 400MB/s write speed for $35 for your games.
It’s true that porting old games to 64 bit can meet hurdles because of old middleware but the number of old games being updated to 64 bit in spite of middleware or still being playable free of charge is far greater than you want to admit. PCGamingWiki lists 727 32-bit only games but many of them can run on PlayOnMac or VMware. PlayOnMac lists hundreds of old games and VMW can run DX9-DX11 so even the majority of retro games should work. I myself finished Deus Ex HR in VMW. I can play other games too like Batman Arkham Asylum, The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Lost planet 3 and Wolfenstein: The New Order and many more in VMW. Then as I mentioned there are hundreds of Mac Source Ports. We have also DOSBox, ScummVM and emulators. All these solutions are free. PCGamingWiki also lists 242 games with both 32-bit and 64-bit ports and many 32-bits games have now only 64-bit ports and even native Apple Silicon ports.
Even that Bink video you mentioned as middleware got updated to 64-bit macOS (Bink 1-2) already in 2013, six years before Apple dropped its support for 32 bit. They also added ARM64 support in Jan 2021, just 2 months after the first M1 Macs were released. Epic also bought Rad Game Tools and Bink in Jan 2021. Speaking of game engines let’s not forget all the games made with Unreal and Unity. Both engines have had Mac support since the first release, Unreal since 1995 and Unity since 2005. Unity added 64 bit support for Mac already in version 4.2 in 2013. Unreal added ARM64 support already in 2014/2015 in version 4.6 before Catalina. With these engines it was easier to convert old 32-bit projects to 64-bit because the developers didn’t have to do all the work. There’s even a guide to ”How to port Windows, Linux and 32-bits macOS Unity games to run on 64-bits macOS”.
I don’t know where you get ”you still seem to be thinking volume of crap asset flips is better than quality” from. First you say there are thousands of 32-bit games people play but Mac users can’t today but when I list different solutions for playing hundreds, or perhaps even thousands such games you suddenly label those precious games everybody wants to play but can’t as ”crap”? You mentioned Half-life and Quake 3 which both have source ports. The reason I mentioned the number (1,353) of released Mac games 1997-2013 was to show that there weren’t ”thousands” of classic games released for Mac during those 17 years. After that engines like Unity and Unreal already had added support for 64 bit years before Catalina in 2013-2014. So if most of the old games on Steam are ”crap” anyway the amount of good quality games should be even smaller and with all the free solutions for playing the most popular old games the need of those few game enthusiasts should be covered, shouldn’t it? That’s why many old popular quality games were updated to 64 bit by developers like Feral and Aspyr.
I’m not sure what ”cult mentality” has to do with the subject either. So just because people disagree with you they’re part of the Apple cult? Even if everyone agreed with you it wouldn’t change the situation. Isn’t it cult mentality too to think that the developers shouldn’t have to do anything and Apple is the only one who needs to do all the work and has to change its entire SW/HW strategy to fulfill the needs of a fraction of 1.41% of Mac gamers who can’t play a small part of old 32-bit Mac games for free? How many times have you seen actual Mac gamers complain about the subject here on MR? I can only recall a few times during the past years when people asked for help to make things work. All other times the ”complaints” have come from Windows/Linux/Steam Deck gamers.
Another mistake is to compare Apple and macOS directly to Microsoft and Windows. There is more to the story than Apple just being cheap, easily being able to keep 32 bit support and ”poor choices”. I’ve already talked about the very small Mac user base on Steam compared to Windows, the fraction of those users playing 32-bit games and the even smaller portion of 32-bit games that can’t be played with different solutions on Mac. Another reason for Microsoft maintaining 32-bit support is all those major customers and large corporations that pay big license/support money for their old expensive systems they still use. Apple doesn’t have that kind of customer base as ”consumer focused” company. That’s also the reason why they have been able to adopt and implement new tech in their products faster. There are also technical differences between macOS/iOS and Windows that resulted in Apple’s decision.
You could blame iPhone for the lack of 32-bit support. 5S with A7 was the first 64-bit iDevice and iOS 7 the first 64-bit iOS in 2013. To run 32-bit legacy apps iOS had to load a 32-bit subsystem before the app could actually run on the 64-bit OS. That affected the battery, performance and the memory. iOS had already more users than Mac in 2013 and when Apple announced they would drop support for 32 bit on Mac in 2017 iOS had almost 3x larger market share. It wouldn’t make much sense based on the number of users to drop 32 bit support on iOS but keep it on Mac. It was a part of their long-term plan to bring iOS and macOS closer together and use Apple Silicon in Macs 2020, a year after Catalina. Still they gave Mac two more years compared to iOS which dropped its support already in 2017. On the PC side Windows 7 64 bit overtook XP 32 bit on Steam for the first time in 2010. In 2015 only about 12% used Windows 32 bit.
Another reason was Metal. Apple wanted its own modern graphics API and released in 2014 it was 64 bit only, never intended for 32 bit. Many iOS/macOS developers understand and even agree with Apple’s decision. There is an excellent tech article by Martin Pilkington that explains the technical issues in macOS that lead to Apple’s decision. Here are some quotes:
”There are arguably more important reasons to Apple for dropping 32 bit on the Mac. They don't actually have much to do with 32 bit itself, but more with decisions that were made in 2007 when 64 bit was finalised. When Apple introduced 64 bit with Mac OS X 10.5, they also introduced Objective-C 2.0. Part of this was a new and improved runtime, designed to fix problems with the old runtime. Unfortunately, these fixes were not compatible with existing apps, so they made the decision to only make this runtime available in 64 bit. However, this meant the (now) legacy runtime would have to stick around as long as 32 bit apps existed.”
”One of the problems this new runtime fixed is quite an important one: fragile ivars. The behaviour of the legacy runtime effectively means that Apple can never update their existing objects with new ivars without breaking existing apps. In reality they have found ways around this but they prove very difficult to do, which reduces the time they could spend on new features and bug fixes. Indeed, the difficulty of having to support the legacy runtime has very likely contributed to some APIs on iOS (which has only ever used the new runtime) not making it back to the Mac.”
”While the fragile ivar problem is a big part of the desire to drop 32 bit, it's representative of a bigger issue Apple has been hoping to fix. They have a lot of legacy cruft in their OS. The Carbon APIs have been deprecated for many years, having never been migrated to 64 bit, but they still need to exist for 32 bit apps. Some of those APIs can date back to the original Mac. There are many other APIs that were deprecated with 64 bit in a similar situation with many workarounds in their code to continue supporting them. The problem with these APIs is that as fewer and fewer developers use them, there are fewer and fewer people to notice any bugs, and in particular any potential security flaws. There are also fewer resources inside Apple to invest in maintaining these APIs to fix any such flaws.”
”The potential switch to ARM also plays into this, as none of these older technologies have ever existed on ARM. Now, Apple could have held off on dropping 32 bit until ARM forced their hand, it would certainly have made it easier for people to understand the reasons. However, it would have meant holding macOS back for even longer.”
”Backwards compatibility ultimately has a cost. It's a cost in maintaining older technologies. It's a cost in slowing down newer technologies. It's a cost in increased surface area for attacks. There is no right answer as to how much you should incur those costs as a developer. Microsoft has gone opted to suck up the costs and provide extensive backwards compatibility, seeing the benefits it brings as more valuable than these costs. Apple takes a more middle ground approach, maintaining backwards compatibility to a point, but eventually always favouring periodically cleaning out dated technology to keep them moving forward.”
”While it can seem that Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility at all, they spend a lot of time weighing up the pros and cons before dropping support for anything. It's also interesting in how much effort they do put into backward compatibility given the large sweeping changes they have undergone the past 30 years, even if that compatibility is only ever temporary.”
You seem to rather focus on old problems than new solutions. More than 7 years have passed since WWDC 2017 and although the problem and confusion was for sure bigger back then that’s not the case after all these years with the solutions I’ve mentioned. Yes, there are always games you can’t play for free but at the same time there are few Mac gamers playing those games too. People couldn’t play their PS3 games on PS4 either. Some people think it’s a fail if Mac doesn’t get new games, some think it’s a fail if it doesn’t have old games, some think it shouldn’t even get any games because nobody games on Mac, the market share is too small and not profitable and Macs are expensive, non-upgradable and non-serviceable. Everybody has an opinion but Apple must draw the line somewhere. The question is where? At 10,000 CS players like Valve did or at potentially 2 Mac players who played Deus Ex yesterday?
The real problem people should instead worry about in the gaming world today is that 87% of all classic video games have disappeared from the market. So the question is not whether you can play an old game on Mac today but if you even will be able to play your old Windows games tomorrow.
For those who still feel that the amount of retro PC games is not enough on Mac here are two recent videos about all types of emulators for playing classic console games:
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You can buy a $50 hand held to play those retro console games. https://www.amazon.ca/Anbernic-RG35...374cb1afdf4a3c9cabadd36c55be0877&gad_source=1
Why waste money on a mac to play them?
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You don’t even have to buy that handheld if you already have a Mac. That’s the point of this whole discussion which you seem to be missing totally, namely what Mac gamers can do on their Macs.
Since you think it’s a waste of money to buy/own a Mac and don’t sound remotely interested in the gaming possibilities on Mac it strongly suggests that you’re not a Mac gamer to begin with and your complaint about ”Mac is a fail” for 32-bit games was just another attempt to express your dislike for everything Apple/Mac like the regular Windows/Linux/Steam Deck gamers in this forum. Btw that device costs $68, not $50.
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Sure, but they get them like 2-4 years later. I do play more games on my Mac nowadays though then I have since they basically made most the games I would play completely useless on a Mac a few years back. That was such an awful idea.
$68 Canadian dollars, less than $50 usd.
And this thread was started 5 years ago, and can now be stated as false. Gaming devs still don't think it is financially viable to make AAA games for mac.
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I would argue it's taking longer than expected but could still ring somewhat true. Especially if and when Ai starts making ports easier and perhaps Apple execs open up the purse strings to offer some incentives for devs to port to Mac OS.
The M4 Mini at ~$550 is being praised in the media as a gamechanger and I would expect some widespread adaptation. My casual friend just grabbed one from Costco and can't believe how nice it is. I grabbed one on day one and am equally impressed.
In my estimation, it's one of the first budget OEM Macs that actually has the specs to play games decently. Mine has a (geekbench) Metal benchmark of ~54,000 which is right in-line with minimum requirements for many games.
Neither your posts nor my responses were about the title of this thread. Shifting focus to make a point doesn’t change the facts I’ve been discussing. You also contradict yourself when you first say ”New Triple A games are nice”, which confirms that game developers do think it’s financially viable to make AAA games for Mac, but now you say they don’t.
The latest proof that it’s neither harder to develop for Mac nor a financial suicide is CD Projekt Red bringing Cyberpunk 2077/Phantom Liberty to Mac with advanced features like path tracing, frame generation, and built-in Spatial Audio. Other AAA titles since the release of Apple Silicon are Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Baldur’s Gate 3, Civ VII, Control Ultimate Edition, Dead Island 2, Death Stranding, Farming Simulator 25, Football Manager 2024/25, Frostpunk 2, Grid Legends, Humankind, Lies of P, No Man’s Sky, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil Village Gold, Robocop Rogue City, Sniper Elite 4, Total War: Warhammer III and X-plane 12.
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You know devs don't want to make games for mac https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...er.2426454/page-4?post=33650621#post-33650621
Nah, Apple is probably doing the same thing Sony does and remove the pre-order for the game if it is more than 30 days out from release.
You have to try harder if you want to live up to your name because your posts don't seem to have much to do with facts.
Yeah, they cancelled and refunded pre-orders on all platforms and offered a free DLC with future pre-orders. Now you can only add it to your wishlist in different stores but Mac App Store doesn't have wishlists. Apple showed the game just two months ago when they released M4 and Ubisoft website still says "Macs with Apple Silicon via Mac App Store. Also coming to iPad".
Assassin’s Creed Shadows for PS5, PC, Xbox X/S & More! | Ubisoft (EU / UK)
Official Site. Experience an epic historical action-adventure story set in Feudal Japan! Pre-order now on PlayStation®5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, iPad, macOS as well as Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store.
www.ubisoft.com
Assassin's Creed fans seriously concerned following abrupt cancellations
Fans are feeling concerned after Ubisoft's latest announcement