…selling more than just 30 million a year. Even if Apple Silicon today could be on a 1nm process and be capable of rendering images directly to your retinas at such a high resolution and framerate, you’d confuse it with reality, with less than 30 million systems a year being sold, few publishers are going to pour money into making a game for a platform with so few users.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
So did Apple give up on gaming?
- Thread starter KatieKat1942
- Start date
-
- Tags
- business app gaming intel nvidia
- Sort by reaction score
Sony has sold 13.4 million PS5s
Sony's PlayStation 5 sales remain relatively steady and strong, with 3.4 million units sold in fiscal Q2 compared to 3.3 million last quarter.
www.engadget.com
PS5 launched 2 days after Apple M1.
90 millions in 3 years, all of them capable to run games. I would say that would be nice number to entice many developers.
Ah, yeah if the hardware supports it, the vendor will have an API for that feature (Ray Tracing being the easiest example Xbox vs PS5).
Gaming is Coca Cola which is profitable when you can sell it everywhere. I think the estimates are like 2.5 billion gamers in the world. Apple is more of a luxury brand like Porsche that is very profitable when sold to the right customer in the right way. The two can co-exist for sure but different business models. So far I think Apple's approach to gaming is spot on. They have a few platforms that allow third party developers to engage and Apple gets to control the quality, marketing and branding. They can't please everyone but the company's success has been remarkable. Just for perspective the top 10 gaming companies in the world have a reported annual of approx 85 billion. That's around what Apple makes every quarter give or take a few billion. And the biggest by a mile is Sony. I think you know where this goes.
Mac App Store & Steam are app store platforms are on the Mac.
90 million is too optimistic.
2020's Mac worldwide shipping figure is 22.5 million.
Lets say its more than 70 million Macs with Apple Silicon in 3 years.
It is still sizable even when a pessimistic (20%) more than 14 million actually play.
Typical replacement cycle is 5-6 years. So at least 112.5 million to 135 million Macs with Apple Silicon by year 2026 or 2027.
From Nov 2013 up to Sep 2020 113.6 million PS4 shipped. The difference is that almost all PS4 had people buying games for them. With Macs at worst it could be 20% only. That would be 2x more than the Wii U and 0.5x the Xbox One.
Video console gamers out there could tell you how popular a platform those of Nintendo and Microsoft were.
Game devs look a the potential saleability of their games on each platform. Given that Apple device owners as awhole tend to be more liquid than those using Android and Windows then it may entice them to invest.
The up side with developing on the Mac is how homogeneous it is. Comparable to the iPhone/iPad/Nintendo/Playstation/Xbox so the cost may be lower.
What hinders Macs is the fairly high MSRP of $999 or higher that limits its appeal to a little over 10% of all iPhone shipments. And a longer replacement cycle than smartphone's 3 years.
Last edited:
That would be a dream! macOS is sitting at around 2% for gaming.
Yes, that would still be very high, wouldn't it? It would be every 5th user with a Mac. The 2% share is for Windows/Linux/macOS, not including consoles and mobile. Can't see 20% of Mac users playing games, especially considering the amount of Macs in business environments. For consoles that is different of course since their purpose is gaming. I know a lot of Mac users, not a single one playing games however. Not counting the occasional chess game or similar.The "20%" is among all Macs.Not all platforms.
I used to play some stuff on Macs, but stopped. Firing up Windows for that now on separate machine also running Linux.
The important thing to remember is that 100% of PS5 are sold for the purpose of playing games. That means any PS5 developer has a guaranteed market of 13.4 million plus who are in the market for new games that cost $50 plus. With less than 30 million Macs being sold in a given year, and most of the homes those Macs are going in having some OTHER form of specific gaming device, it would be a VERY challenging market for any publisher to get into. Make it more like 100 million a year and the calculus changes somewhat.
Sony has sold 13.4 million PS5s
Sony's PlayStation 5 sales remain relatively steady and strong, with 3.4 million units sold in fiscal Q2 compared to 3.3 million last quarter.
PS5 launched 2 days after Apple M1.
Well, that would be dependent on the type of group we’re surveying wouldn’t it? A group of teens or young adults using Macs may have a very different view from you wouldn‘t you agree?
Not enough to entice cross-platform developers as a customer could “get into” their app by many cheaper means (cheaper for the publisher). For anyone wanting to market JUST to Macs that are coding in Metal from the start? I’d say “maybe“? However, if it’s not something with broad appeal like a Minecraft, then, even with 90 million, you’d still be looking at sales going to a small segment of the users.
How about 150m in 5 years?
Whether anything has broad appeal really depends on what’s on offer? It’s up to the developer’s imagination I would think.
Out of curiosity, in your opinion, how many copies of a game need to be sold to be considered successful?
They've also sold over 500 million iPads, and the Pro models even use the M processor.
150m in 5 years would absolutely be better, but still, someone would have to do some serious market analysis in order to determine how many of those 150m would actually be interested in buying games specifically for Mac as opposed to other platforms.
Broad appeal isn’t up to the developer’s imagination, it’s defined by the market that developer’s trying to sell to. For example, Minecraft. It’s a fairly good definition of broad appeal. There’s lots of different ways to play, both single and multi-player plus a very robust third party server community that offers even more ways to play for players across many ages. By comparison, Forza has a much narrower appeal. So does Dark Souls. And Cyberpunk 2077. Not saying that those games didn’t do well, but if you’re trying to sell into a market of just, say 150m, and you’re going at that with a driving simulation game, the number of folks that would possibly buy your game would be far fewer than if you attempted to create something more Minecraft-y.
In my opinion the number of copies of a game that needs to be sold to be considered successful can only be defined by the developer/publisher of that game. If they run a small lean shop and their game doesn’t require a lot of support after the sale, they could sell $200,000’s worth and make the initial investment back. If they plan to pour 2-10 million dollars into the creation of the game (persistent back end server support, etc.) then realistically they should be expecting to make that same amount back. And, in both cases, they probably want to make enough money such that they can continue running the company while they’re working, so maybe a few hundred thousand copies more than that.
So, I just looked up what Cyberpunk 2077 cost to develop. US$313 million! That’s gonna either be a LOT of game sales or a looooot of IAP.
Wouldn't the developer have to imagine this platform called Minecraft first? Not sure if you're putting the cart before the horse here tho.
Let' take your $200,000 investment example, and let's take the hypothetical 90m Macs that can run the game this $200,000 investment produced. Let's say they target to sell the 100,000 copies of this game for the price of $19.99. Let's further assume that the game platform, e.g. Steam, takes a 50% cut. The developer gets $10. That's a revenue of $1,000,000. That's a whopping $800,000 of gross profit! 100,000 is 0.11% of 90m. So it look like the main challenge is for the developer to make their $19.99 game as appealing as possible so that they can achieve their 100,000 sales target. Selling 20,000 copies and they break even. Seems like a risk worth taking, no? Of course this is over simplifying the computation, but I think you get the point.
Cyberpunk 2077 is never going to be a single platform game. The question then is how attractive is it to port it over to macOS and maybe iOS? I'm very sure the developers are furiously chugging along with their spreadsheets now. Maybe it makes sense for them, maybe it won't. With the population of Macs that have sufficient horsepower, my opinion is it doesn't make sense as of 2021. Nobody will know how the landscape will look like in 2023/24.
The developer can imagine myriad things, some that may have broad appeal, some that may have narrow appeal or even no appeal. How appealing it is to consumers is determined the moment consumers are consuming it.
There are things developers can take into account to ensure what they’re thinking of will have the widest reach possible (they can even look to projects that have proven broad consumer appeal and then copy those). However, until it actually gets to consumers and consumers vote with their dollars, it’s still just another game idea waiting to reach customers.
The developer of Flappy Bird did even better than that
And, because the game was so very simple, it had VERY broad appeal and was very successful. BUT, Flappy Bird’s success is partly due to the MASSIVE userbase of the hardware to which it was deployed. If the Mac had a userbase anywhere near the size of iOS, the gaming options there would be very different. Would Flappy Bird even have been successful on the Mac? Maybe not, because the type of game it is lends itself to “play anywhere, anytime” and not so much sit down at your iMac or pull out your laptop and play.Unfortunately, I think if there IS a developer out there that feels they have a game idea that’s sure to be a hit, they’re going to target the most widely deployed platform that it can be deployed to initially. That’s going to be non-Mac every time.