Apple wants to kill Steam games on Macs and get developers to make iOS / Mac dual purpose games they sell through the Mac App store instead. There was a big presentation about porting iOS apps to Macs yesterday, and almost certainly 95% of the apps ported (by volume) would be games.
There’s already an example of this you can try - World of Tanks Blitz. Works perfectly on almost any Mac (since the graphical hardware of Intel GPUs and Arm CPUs are similar in performance.) And iOS and MacOS players can actually play with each other.
Honestly I wonder if this isn’t a response to they refusing to allow Valve to publish their Steam Link app. I was thinking when i heard that Valve might well have an anti-trust case, and certainly the money, to push it. If Apple instead depreciates the API that most Steam games are ported to Macs on it cuts Valve off at the knees without actually appearing to target Valve directly. Certainly they’re trying to push all Mac games through their proprietary store more strongly now.
Seems like a good guess to their plan. I have no idea how successful or not it will be for them with the customer. But I do know that this makes mac’s a whole lot less attractive for many game developers.
I don’t know why Apple has a baked in dismissive attitude toward gaming, but they do. I think they only allow the iOS store to begrudgingly have Games as a category just because of volume of sales - Apple’s highlighted iOS games have been the same games, more or less, for about 2-3 years now. They clearly just want to push all that iOS content to MacOS and rake in more moolah.
But because Apple usually makes it so hard to afford a gaming-level card in any but the most expensive Macs in recent years i’ve noticed large publishers are starting to drop Mac support more and more. I think the last Creative Assembly game to go Mac was Warhammer 1, and the App Store version of that game is marooned in limbo.
Honestly and I dont want to be inflammatory but I genuinely think Apple has become very arrogant the past couple of years. The nightmare scenario here is if and when they do this just about every mac game on Steam that is not updated will just stop working. The required update work here is far from trivial unless Apple has some fancy wrapper plan up their sleeve, which I doubt. Much more likely I guess developers will simply remove macs from the supported platform list and deal with the refund hits. Macs account for 2-5% of most cross platform games so thats not a small amount of money but something devs can walk away from.
We’re in the era of Big Tech where companies’ maximize profits by building walled gardens filled with smiling faces from around the world, attractive aspirational people riding bicycles into the green future and gossamer multi-hued flags flap invitingly bright in the proprietary yellow sun. Don’t be last one standing in the shade.
I’m a Mac user and enthusiast. There are plenty of games that run just fine on the Mac. Newer AAA games? Not so much unless you have a super high end machine.
I find it hard to believe that Apple will just abandon gaming as a use for their computers. OpenGL isn’t gone yet, so maybe at next year’s WWDC we will hear about the OpenGL to Metal translation layer/API. I also cannot imagine them deprecating OpenGL and not leaving it in situ for at least 2 years. There’s simply too much Apple history there for them to make a knee-jerk decision about this. Sounds like there’s already some type of Vulkan to Metal API so perhaps that will take off.
I was gaming on a Mac back when it was cool. Playing Doom II LAN deathmatch at 640x480 on a PowerPC Mac when my PC friends were maxed at 320x200. They had to troubleshoot their IPX network settings via command line text files when all I had to do was click a couple checkboxes. Those were the days. Or should I say, that was the year… 1995, I believe. After that, it was all downhill for Mac gaming.
My guess is that in their mind they believe they are growing gaming by unifying iOS gaming and the mac. Shades of the Windows 8 thing.
I do hope you are right about them fixing this down the line. Sadly my faith in the mac has plummeted with the way Apple has handled things the past few years. The dog whistle word of “legacy technologies” in their statement doesn’t increase my confidence either.
I threw one out recently and even as a Mac hater I had to admire the opulence of that case. Very nice screws and case. Of course that cost what, $4000?
