Hacker News Reader

Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

Dropping 32bit support is game-over for gaming on macOS. The numbers already didn't add up for indie developers [1]. Even AAA game developers often ignore macOS because the ROI is just too low. And from the $5/month subscription how much will end up to the developers [2]?

Essentially what Apple Arcade will end-up hosting is ports of run-of-the-mill mobile games. And I'd bet the advertised number of developers will diminish as soon as the agreements they secured for the launch expire. But if this is the kind of gaming you're interested into, you already have your iPhone/iPad.

[1]: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2019/09/sorry-mac-users-a...

[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43k4ww/its-hard-to-use-ap...

View on HN

> Dropping 32bit support is game-over for gaming on macOS.

No, it isn't. There were never any 32-bit x86 Macs with decent GPUs. Dropping 32-bit support only affects games that were already old enough to be commercially irrelevant or games that rely on unmaintained third-party middleware that never got a 64-bit port. Those don't add up to enough to be a major impact on the Mac gaming market. There are plenty of other factors that are much more important, such as Apple's abandonment of OpenGL and preference for Metal over Vulkan.

A bunch of Aspyr titles (a sizable publisher of AAA ports) won't work with Catalina, and there are no plans for updates.

These aren't old games for the most part: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/apps-wont-wo...

Those are old games for the most part. The newest thing on that list appears to be from 2015, and it's a remastered version of games released in 1999 and 2003.

They certainly weren't making much money off these particular games even before Apple announced the deadline for going 64-bit. It's unfortunate and disappointing for customers who had already bought those games, but this deprecation didn't shut Aspyr out of much in the way of future sales.

Users do not care about that. They care about when things they paid for stop working.

But that's not what drives the market for Mac gaming. What matters is what kind of return on investment developers expect to get out of porting to macOS. They don't particularly care whether the port keeps working for four years or forty, because they'll make basically all the revenue in the first several months.

Now, if users become reluctant to buy Mac games for fear that they'll stop working unacceptably soon, that could have a meaningful impact on demand for Mac games. But even if Apple made it official policy that they would break games after four or five years, that wouldn't completely kill the market for Mac games. If Apple made it cost-prohibitive to get a game ported to their platform in the first place, that would pretty much be "game-over for gaming on macOS".

If you can't play your old games it makes the entire platform unattractive to players, which in turns makes it unattractive to game developers.

But tbh Mac was hardly a gaming platform to begin with.

>it makes the entire platform unattractive to players

The platform has never been "attractive to players" to begin with.

Now we have Arcade though and easy porting to iOS though, which could open a multi-billion market...

Now, if you only had a way to actually get your fair share of those billions...

Old games like Civilization 6? Civ 5 is old, I give you that.

Civ 5 and 6 both have 64-bit Mac versions. It's only Civ 4 that's unplayable on Catalina. That's a game from 2005.

A huge amount of Indie games do not require a powerful (or even decent cpu). Many of them have Linux and Mac ports. Those are the same kind of games whose developers do not have a lot of spare resources to stay on the endless treadmill of deprecation.

It also kills any hope of wine powered support for proton in steam as many many windows games will be still 32 bit for a very long time (mind you, metal already had put a big dent in that).

Interestingly Linux users are indirectly getting affected by this: for many developers supporting Linux was just a byproduct of supporting macOS. As the latter is being dropped, support for the former is getting harder to justify. Luckily Proton seem to be a very viable alternative to native games.

I thought PlayOnLinux/WINE is the linux gaming solution.

Proton is a wine variant directly integrated with steam.

> No, it isn't.

Well, let's see. My main 3 purchase locations are Steam, Humble Bundle and GOG.com. I'd guess this is fairly typical, but anyone using other platforms feel free to add yours.

Steam: The Steam client is still stuck on 32bits. I'd bet it will soon be updated to 64bit, but it just goes to show that macOS is pretty low in the priorities of Valve. And if a company with the resources of Valve doesn't care, I can't see much motivation for the individual developers either.

Humble Bundle: I've went through the current and following Humble Bundle Monthly games. Windows Only: Call of Duty WWII, Crash Bandicoot Remastered, Spyro Remastered, Sonic Mania, Planet Alpha, Override-Mech City Brawl. Windows+macOS: Battletech, The Spiral Scouts.

GOG.com: There's already a 64bit DOSBox port—DOS–era games will eventually be supported. Windows–era games are gone—Catalina breaks Wine emulation and no announcement has been made for 64bit support by the Wine Team. For newer games, GOG.com will need new builds from the developers—doubtful if we ever get to see those, especially for indie games where developers don't have the resources to go back and port their released games. Newly released games are often Windows-only.

I don't know how you see this picture, but it looks pretty bleak to me.

The Steam client has been updated to 64 bit quite a long while before. But the in built updater seems to only fetch the 32 bit version. If you uninstall Steam and do a clean reinstall from Steam website, you will get the 64 bit client.

Commercially irrelevant for the game maybe, but not for the platform. If i can't play my old favorite games i am less inclined to buy a new platform. Or might move to a platform which supports those games.

Most indie games in the past 5+ years are made with a few middleware engines like unity or gamemaker and AFAIK it's a rebuild option to release a 64bit version.

This is true, but unfortunately, a lot of games are almost completely unmaintained, especially on macOS. Many of the smallest indie game developers don't even own Macs—they either borrow their friends' machines to do one-off builds, or they use cross-compilers and rely on fans for testing.

Even just recompiling the game might be a challenge for a lot of developers in the "long tail" of the Mac game library.

This is my sentiment as well. A twitter summed it up nicely:

> the notion that every developer of every app is part of the constant, incessant update loop that Apple encourages is fundamental to the problem. Someone's super personal narrative unity game from 2013 is not getting updated!

[1] https://twitter.com/MammonMachine/status/1181327259057082368

Unity 5 came out in 2017 and it's not supported on Catalina.[1]

So devs of two year old games will need an old macOS install that can export their game to 64-bit, but also a new enough macOS install that can notarize their app (maybe these can both be Mojave -- but many indies don't own their own macs).

Also, Unity 5 is no longer available for purchase. If they're already using their license on another machine, they'll have to migrate it to these macOS installs.

Devs could upgrade to a more recent Unity and fix all the bugs, but to what benefit and at what cost?

[1]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/installing-unity-on-macos-ca...

It would be interesting to see a report from Steam on how many 32bit only OSX games are in the store. According to the stream hardware survey [1], OSX represents 3% of their install base.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

According to people in the know, the $5 a month is for Apple. Apple pays a flat-fee to the developers of games in Apple Arcade, and that's it.

... I mean sure, I love the idea of paying $60 for a game that throws away 15-20% of the performance by targeting an architecture that hasn't been supported by MacOS for more than a decade, rather than supporting an architecture that has been around for something like 15 years.

But yes, apple is in the wrong here, and should continue to support hardware that they haven't shipped in 10+ years.

I assume you're in the group that believes MS should be required to support XP forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com