Not that these Apple chips will run x86 or x64 code. Unless they bother with a Rosetta 2.0 then gaming is out of the question if Apple makes this jump.
I'm half-convinced that Apple killed 32bit support so early precisely to see how developers coped; if it had been really bad they could have re-introduced it in a point release of Catalina. As it was, it wasn't very bad and most developers complied, which is an argument in favour of an ARM transition being feasible.
The only other reason I can think of to so aggressively move to 64bit is security, but most of the apps that were stuck on 32bit were not that big a security concern.
I am not just talking about 32-bit support. It shows up in a lot of random libraries that wind up deprecated and replaced with something less capable. That's a pattern I have seen a lot elsewhere and it's usually a bad sign for overall product quality.
The only good reason I can imagine is, that when Tim Cook announces macOS on ARM, he will claim "runs everything that runs on Catalina".
Sure, Coke sales are down 50%, but the customers who are buying New Coke say they like it just as much as the old recipe!
The best bet is Windows since it would happily run software made 25 years ago in Windows 95 time.
To use macOS, you have to be satisfied by using the apps which run on macOS: Adobe apps, Apple apps, Microsoft Word and open source software.
Enterprise is Windows territory, most businesses are Windows territory, education is Windows territory, most home users / small businesses are also Windows territory.
So if Adobe apps will have an ARM build, that will satisfy a huge part of their user base. The rest would use Apple tools which will get ARM builds and open source tools which already have or will have ARM builds.
Is it really so easy to introduce 32-bit support back?
_If_ they were taking the approach of a deliberately early deprecation, which it seems like they were given the timing relative to the rest of the industry, it would only make sense to make it be an easily reversible decision.
Oh, you meant PC games? Sure, the Mac only has a small percentage of (for example) Steam games, but that percentage is steadily rising - it's now over 25%. Switching architecture is unlikely to present a major problem for most developers, especially given that they're probably using Unity or Unreal Engine.
As a former game developer I can tell you that that is an issue. Apple is totally against using cross platform tools. They break compatibility as much as they can.
Framework change, architecture change and so on.
Instead of going with OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenCL they made Metal.
If user base is large enough, as is the case with iOS, there's an incentive to go trough the pains of releasing for that platform. But that isn't the case with macOS. Maybe for Adobe is worth it to spend resources to build software for macOS, but for other companies that might not be the case.
Anyway, you make much more money by targeting Play station and Xbox, and the resources needed are the same in money and man hours so it kame sense to target macOS last, if ever.
And no, not everybody is using Unity and Unreal. That is true mostly for indies.
This article appears to successfully statically translate arm64 binary into an x86_64 binary using bitcode.
Also, a considerable number of Mac apps don’t use the App Store for distribution.