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Comment by chadlavi | Hacker News Reader

That's a circular argument. No content or support is the reason there are very few Mac gamers.

There are an awful lot of people out there who have a Mac and play games on other platforms and devices. Probably even people who bought a pc just to be able to play games on it.

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>That's a circular argument

It is not. Many developers have tried and stats have shown the cost of porting Games to Mac, as well as maintaining it with each macOS changes were not sustainable with its revenue generation. That is at least for Games coming from console or PC.

This may change if those Games come from Mobile Platform.

I mean you say that, but for Linux the figures were very similar -- perhaps worse, until Valve put work into Wine and developed tech like, e.g. Proton

True, but with the Steam Deck it was obvious why Valve did that -- they weren't doing it to be nice to Linux users (although they've benefited) but because they wanted to use Linux (and avoid the Microsoft tax) on their consoles. There's no benefit to them for improving Mac gaming. In fact, the Mac Steam experience has been getting worse as many games (including many of Valve's own) only have 32-bit ports to the Mac which do not run on current versions of MacOS.

It's the main reason why Windows failed to catch on in the mobile market space. And yes, their constant changes to APIs didn't help, but that's the reason their lack of content started in the first place.

It's a vicious cycle that can only be broken by huge investments and trade deals from Apple. They're trying to get games back on the platform: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/apple-gaming-updates/

However, they're doing so relying on their upscaling tech from the get go. They're also marketing this exclusively for ARM Macs, which are still the minority out there. Perhaps in another couple of years the cycle will be broken, but Apple has historically been quite dismissive of gaming on Mac for anything but "casual" games.

With Apple’s switch to Intel, there was much more support for porting games to Mac. Unfortunately, since Apple overpriced commodity Intel hardware, Macs were noticeably underpowered especially when compared to PC desktops, which was made even slower due to the lack of video card options. It made no sense to play games on a slower system. And that is how the idea of playing non-iOS games on a Mac died.

I am happy to use PCs for games, while using Macs for everything else.

To make matters worse the Mac ports were often not as optimized as the PC versions often leading to worse performance than the PC version on the same hardware. And before Steam started selling Mac versions they were often more expensive and several months old. I distinctly remember seeing SimCity 4 as a "new" release for Mac in the local Mac shop for over twice the price of what I had paid for it on PC a few months prior WITH the expansion pack.

Maybe there’s a market for a company that specializes in porting, maintaining, and updating PC ports. Maybe even a Marketing that markets Mac Studio performance if it’s good enough. If the company is successful enough perhaps a deal can be made with Apple.

That company has existed for well over a decade now. It’s Aspyr. While they’re still at it, even they know that it’s not going to lead to anything big.

Two such companies: Feral Interactive as well.

My memory might be off, but I think they’re the same company. Aspyr might have purchased them a while back

I’ve been wondering how hard it would be to port(?) proton to the mac? Surely theres a version of the vulkan api available for macs?

Not just optimizations to blame, MacOS shipped with an extremely outdated OpenGL and Apple refused to update it. This caused many projects to drop support for MacOS entirely.

It's a vicious cycle, not a circular argument.

Apple have made it clear they don't want games on MacOS. They have not updated the OpenGL for way too long and it's missing any of the modern extensions. There is MoltenVK thankfully but none of that thanks goes to Apple who only push for Metal.

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