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Comment by hedgehog | Hacker News Reader

Except for brief blips here and there Apple seems to not put any priority on gaming. It's a bit disappointing because they could have a really strong showing if they cared.

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FWIW, addition of MetalFX upscaling (comparable to DLSS/FSR 2) in Ventura has been a nice surprise and one of the biggest development on Mac gaming in recent memory.

Digital Foundry did some review of MetalFX in Resident Evil Village[1] and was pretty positive about it. (From DF's findings, MetalFX has some problems with transparent texture, but details preservation/restoration are pretty good.)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iXx9lfe62w

It's not so much technical as business focus. There's a big issue with their app store cut on in-app purchases and whether they want to set a precedent on lowering/changing the rules to be compatible with games like Fortnite and the third party stores (like Steam and whatever Epic's is called). If they found a solution to that then they need high quality and timely ports, that's a whole organization of marketing, bizdev, devrel, etc people.

At a technical level it seems like they could get more console-like levels of tuning for their platforms. Very few chips to support, only a handful of thermal targets, all chips have a common CPU/GPU architecture, all devices have very fast storage. Conceivably they could field a winning platform for competitive gaming.

My guess is they look at Sony & Microsoft and don't see much value in reshuffling priorities to likely just be #3.

Edit: hajile above convinces me that rather than concerns about spending money to be #3 they probably already are in the top few by gaming revenue and could have lots of reasons for not being more aggressive about taking more share.

With Apple being the largest game company by revenue, they do take it seriously, but for every dollar made from an AAA game, there's probably 20-50 to be made on less "hardcore" games. Thusfar, Apple is serious about money rather than capability.

That seems to be changing though as there are pretty strong supply chain rumors that they are working on AR/VR headsets (allegedly delayed due to terrible market conditions and some supply chain issues). They've also made pretty big investments into their subscription game service.

I think Apple TV is very overlooked by developers too.

There's a lot of processing power in those things. The weak 2021 model has 15% more GPU power than a docked switch (30% more than an undocked switch). The older 2017 model uses an X processor which should give it even more GPU power (almost double an undocked switch). The latest A15 model (with a major price drop vs the previous generation) has more GPU power than the Xbox One S and isn't so far off from the PS4.

    Nintendo Switch    500 GFLOPS (docked) 390 GFLOPS (portable)
    Apple TV (A10x)    770 GFLOPS (2017)
    Apple TV (A12)     580 GFLOPS (2021)
    Apple TV (A15)    1500 GFLOPS (2022)
    Playstation 4     1850 GLOPSS
    Xbox One S        1400 GFLOPS

Apple TV shipments since 2017 seem to be in the 50-80M units range. Compared to 25M PS5, 17M Series X/S, 111M Switch, and 117M PS4, that's a pretty significant number.

I looked for a quantitative comparison. If the numbers in [1] are accurate Apple App store gaming revenue was around $11B in 2021. Meanwhile Microsoft was around $15B [2]. That's way closer than I thought, big enough that they could reasonably be concerned about avoiding any appearance of strength that could trigger anti-trust action. Interesting.

1. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/03/apple-earned-more... (15.9*0.69=11B)

2. https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html (Gaming: 15,370)

Don't use flops as a comparison please. Meaningless numbers especially across platforms. Especially across vendors for those devices that are pushing out said flops. Same thing with texels per second or gigapixels per second or any comparison like that between 3D graphics accelerator devices. If those numbers meant anything then my Intel A750 would be one of the fastest graphics cards in my house right now.

> I think Apple TV is very overlooked by developers too.

Because no one nows if the platform will be there or not. Apple's commitment to it has been lackluster. And since there are no dedicated controllers, you'll need controllers from a system... that you probably already own, so why play on Apple TV?

apple is in an active lawsuit with one the biggest gaming companies in the world. fortnite hasn’t been available on apple devices in 2 years. if they really cared they wouldn’t have shut down one of the most popular games of today from their devices

This comment doesn't make sense to me. Epic broke one of the major tenets of their contract with Apple. Apple faced losing a significant revenue stream if Epic's efforts were allowed to continue. In particular, since they intend to use the same model for future devices in other verticals, they would have also lost out on a simply colossal amount of future revenue.

The business case on this was a slam dunk. Other companies running virtual product stores with similar terms would have done the same irrespective of how popular Epic's products were.

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