Who actually claims that? The issue is more that the ROI just isn't there. Remember that porting to a platform incurs additional support costs that need to be payed.
Behold, the actual reason AAA studios can't. Engineering excellence is not something you buy or otherwise invest in. It is your culture. It is who you hire. It is what kind of expectation you set internally for yourself and your peers. That is only marginally related to budget spent on salaries.
If you actually practice engineering excellence, the investment is small. If you don't, the investment is nonsensical.
It's not about "engineering excellence" unless you think exploiting hardware quirks for perf is poor engineering.
Blizzard seems to disagree, as I mentioned in another comment. I’m just not sold on this argument tbh. It makes sense at face value but that’s not enough reason for me. Especially given how many games played on both PC and Mac from 2010-2020 and continue to do so. It’s not the empty desert for gamers it was in the 2000’s.
Maybe you're right, and the technical hurdle is fairly small relative to the money they stand to make from it. Whatever the case is though, Apple's current offerings are not really attractive to developers. People would rather target the APIs they already know than do Apple's dirty work for them. Maybe Apple should take a page out of Sony's book and actually compensate or assist the studios building on top of their technology.
Older games released by Blizzard might have a macOS release, but not the franchise they are pushing the most right now.
2. Isn't the topic at hand mac?
3. Are you sure you want to cite that kind of number? The most prominent one says this: "Though only 5.8% of his game's buyers were playing on Linux, they generated over 38% of the bug reports. Not because the Linux platform was buggier, either. Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific, that is, would only happen on Linux." "The bug reports themselves were also pretty high quality, he said, including software and OS versions, logs, and steps for replication." That's free QA, not a burden.
Unfortunately this is not how many managers see it. They just see it as more work because people are "discovering" more issues that they now have to fix. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, or in this case, the squeaky community is considered annoying and gets neglected.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...
Not to say it's all positives, I'm sure a big title has a lot of linux users in the annoying 'enthusiastic youngster' phase a lot of school-age PC gamers go through. But the kind of spreadsheet math that doesn't even classify support interactions is lazy.
I've worked with multiple companies on projects with large support infrastructure and teams. I've seem many foreseeably-bad business moves called "data driven decisions" based on support metrics. Metrics aren't insight, but they do let a business team justify the decisions well on paper. I'll avoid writing a whole rant about supporting a call center, but I will say their cost and ancillary nature makes iterating with the data coming out of them (or just iterating on the design on the support system itself) poorly prioritized and full of noisy signals.