I wish Apple would make a handheld gaming device and make it work with steam similarly through the proton layer like Valve. I'm sorta hoping by putting this into writing it might bring it into existence.
Apple has been able to make a killer game console or handheld for a while but they just don't seem to care.
All they really have to do is change the marketing around the Apple TV, put a controller in the box, and start courting developers to port their switch games...
They have done this, albeit half-assed. The AppleTV (and iOS) readily support a bunch of Bluetooth controllers. They tried to get studios to make games for the AppleTV but they mostly just got iPhone/iPad ports.
There's a couple big problems with the AppleTV. The first is poor tooling for graphics and audio development. The underlying frameworks are powerful as is the hardware but it's difficult to debug them or access them at a low level. It's hard to just get an accurate accounting of the timing of draw calls and GPU load on iOS and macOS. The tooling for DirectX is way more powerful.
The AppleTV hardware is also shit. They've always shipped with old Apple Silicon SoCs. So if you've got a game that screams on the latest iPad or iPhone it runs like shit on the AppleTV or you've got to scale back the visuals. Even when a developer manages to make an awesome game for iOS it ends up sucking on AppleTV.
Then there's the tiny amounts of storage. Even the average Nintendo Switch game would find the AppleTV's storage anemic to say nothing of the PS5 or Xbox.
Apple has never courted AAA game development. I don't think any of Apple's C-suite appreciates games. They trot out game developers to do slick demos at one of their events (doting on them in the run up) and then go back to largely ignoring them. The various game adjacent technologies/frameworks are almost always bottom-up initiatives from development teams trying to come up with a new shiny thing for the next OS release.
Not since Jobs returned, anyways. Before that, Bungie was a darling for Apple and they even made the Pippin, which was a games console.
But I would agree Bungie was a AAA studio though in spite of Apple rather than because of anything in particular Apple did. They treated Bungie and their games as a thing to provide a demo but never really anything to actively support or encourage.
I wonder why they don't, but I'm not a gamer. Is there something about GPU performance that still doesn't stack up? Does the violence of many AAA games go against their Disney-clean brand? Are there too many platform exclusives that would hamstring the effort? Is it just not in Apple's DNA? Or is console gaming just not profitable enough at the end of the day?
That being said, even if they were, Apple likes fat margins on all their hardware. Game consoles are the Gillet model, zero to negative margins on the console with money made on licenses and services.
A theoretical AppleTV with an M2 and beefy GPU with a useful amount of storage could never hit their margin goals. Such a box would basically be the high end Mac mini which retails for $1299. There's no way Apple would sell that kit for $399 and try to make up the difference in licenses and services. Even with a huge attach rate there's no way they'd make up the difference.
They do nothing (old OpenGL) or make things worse (unfixed OpenGL bugs), or promise a new focus and then don’t keep following through long-term.
The only reason Apple has any credibility in any way with games is the iPhone, and they did basically nothing. They were in the right place with good hardware and made software easy to buy. They didn’t focus on it.
(Then they allowed IAPs and destroyed the market for good iPhone games but made everyone rich so ‘woo’)
They got in a giant fight with nVidia. They totally pissed office Epic, makers of Unreal (it wasn’t going well before the games store stuff). Took years to allow real controllers and didn’t make one of their own so most people didn’t know BT controllers were an option. Forced AppleTV games to support the Siri touch remote as a controller for years despite it being useless for most games. Take a huge cut of profits on all non-Mac devices. Randomly reject app updates. Don’t have a public roadmap for anything and can change direction on a dime.
Everything I’ve heard is they have no faith from the industry. I’m not surprised.
Steve Jobs didn’t want the Mac seen as a toy or video games machine but a ‘real computer’ and the attitude hasn’t exactly changed since.
There was that very brief period in the late 90's where Job's vaguely gave it a little try with things like a Demo of Quake 3 on stage but they then moved on from that almost immediately.
The closest thing Apple has done for gaming technology wise is the Metal API, if they really wanted to make an impact on gaming, they would have adopted Vulkan.
Work on Metal started before AMD donated Mantle to Khronos which became Vulkan and was released (IIRC) before Vulkan was finalized. Apple was not going to drop all that investment to chase Vulkan.
I’m addition, I think Apple just wanted a faster and more modern API to make better use of their hardware than the old version of OpenGL they were using. I suspect they still would have made Metal even if the games industry didn’t exist.
That just happens to be the context we hear it discusses in the most, for obvious reasons.
AAA games eat storage too taking typically 30-100+ GBs. Baldur's Gate 3 for example is 125GB. Xbox has relatively expensive sort of proprietary storage upgrades where 1TB is $150 but it looks downright cheap compared to what Apple asks for 1TB.
Judging by the Apple original content on AppleTV, this is not an issue.
The best selling video game handheld of all time, the Nintendo DS (across all its hardware revisions), sold over 150 million units in its lifetime.
Apple typically sells this many iPhones in less than three quarters.