Valve says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS not happening, there aren't enough players

Well and, whatever embarrassing game that Apple will trot out at their developer conferences 2-3 years after it was released and claim Macs are built for gaming.

Will it work? No clue. Historically premium games had absurd piracy rates which is why most premium games pulled out and why F2P games with servers holding to value rose. But IOS always had lower piracy rates than android, so Apple has a better foothold for trying to re-appeal to console games studio than Google.

Once upon a time, there were many iOS games that you paid for up front with no micro-transactions at all, for instance, XCom was about $20 a decade ago.

I have a feeling the console game ports will be pay up front, just like they are on a console.

To keep investment in the platform strong, they stand to benefit from stabilizing and recovering from some of their NIH brain damage.

Will the fixation on collecting their cut come to an end? Time will tell.

Again, Apple uses the same GPU cores across all it's hardware platforms. It will have hardware ray tracing on handhelds, tablets, laptops, desktops as well as on their upconing AR/VR platform as the SOCs are updated.

Why does it matter if Apple makes their own controller? iOS/iPadOS supports other popular controllers and the Apple Store even sells multiple controllers (including the PS5 controller).

I'm not sure this is a fair portrayal of gaming on iOS.

Now, a reskinned Bejeweled with in-game currency IAPs – that's more like it!

I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.

I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.

Neither the PS5 nor Resident Evil Village came out in 2013.

>Resident Evil Village on iOS is a remarkable sight to see. It's hard to tell any difference between playing the game on a console. From the accurate textures on the characters to the lighting and shadow effects, the game looked as good as it did as when I played it on the PlayStation 5 back in 2021.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...

Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.

So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.

And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..

This is one of the threads I remember reading about this. The blog seems to be offline, but you might find some luck with the wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190323200813/http://blogs.valv...

In any event, around this time they found a lot of optimizations porting to linux that they then back ported to the windows client. This was 10 years ago, so the zeitgeist in the company may have changed, but I've certainly taken to heart the idea that you should be cross compiling to at least one different target whenever you can to improve your engineering. The earlier you start the cheaper the cost of doing so as well. (This isn't the only company doing so at the time talking about gains of cross compilation either, and not just games)

CS:GO is over a decade old at this point, and has been free for 5 years. What should we expect?

It's not Valve's responsibility to engage in pro-Mac activism. It would be weird if they were doing so.

Windows users are already on Windows and Windows machines are much more open to dual-booting Linux... if needed.

In fact after switching to their own silicon, Apple has mostly increased the price to access a particular performance level, and I would argue that previous Intel machines were better gaming machines at equivalent prices points. Without concerning yourself about prices one can see that in best case scenario (taking Metal benchmarks for reference and extrapolating when needed) : M2 can be about as good as an AMD Ryzen APU destined to notebook/laptops (6800U) M2 Pro seems to be in between a RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 and it would be a slightly slower RTX 3080 laptop. M2 Max can be slightly faster than a RTX 3060 but slower than a RTX 4060 laptop ; it seems to be equivalent to the Radeon RX 7700S (AMD describe it as a notebook part...). M2 Ultra is irrelevant because it doesn't provide real improvements in graphics performance.

Realistically the only way to get this low level of performance would be to buy a laptop (not too high end) or to go for pretty old or entry level desktop part.

Now if we talk about AAA games, M2 is pretty much useless, it is somewhat better than previous Intel iGPUs but that isn't saying much ; you still won't be able to run anything graphically intensive at 1080P in an enjoyable manner. M2 Pro could potentially run some of the less demanding games with a decent experience (around 60 fps stable) but it starts around 1.5K in a desktop form factor (naked, no K&M nor display) yet it perform worse than cheaper 3050Ti laptops (that have all those things !). In laptop form factor it starts at 2.4K but is generally much worse in gaming performance than a similarly priced/specced PC laptop. And it feels that talking about M2 Max in any form factor is a major waste of time because it starts at 2.4k for the naked desktop but you can buy a better performing (for games at least) desktop PC and still have money left over to buy a Macbook Air (not even the cheapest version). So unless you really need that power for a macOS only software that properly use the new arch it doesn't make any sense. Not only very few will buy but they won't even think about gaming on it. It is unsurprising, after all the M2 Max has barely more Gflops than the 550$ Xbox Series X...

Before their own silicon Apple was not particularly good at gaming (especially on the entry level) but at least if you were willing to pay you could access a decent level of performance. It wasn't very competitively priced but the premium was worth all the other benefits. For example an iMac 27 inch with a RX 5700 XT would cost you over 3K but it was worth it for the whole package (especially the display). Now even if you want to spend 3K on a mac, not only you won't get any package at all but the graphics performance will perform worse than this 3 year old iMac. And that is before talking about architectural optimisation problem and general support.

So I believe Valve sees that and decided (rightfully) that it wasn't worth their time. Previously it was just a matter of making a build that could run in the macOS GUI and it wasn't too much work because both GPU and CPU APIs could be almost identical. I'm sure there were some differences at compile time but it didn't ask for a large parallel port and a decent amount of customers could get a pretty good experience (high end Macs and eGPU users). But now they would need to maintain a parallel port that would diverge in significant ways (even if we just account for the GPU code) and on top of that even the most high-end customers would only get a performance that would be considered ok for mid-range/high-end laptop. It is just not worth it.

Considering that the 3nm A17 Pro isn't really the revolution it was touted to be ; this is probably the right move. Not only Apple hardware is becoming irrelevant to enthusiast but it seems it will not improve for a while (maybe ever) considering the A17 already has heat issues even though it isn't a whole lot faster it looks like M3 chips will run hotter and use more power without really closing the gap.

Reality is catching up to the Apple arrogance, you can buy monopoly power on a technical advantage once but eventually competition is going to come around. Now is the time and I think it is only the start. Most cross platform software that needs a significant rewrite won't get ported to Apple Silicon, it doesn't make sense considering the weak hardware. They'll come and say : but it doesnt use a lot of power. Yeah I would be pretty mad if my slow small car would use as much gas as Porsche...

This is my cynical side, but I'm sure they don't mind the opportunity to get their store in front of people, both with the deck and by how closely knit steam is to providing gaming to non-windows PCs. In my view PC gaming is in a weird spot right now if you try defining "what is the platform?" Is it windows, is it steam (and all the other features it has), is it x86, how much can/should a game be 'portable' from one ecosystem or enclave of PC. There's also been issues with games like Starfield not working with the intel Arc GPUs until a few days ago that have me wondering (from a fairly naive point of view) how closely that aspect is tied to assuming nvidia/AMD are the only possibilities versus how well it was written to the abstraction layer, assuming intel were compliant.

I can think of at least two reasons:

Legal - APIs might be copyrightable in the future.

Control over changes - Not having to play ketchup every time Microsoft changes or updates an API. Windows APIs do still change and break applications they have compensated for this with application specific shims.

That being said I can't imagine what Valve would come up with. Maybe they could base something around Vulkan, Musl and Wayland.

Ubuntu's extended support even pushes that out to 10 years, and I imagine Valve could also do its own patching (or just ignore security concerns).

Nice thing w/ Valve is they allow you to use your distro's libraries or switch to the runtime, depending on how much performance you are trying to eke out of a game.

Odds are anything written a decade ago doesn't need cutting edge performance though.

I never thought about it that way, but I can see this as a possibility based on how you framed it. Have an upvote.

Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.

And yes, I consider your comment to be childish bickering primarily because you don't have another argument besides "their product is more expensive than it's worth comparing hardware to hardware." Apple users understand that they're actually paying a premium for the software (the operating system), as well as the designed and usually fetching exterior (which to be fair does look nice, and I tend to prefer Macbook charging ports over Dell's old barrel ports.) Which, there is something to be said about an operating system that decided they don't want to run Java anymore. I'll grant that their software might have merit. Java web start apps are the bane of my enterprise existence.

A high spec Mac Mini is $1299 USD (10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 GB).

Anyone paying $4,999 for a Mac Studio/Pro is doing media creation for work and doesn't give a fuck about games or will have a separate console/PC for that. Those are workstations, not for gaming.

I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

I'd say Valve is exactly that. Valve pays many developers their salary who are responsible for making almost all single player games work on Linux via proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d). Although they do push their changes upstream.

So even if you manage to publish a deb, rpm and to the aur, QA is difficult.

Based on my experience (not game dev), Linux users are extremely polite, grateful and willing to bend over backwards (or even write patches themselves) to get things working.

This makes it even harder to tell them that you simply can't support their preferred configuration.

Mac userbase that purchases games is small, they need to make it easier if they want more games. And Apple also doesn't want you developing on Windows-- you need to use this bloody Mac.

Right, but the console proprietary graphics frameworks have clear market demand. Macs are not a platform with which people buy to game, and metal is not a graphics framework with clear market demand. Apple will need to subsidize porting if they want to get a critical mass of games on Metal rather than OpenGL, i.e. the easy API to target. (Yes, I'm aware many game engines bring this for "free", but that doesn't mean these ports are competitive with their equivalent on windows on the same hardware.)

EDIT: I forgot iOS; that's probably what might make a difference this time. Unlike the Mac there is a clear market demand for gaming on that platform.

Unless mac users go out in numbers saying they want to pay triple price for games I don't see anything happening.

I don't have a single store-installed app on my mac and I only get warnings (once) from 1-2 open source apps whose developers don't code-sign.

Neither do apps distributed directly by third parties as long as they are signed etc. (you just need the $100/300 per year apple dev. account for that).

It's very different than anything on a Mac or PC.

The Apple GPU is actually more like the Cell idea that Sony had to give up on (and add a GPU) before the PS3 shipped. It's not as slow as Cell, but it's different enough from a regular GPU that games optimized for one aren't that great on the other. I love my M1 Max and M2 Max for Civ and Factorio, but I've got a windows gaming rig for playing the kind of games that need show stopping graphics, and a PS5 for convenience.

Not the point. Also, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest gaming platforms, catering exclusively to games, is doing better in games than a more general platform; it would be strange if it were the other way around. Also also, no one is defending the state of gaming on macOS, we’re all aware it’s bad.

This is also probably why Apple is holding out. They see their phone/tablet iGPUs getting powerful enough to be in a league similar to those in their laptops and believe that mobile and desktop gaming will eventually converge. Game publishers might not care about the tiny share of Mac gamers, but will they also feel that way about the far more numerous iOS gamers?

There’s been hints of this happening with some games straddling the line between desktop and mobile like Genshin Impact which is often compared to Breath of the Wild and now the upcoming RE4 remaster will run on iOS in addition to the other major gaming platforms.

On the one hand I wish it was better. OTOH in the back of my mind I wonder if part of the magic is forcing you to get into the nitty gritty and do you best to manually optimize and if you don't you accept the chaos and inefficiency--nearly a metaphor for life.

Also apple is fucking swimming in games, I'm willing to bet more gaming is done on ios than windows. It's just not games that represent 'the gamer'. No modern warfare 5000 on ios. I know that most days, even as I could be identified as 'a gamer' for the last 30-40 years, I spend more times playing games on my phone than I do on consoles or my pc. Part of that is just 'I always have my iphone' part of it is the games are often designed around short session length, part of that is most AAA game releases these days are wildly uninspired. Every once and awhile I can black-out a whole sunday just to soak in a big release (I imagine spiderman will eat a day or two whole in a few weeks, I know Baldurs Gate ate more than a few sundays since it was released)

It's sad not to see many games on macos, though the ones we get are generally ones I want. Aforementioned baldurs gate 3, mid tier 'indies' that are frankly amazing like Hades and Slay the Spire. I could care less if assassins creed 326 makes it to macos, or mordern warfare 754: even more jingoism. It hurt a little to see blizzard abandon macos with diablo 4 .. then I played it and well ... not so hurt anymore.

No, everything I mentioned is applicable to the Mac.

> But having proprietary APIs on Macs isn't going to get other desktop games to Apple

Neither was that the argument. The explicit point was that Apple is not indifferent or hostile to games, not that their gaming strategy is good.

Especially DX12 giving so much more control has actually backfired in a lot of instances, because game developers don't treat PCs with the same optimization care as they do consoles. Consoles have standards (and reject bad builds), for PC you can always pull a Todd Howard and tell users to upgrade to compensate for their misuse of the APIs.

Windows has traction by market saturation, not the technical merit of their Graphics API.

Really the notable breaks of late have been PS3 to PS4, and WiiU/3DS to Switch.

For examples of continued compatibility within a generation... every console ever? I think there were a handful of PS2 titles that had graphical bugs on the slim PS2? But that's going back over 20 years.

M1, Unigine Heaven, 1080p, Medium settings, 56 fps average:

https://youtu.be/DzIrmSFqzYk&t=271

Ryzen 5, RX 6400, Unigine Heaven, 1080, Ultra settings, 46 fps average:

https://www.alktech.co/articles/asus-dual-radeon-rx-6400-4gb...

At least for the RX 6400 test, the bottleneck is the GPU itself.

I guess the typical response is that people will use something like a game engine anyway, so I guess fair enough, but I want something lower level than a game engine without having to get a doctorate in graphics rendering just to draw a rotating cube.

https://www.macgamerhq.com/opinion/macos-metal-games/

The most recent one that comes to mind is Mac x VR marketing push...4 years back? Ended it complete tears, SteamVR isn't even available for Mac anymore. And it was depressingly obvious at the time there was no reason for it to work out, it was clear ARM Macs were coming very soon.

https://developer.apple.com/games/

OpenGL drivers are well known for being buggy as well. For a very long time, AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows were terrible and saw little love given that DirectX on Windows is where most of their effort went. It seems that Vulkan drivers are more performant, less buggy, and treated more as a first class citizen across both Windows and Linux.

And OFC, Apple deprecated OpenGL and they are stuck at 4.1 from 2011. At least with MoltenVK, you get Vulkan->Metal and a modern-day API to talk to without having to deal with Metal directly.

WebGL is covering up a lot of stuff for you, but it's better to find/create a modern "simple" API on top of a modern rendering API if you want one.

You don't see an issue paying for a game only to have it forcibly removed from your possession?

> maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time

This isn't the official pool (if you're talking about competitive pools), and no it doesn't happen all the time. Valve never removed a map from CSGO, only added them.

> you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested.

Oh right, community servers. I forgot about that, thanks for reminding me. Community servers are no longer listed publicly in a browser like they used to be. Now you have to google search for servers and connect to them directly via IP and port. They removed that functionality as well.

> and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time

Not really. The only time people complained about it prior to CS2 was when they made it server registration to combat cheaters, which introduced a lot of randomness depending on who you asked (nobody really knows how it works, but people could feel a difference at the time). Now they do sub-tick registration which is an approximation function that is being gamed by non-casuals.

Here's a good video on the subject[0]. Ignore the bit about mouse DPI, dude had no idea what he was talking about with that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eandoX7Jsh4

They're trying to offer 128 tick-like gameplay without having to pay for the increased compute and network costs of doubling the current 64 tick servers by faking hit registration, which is having an adverse effect.

So it's not merely some "git gud" complaint. It's a very valid complaint over a major change of game mechanics from a previously purchased titled that was effectively stolen away from you.

You should be upset by this. This is not how companies should behave.