It's interesting that Apple keeps making this point, and that they released the Game Porting Toolkit. I don't think we're going to see like an Apple Switch device, but they do seem to care about console/PC-quality games in a way they never have before.
I think we see this sentence said every few years (or at least a similar one, related to iOS). It'll slowly be as evergreen as "the year of Linux desktop".
Meanwhile, the amount of games that actually are available and running in ARM64 mode on macOS is still miniscule.
Honestly, Game Porting Toolking doesn't seem like a product built by company that's serious about gaming - it's a developer tool that still needs the developer to do extra work to actually publish the game for Macs.
Compare this to approach Valve took on Steam Deck and you'll see just how a company that takes games seriously works.
Apple could make things so much easier by just shipping MacOS with a native Vulkan driver and letting the community maintain the DXVK translator like all the other GPUs. It wouldn't diminish the demand for Metal (it's still the only option on many platforms) and it would bring Mac back up to parity with other OSes. Maybe a renewed commitment to supporting Rosetta would also help seal the deal.
In fairness, Valve originally did take the same approach. Proton was born from the ashes of Steam Machines - Linux boxes that developers had to create a port for.
Similarly, WSL, WSL2, WSLg, and WSA are born from the ashes of Windows Phones and Project Astoria. They aren't quite there yet, but I expect another shot at mobiles in the future.
Apple will have to go through the same teething process. Their rendering pipeline is wanting in some ways, and that'll only be sorted through painful experience. Console emulators (E.g. Yuzu/Ryujinx) are in the same vein as Proton, so if you want a health check on what problems something like Proton for Apple would face, you can see what problems the emulators are currently dealing with//hacking around.
By revenue games are possibly bigger than movies and music combined (global revenue).
Not everyone needs to like games buy many do and the industry revenue is quite massive compared to any other entertainment.
From what I've heard, the person who was originally in charge of the iOS App Store completely dismissed videogames altogether. He believed music was the only art form worthy of Apple. Rumor has it he actively sabotaged the effort to make Apple TV into a market-competitive game console. When he was moved to the iTunes team, iOS suddenly appreciated games.
Between the two of them, Apple has been actively steered into not being a platform for games. Maybe that's finally (very slowly) changing.
In terms of GPU and CPU and memory?
I mean, could a M1 MacBook Air or Pro run a hypothetical native version of GTA V as well as the PS4 did? I'm assuming it can't match a PS5, but how close could it get?
Apple pricing model creates artificial scarcity with memory and storage, which makes the base models poorly suited for gaming. Consoles ship with 16 GB memory and 1 TB SSD, while reaching the same numbers is still a $600 upgrade to the base M2/M3 Macs.
Now that iOS devices and Macs have the same CPU cores, GPU cores, and APIs, targeting Apple hardware gives you a much bigger user base that you can target than you've ever seen previously with Intel/Power PC based Macs.
Whether it will play out different is for consumers and developers to decide.
And the thing is, it could work. Because that’s pretty much the main relative advantage consoles have over gaming PCs - extremely narrow range of hardware, which allows consoles squeeze out better performance than a gaming PC with comparable hardware specs (of course the PC will likely be cheaper, but that’s beside the point) on most games, because those games were extremely heavily optimized for that hardware.
MacOS, under that logic, would come through somewhere in-between those two extremes - less disparity than between two random PCs, but more disparity than between two models in a single given console generation.
Even funnier, I just realized that macOS major update support for any given mac is 6 years (and 10 for security updates iirc, but don’t quote me on that), which is about as many years as a single console generation lasts.
Apple is sitting on a gaming console that could be a hit, and is doing literally nothing with it: Apple TV.
iOS gaming brings in such a large revenue share that it's hard for a business that cares about the bottom line to ignore.
> Mobile games generated $89.6 billion revenue in 2021 across both platforms... iOS was responsible for $52.3 billion of that revenue
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/mobile-games-revenue/
Now that targeting the Mac and targeting iOS devices is largely the same thing, it's much more likely to make financial sense to target Macs than ever before.
> Resident Evil Village on iOS Is Legit. I Forgot I Wasn't Playing on a Console
https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/resident-evil-village-on-io...
And the Tomb Raider 2 release date announcement from 2 years before that: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/shadow-of-the-tomb-raid...
Every time, Apple pays a big studio to port their AAA title and change things forever. Every time, nothing changes.
Targeting that market gives you a Mac version for very little additional cost.
> For mobile games, sure. For desktop titles, nothing has really changed.
So I will ask again: what is the renewed incentive to port to Mac?
The economics have totally changed. Targeting iOS with it's massive revenue share gets you almost all the code you need to target a Mac. All you need to do is add support for a keyboard/mouse UI.
It's the exact same strategy Microsoft used with XBox.
If you're already targeting Windows, targeting XBox required less additional effort (add a gamepad UI to your Windows game) than targeting something like the PlayStation would.
So you port an existing AAA console title to iOS for the huge user base, and get MacOS for relatively little engineering cost.
Do they?
> Now that iOS devices and Macs have the same CPU cores, GPU cores, and APIs, targeting Apple hardware gives you a much bigger user base
If you lump mobile phones into a single category with desktop computers and laptops, you don't have a strategy. You have Apple Arcade with mobile-only games pretending they are fit for a big screen.
Gaming strategy is what Microsoft had in the 90s early 2000s when they were going full steam ahead with DirectX.
Full-blown Resident Evil Village is available on iOS with graphics that are very console-tier.
Not saying that this and a few other counterexamples somehow mean that their gaming strategy will succeed. But I wouldn’t say that including iOS in their gaming strategy would fail due to iOS hardware limiting them to mobile-tier current Apple Arcade type of games.
You know the difference? Consoles are usually attached to big-ass TVs. So whatever graphics iPhones may have games like Resident Evil will be few and far in between, and more of a curiosity.
We already had "console-level graphics" with whatever was the fantasy demo it was 10 years back. Nothing materialized then. Nothing will materialize now.
So plug the phone into the big ass TV when you want to do that? Or just play on an iPad?
> Or just play on an iPad?
"just". I don't have an iPad. I do have a gaming console and a TV, a gaming computer (PC), and a work laptop (Macbook).
You can just connect your iPhone/iPad to your TV using a USB-C to HDMI cable, and all is good. I bought a random USB-C to HDMI cable off Amazon, and it simply worked. No fiddling with settings, no setup, I just connect the cable and everything simply works.
The support for gamepads on iOS/iPadOS is great too, tried it with first-party PS4, PS5, and Switch (Switch Pro controller) gamepads. Worked without any issues, the whole pairing process took less than a minute (and that minute included googling how to do it).
I was moving across the country recently, so for a period of time I didn't have housing and had to stay at my friend's place (which he generously allowed me stay at while he was out of town for a week). I just connected my iPad to his TV with a cable, paired my PS4 gamepad with the iPad, and made quite a bit of progress in Vampire Survivors this way.
> I was moving across the country recently, so for a period of time I didn't have housing and had to stay at my friend's place
While there are use cases for this here and there, does it work as a gaming strategy for a company?
Good news, by default iOS suppresses all notifications when connected to an external display :)
> While there are use cases for this here and there, does it work as a gaming strategy for a company?
For someone like me? Agreed, it doesn’t really make sense. For someone whose only potential gaming device is a smartphone? I don’t know, perchance it could act as a gateway to upselling a macbook to users or just as a side act to macOS gaming. But that’s a very shaky guess on my part.
Apple is literally repeating Microsoft's strategy for breaking the XBox into the console market.
Targeting the high volume platform (Windows/iOS) gives you code that is nearly identical to the code you need on the lower volume platform (XBox/Mac). All you need to do is support an additional user interaction method (Keyboard Mouse/Gamepad/Touch).
You know the difference between XBox and iPhones? One is a dedicated gaming platform plugged into a big TV. The other is a personal communication device with a small screen.
> All you need to do is support an additional user interaction method (Keyboard Mouse/Gamepad/Touch).
Ah yes. "Just" support a different interacton model. Nevermind the plethore of issues with that and the differences between big and small screens.
The Mac seems to be only slightly warm while playing. I haven't yet played to the point of building enormous 4 lane railway squares, I'm intrigued to see just how much the M1 can handle.
Great for entertainment, absolutely terrible for my productivity!
Face computers have a lot of convincing to do before they are adopted widely.
> Staring awkwardly at my wife and saying "Yes sweetie I am definitely giving you my full attention" while I definitely am not is out too?
You just described two scenarios that are already very common in the present day, if you swap the headset for a smartphone in them.
Not saying it is a good thing at all, it isn’t. But given how many people currently don’t mind doing it with their phones (where their actions are on a clear display), I think significantly more people would be into those use cases with AR headsets (and in the future, glasses). It is literally the same thing as with phones, but more concealed/private. So it would capture both the existing group doing it with phones and plenty of new people.
Note: I am aware that Vision Pro isn’t intended to be worn outside or for prolonged periods of time due to battery and just general headset thing, so no, I am not trying to claim it is going to replace smartphones for people. I was talking more about where this is headed, which will only be possible once the technology gets us to the point of a “regular looking glasses” type of a form factor (or something similarly unobstructive).
I could have an AR Pokémon pet, like Pokémon Go...but good...
Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 6 when it comes out? I doubt it.