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Comment by polyomino | Hacker News Reader

This is the same failed strategy that Microsoft tried with windows 10 uwp. The control schemes and form factors matter so developers don’t get much benefit.

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Developers already target multiple control schemes (keyboard/mouse, gamepad) and device sizes.

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.

For mobile games, sure. For desktop titles, nothing has really changed. MacOS runs the same APIs, Apple still refuses to make compatibility promises, and older titles are perpetually phased-out of support unless they are constantly updated. Apple-native titles will definitely get ported to Mac, but what is the renewed incentive to port PC, Xbox or Playstation games to Mac?

> nothing has really changed

> 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 here's the Alien Isolation announcement from two years earlier: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/17/alien-isolation-game-re...

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.

You don't have to beg or bribe studios to get them to target a market with 90 Billion dollars in annual revenue.

Targeting that market gives you a Mac version for very little additional cost.

...which is back around to my original point:

> 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?

> nothing has really changed

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.

Some iOS devices are now performance-competitive with desktops, and they support bluetooth game controllers (so you don't need (much) of a touch-specific UI)

So you port an existing AAA console title to iOS for the huge user base, and get MacOS for relatively little engineering cost.

I assume 90%+ of that is gambling or other mechanics where the spending of addicted “whales” makes up most of the revenue.

Windows PCs can have such a wide range of hardware that this seems like an attempted software solution to a pretty difficult to solve problem. Compare that to Apple, where there isn't such a disparity between two separate computers, and it makes more sense to try to target MacOS under that logic than it does.

Whether it will play out different is for consumers and developers to decide.

Wow, this is a really good point I haven’t thought of before.

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.

It would be interesting to see games primarily designed for consoles get ported to Mac before they work on the Windows port, since the architecture is very similar between the M series APUs and the console APUs :)

> 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.

Apple is sitting on a gaming console that could be a hit, and is doing literally nothing with it: Apple TV.

Apple also hasn’t fumbled with their platform unification nearly as much as Microsoft did with their attempts. It hasn’t been perfect, Catalyst most notably has warts, but it’s a far sight better than the situation with Windows was where the new platform (UWP and ancestors/cousins) were rebooted multiple times and perpetually half-baked. AppKit and UIKit are both solid, mature, and capable in ways that even a decade after Windows 8, Windows App SDK (what UWP became) isn’t.

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