Apple's Push to Transform the Mac into a Gaming Paradise | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Push to Transform the Mac into a Gaming Paradise

inverse.com

They're not pushing anywhere near hard enough. I don't even really want to play new games, I'd settle for just being able to play old games. It's funny the article mentioned Halo - I can't play that on my M1 Max at all, even though I own the mac version. It could probably emulate it fast enough. Hell, it could probably emulate the windows version fast enough. But nope, it doesn't work and I'm not willing to jump through hoops to somehow maybe hack it into working, I want to play a game sometimes, not configure UNIXy stuff, that's what I'm playing a game to take a break from.

And I like the screenshot of Steam. Almost none of my Steam games work, even first-party stuff like Portal or Half-life. FFS, the steam client itself has not even been updated for arm64. That right there tells you how seriously Valve takes the mac gaming market.

If Apple were serious, they would do as MS has repeatedly done and back up to Valve's (and other's) offices with a dump truck full of money and just do whatever it takes to make it work. Until they start to take proactive steps, not this "build it and they will come" mentality which has never worked in the past, I think mac gaming will remain the backwater it is. I'd love to see that change, but I don't think it will.

Have you tried Apple Porting Toolkit? It’s able to get most of my Steam library working well (Cyberpunk and Halo for example). There is an app called Whisky that removes the hoops.

https://getwhisky.app/

FWIW Crossover has also integrated Apple Porting Toolkit: https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/9/27/crossove...

It'll never happen. Gaming depends heavily on backwards compatibility... something that makes Apple employees shriek and run in terror.

It's a shame how much of my iOS game library is no longer playable. (Not to mention every 32-bit game on iOS and macOS.)

Unlike other platform vendors, Apple's strategy seems to be to ignore backward compatibility and instead dump a yearly maintenance burden on developers.

It’s insane they don’t have a compatibility layer for 32-bit macOS apps, so many games were never ever ported to 64-bit.

It's very disappointing compared to Windows, which has compatibility environments for XP etc.

Precisely. No small studio has time to write a whole 3d engine when all they really need is a few plot authors and graphic designers.

I love my MacBook Air M1; it's small and lightweight and simple, no moving parts, no dust, and it's fast enough for me.

But it clearly lags in 3D gaming performance; the silicon just isn't there to the same degree. It might compete with low-TDP SoC graphics such as AMD's APUs, but it's not a gaming device.

(...and now I resume reading the article...)

> it's not a gaming device

If only the M1 Mac were as powerful as gaming devices like the Nintendo Switch or the Steam Deck. Or the iPhone, which can run games like Resident Evil Village or Death Stranding - not to mention mobile titles like Genshin Impact, or a bunch of great Apple Arcade games.

No idea what Apple is thinking. ;-)

There are already many triple A games that runs on ios. Technically they would run easily on Mac and apple doesn't even bother with these low hanging fruits

I'm pretty sure a Steam Deck or say a Switch is lesser hardware than a M1, yet they seem to pull it off.

There's more than a 4x difference in pixel count between those handhelds and a M1 Air. The Switch and Steam Deck simply have far less rendering work to do.

My Intellivision is a gaming device and has no 3D support. There's tons of games that don't require recent hardware. :-D

Not to mention the M1 Air is the or near weakest A.S. Mac you can buy.

As I wrote my comment above, I suddenly thought of Nintendo's strategy: sufficient hardware to support a fantastic experience.

Nintendo plays like Apple builds. It's clearly a great way to make games.

And of course, "casual" games on Apple's handheld devices can be successful. Even spawning new game paradigms like Niantic's Pokémon Go -- yes, that's from arch-rival Google, but there's no denying Apple's influence in powerful handheld device design.

Unified memory architecture, resemblance to console design...

So yes, actually: there's plenty of hardware capability even in the lower-end Apple Silicon platforms, enough for great games.

Sigh. I remember it as if I were in the room at the time, I knew a couple of people who were there in 1999 when Bungie, already Mac-famous from Marathon, demoed Halo ... then Microsoft bought it. Holy dogcow...

Apple didn't have the cash then to attract game studios, and the longevity of their platform was still a legitimate concern. It's a very different playing field now.

> Unified memory architecture, resemblance to console design...

Console design ca. 2001, right down to having its own graphics APIs that nobody else uses

> having its own graphics APIs that nobody else uses

It's amazing how many games are written for, or ported to, those APIs on iOS.

There's a lot of false information even in the premise of that introduction. Jobs didn't announce Halo as an Apple exclusive, he announced a simultaneous release with Windows. Microsoft didn't poach Bungie. Bungie was failing financially before the acquisition and Halo wasn't anywhere near complete at the time.

Microsoft saved Halo.

If the premise is that flawed, I'm skeptical of the rest of the piece.

I'm not sure that what you are saying is incompatible with what is written in the article.

Note that "stole" is in quotes.

Delaying Halo for the Mac deflated Jobs' claim that gaming was coming back to the Mac platform.

I'm not saying they believe that Microsoft stole Halo. Their premise is that Halo would have been a success launching on Apple. That Bungie, with Halo, single handedly caused the success of the XBox. And that it alone could have caused Mac OS to become a gaming juggernaut. When in reality, Bungie desperately needed help and Microsoft recognized the value of launching Halo on the XBox. That symbiosis was needed for the success of both things.

The incompatibility is that the author clearly doesn't understand why the Halo succeeded. Microsoft has historically bolstered game and hardware developers in a way Apple has never been willing to. Their purchase of Bungie is only one example of that.

Apple would not have provided any of the support in the partnership that Bungie needed to complete the game. Their alternate universe is flawed because without the purchase of Bungie there is no Halo.

Halo was going to be on PC too. It would have done very little to help Mac OS anyways.

They could do this by seriously talking with Valve and making Proton work with Apple Silicon as well as it works on Linux.

I don't think any other route will really work, but then again, Apple sometimes surprises.

> “losing” in gaming for decades has not been fun for Apple

Yeah, I'm not sure about that. It's given them an excuse to ship sub-par graphics and helped make the big bust-up with Nvidia less painful.

What timing. Somebody at Apple needs to buy a PS5 and spend 10 minutes with the dualSense controller in ASTRO's playroom. Mac and PC won't ever get the full dualSense experience and that means they're outmoded.

Sony found a way to make everything without dualSense feel old and obsolete, including their entire back catalog of games from the PS1 to the PS4.

I own a PS5 with Dual Sense and it's pretty much the same as any controller I have used. I prefer the SCUF Xbox controller on Windows.

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