This was shocking to me as a gamer who loved Windows and had to use Mac. Rosetta helped for a while. Nowadays it feels like an intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up.
It is. Both Apple and Google will push apps off their stores that have not been updated in "a while". Even if the app works fine and is perfectly finished.
Also, there's Vulkan on Metal, but there's translation overhead, and I have no idea what other issues it causes. Dolphin emulator did some research on that.
But like USB-C, at some point you should just embrace the industry standard.
Game consoles don't do Khronos APIs for the most part, they are really only standard on GNU/Linux and Android, really.
But I did mean this as part of games not mixing with Mac. You most likely have to run any game in an emulator, and it still maybe doesn't work or is much laggier. It's not just AAA games and cringesports, it's all sorts of popular games. Both AoE2 remakes for example. BeamNG works but not well. Anything with anticheat is a no (last two examples aren't this category btw). I've used WINE like 2008-2022, at some point decided nah, even though Codeweavers have done an amazing job.
I'm sure there are games that don't work but it's a minority of new Steam releases even if you exclude pure slop.
Gamedevs already have Metal support on their engines, they don't spend time with API wars like FOSS communities.
Just like, Khronos APIs are largely irrelevant in game consoles, and Windows.
Even on the Switch that does Vulkan and GL, NVN is the main API for those that want full control over the hardware.
And as note,
https://asomobile.net/en/blog/mobile-gaming-market-in-2026-t...