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Future for Mac games in M1 era

cocoua

cocoua

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 19, 2014
1,055
655
madrid, spain
I've been reading lot of things as M1 will be the final touch to finish the ac as game plattfom, but as I was watching the last Metal Slug trailer for mobile I was thinking "I can't wait to connect this to a TV and a gamepad…"

I think M1 will make Macs a real game platform, not just for all the mobile games available, but maybe even competing with Steam totally, as many games in App Store are ports from Steam/PC

Let's hope so
 
The whole issue is how many of the "major development" houses will support it. I love Blizzard games - especially the Diablo series - and am extremely disappointed as it seems they will no longer support macOS.
I have a 2019 iMac and was considering getting one of the new M1 iMacs until I see that Bootcamp won't work and Parallels really doesn't work well with any relatively recent Windows game. (Not that Bootcamp is not with it's own issues.)
 
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this is what I'm saying, there is a version of Diablo for iOS, maybe is not the one you need, but maybe in a future would be.

It seems Apple offers all iOS apps on mac, no matter if developers want it or not (if they dont, they can do a special version for MAc) but AFAIK, apps from iOS are automatically offered in M1 Macs.

So, Developers would have to choose, and I think all this is going to shake things up.

And the server gameplay offer is getting hot, GeforceNow and Stadia are just newborns, but let's wait to see what happen with this also. If Steam would offer this it would be awesome.
 
swandy said:
The whole issue is how many of the "major development" houses will support it. I love Blizzard games - especially the Diablo series - and am extremely disappointed as it seems they will no longer support macOS.
I have a 2019 iMac and was considering getting one of the new M1 iMacs until I see that Bootcamp won't work and Parallels really doesn't work well with any relatively recent Windows game. (Not that Bootcamp is not with it's own issues.)
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Bootcamp helped kept people who played PC games playing on their Macs. I love my Mac, use it for everything but gaming. It is not a gaming machine and it not being supported by the Game Industry for other than casual gaming, seals it’s fate in this department, imo.
 
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cocoua said:
I've been reading lot of things as M1 will be the final touch to finish the ac as game plattfom, but as I was watching the last Metal Slug trailer for mobile I was thinking "I can't wait to connect this to a TV and a gamepad…"

I think M1 will make Macs a real game platform, not just for all the mobile games available, but maybe even competing with Steam totally, as many games in App Store are ports from Steam/PC

Let's hope so
Click to expand...

I can’t say I’ve been really interested in any apple arcade games. They seem to be far from AAA titles. The drop of support for eGPUs and boot camp put the nail in the coffin for true gaming on a Mac. I hope Apple can push out a GPU that comes close to the big boy offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, but I’m not holding my breath. Until such time I’m going to have a Windows machine.
 
This is the answer Brad Oliver gave on Insidemacgames about the lack of Apple Silicon native games so far. He is a game developer who worked for many years at Aspyr and ported many Mac games.

"Worth pointing out that the holdup here mainly centers around third parties: no native Steamworks, no native middlware libraries, etc. Until that situation settles, M1-native ports will be hit and miss. Rome Remastered will be M1-native, but only on the Mac App Store because Steamworks (and Steam) are still not set up for M1 support. How deeply Steamworks communicates with Steam is not something I know much about. Maybe you can have XPC shenanigans between Rosetta apps and M1-native just fine...?"

Inside Mac Games Forum

www.insidemacgames.com www.insidemacgames.com
 
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Apple is not making any effort for Mac gaming because it does not make them any money. Steam is working a lot harder to make games work on Linux, than Apple is working to make games playable on MacOS.

In all seriousness, I dont even know why why developers even bother to release a Mac version unless the game engine software has a button that says "Export to Mac format."
 
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MacBH928 said:
Apple is not making any effort for Mac gaming because it does not make them any money. Steam is working a lot harder to make games work on Linux, than Apple is working to make games playable on MacOS.

In all seriousness, I dont even know why why developers even bother to release a Mac version unless the game engine software has a button that says "Export to Mac format."
Click to expand...
The developers will bother to release games if there is money in it (user buying the games OR apple subsidizing), there are 2 big issues with Mac gaming :
1) Windows is the monopoly of the PC world , they own a proprietary graphics API (DirectX) that ALL the games in the PC world use , the same API is used on the Xbox as well , when you write and optimize (which is something ppl miss when they look at a game development) you do it for your major platforms , today it means everyone write for DX and optimize for DX , some might port a game to Metal, but do they optimize for Metal ?
2) Gaming studios being bought up by the biggest players , mainly Microsoft , making it even harder to make games for Mac as they have a higher level strategy to keep games "exclusive" .

But not all is doom and gloom , if the Macs will gain better GPU`s in the more popular Macs , it will make the target audience bigger , which in turn will make some of the developers more incentivized to get their games on Metal/Mac.

If I am a game developer and I see a platform with no games , I can see it in 2 ways :
1) this is a dead platform for gaming , why would I put my game there ? it will cost me money to bring it there!
2) this is a dead platform for gaming - > BIG opportunity for me as I have no competition !! if I put my game there ill get much more interest , publicity and a more "starved" consumer base.

If you get a popular shooter for example (Overwatch for example), then this specific shooter will be the only one in the Mac world , so 100% for the Mac gamers looking for a shooter will buy it as they don't have anything else to buy.

Path of exile Is going to be native for Macs/Metal in the upcoming months (hoping POE 2 will be ready for Metal) , while it looks like Blizzard are leaving Mac in the Diablo world , this means that if you are in for an APRG , your only option is POE (great game by the way) on the Mac , this makes it lucrative for GGG.
 
ARM isn't going to change a thing about game development on the Mac. If they don't have a team dedicated to writing exclusively for the Mac now, they never will. Porting a game is a band-aid approach to making a game somewhat playable not equal. They can't modify code that isn't there to begin with. Imagine porting a Mac native game to a PC. Same nightmare. It's why so few companies do it. Hell most won't even attempt it in-house, they let a third-party do it. Their risk, not the original developers.

How many games (desktop) do you play that are natively written for the Mac? Come on, I know most people have at least one finger... this is easy. If they aren't being written for the Mac natively, it means they didn't care to write it for the Mac. And that mindset isn't going to change in 2021 or 3031. Apple could buy every game developer on the planet and force them to write for the Mac. But is forcing someone to make games for you platform really a resounding win? It's that sort of mentality that pushed people away from the PC platform in the first place.

And for the record, Mac gamers thought the INTEL transition would herald a new era for Mac gaming... it didn't. Nothing has changed here. Microsoft buying up all those game companies didn't topple Sony's iron grip on the console market either.

You want to play PC games... buy a PC. It's really that simple.
 
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pmiles said:
ARM isn't going to change a thing about game development on the Mac. If they don't have a team dedicated to writing exclusively for the Mac now, they never will. Porting a game is a band-aid approach to making a game somewhat playable not equal. They can't modify code that isn't there to begin with. Imagine porting a Mac native game to a PC. Same nightmare. It's why so few companies do it. Hell most won't even attempt it in-house, they let a third-party do it. Their risk, not the original developers.

How many games (desktop) do you play that are natively written for the Mac? Come on, I know most people have at least one finger... this is easy. If they aren't being written for the Mac natively, it means they didn't care to write it for the Mac. And that mindset isn't going to change in 2021 or 3031. Apple could buy every game developer on the planet and force them to write for the Mac. But is forcing someone to make games for you platform really a resounding win? It's that sort of mentality that pushed people away from the PC platform in the first place.

And for the record, Mac gamers thought the INTEL transition would herald a new era for Mac gaming... it didn't. Nothing has changed here. Microsoft buying up all those game companies didn't topple Sony's iron grip on the console market either.

You want to play PC games... buy a PC. It's really that simple.
Click to expand...
But it is fun to dream about what could be!
 
Huntn said:
Bootcamp helped kept people who played PC games playing on their Macs. I love my Mac, use it for everything but gaming. It is not a gaming machine and it not being supported by the Game Industry for other than casual gaming, seals it’s fate in this department, imo.
Click to expand...
And I remember the time when Steve Jobs invited Bungie Inc. to demonstrate HALO on MacWorld in 1999...
Watch this interesting series:
 
laurensvo92 said:
Apple has put bit of effort with Mac Gaming, with Game Center. Perhaps we will see more games coming from iOS with Apple Arcade?
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For all I know there is a huge audience for iOS games, but here is the thing. iOS leaves out the AAA cutting edge titles that carry the game industry, while acknowledging some, maybe more than some of those titles come from the consoles to the PC and I rarely if ever play iOS games, only as a last resort.
 
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laurensvo92 said:
Apple has put bit of effort with Mac Gaming, with Game Center. Perhaps we will see more games coming from iOS with Apple Arcade?
Click to expand...
I'm sure Apple would love to have macOS users subscribe to apple arcade. So playing mobile ios games, there will be options, playing desktop computer games, it will be more of the same. A handful of titles may make it over to macOS, but by and large you want to play [non-mobile, non-iOS] games, you'll need to run windows or get a PC
 
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Bit late for Apple to catch up with the games market in this way, they should have introduced a new Mac pro desk top that was aimed at the home/games market long ago, their time has now gone as far as games are concerned. I used Parallels for about two or so years a while back and it wasn't that good from what I recall. Bootcamp is the way to go if you really do not want to buy a gaming PC, but as far as Apple are concerned it is too little way too late.
 
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Maybe I understand this wrong but didn't they release Vulkan that was supposedly make it easier to release games on Win, Linux, and MacOS instead of relying on DirectX? Was Vulkan supposed to be better than DirectX? I also do not understand why Apple released Metal...like how many people will code specifically in Metal just to release it on MacOS?

For the past 20 years Apple didn't care about gaming. Linux today has better gaming support than MacOS. They do not care because their sales will not be affected as those who are serious about it will build a cheaper PC, it just bites their users who are going to buy a Mac either way.

The only hope for Mac users now is the streaming services, how well they work, that is another question.
 
Vulkan specifications were finalised two years after Metal, and Apple wanted full control on its own 3d and compute api, after the failed OpenCL collaboration with Khronos.
Would a native Vulkan driver help? Maybe it would be easier to port some indie games (which can be still easily ported using MoltenVK), but most AAA titles are DirectX anyway, and in the end the only thing that matters is not the technology, but the fact that the Mac marker is smaller, which means less sales, and most games developer don't even have a Mac to test their game, and most Mac out there have only Intel gpu that's not really made to play games.

Linux "better support" is just reimplementing Windows, "wine" or "proton" are just an implementation of all the required Windows API. It allows playing Windows games, of course, but how many native Linux games are there out there?
 
laurensvo92 said:
Does Parallels support Windows Gaming on a M1 chip?
Click to expand...

See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/c/andytizer/videos

MacBH928 said:
I also do not understand why Apple released Metal...like how many people will code specifically in Metal just to release it on MacOS?
Click to expand...

"We've been making use of Metal on iOS to great effect since its release in 2014. A fast, agile, feature-rich API like Metal is exactly what we need to bring a game designed for modern consoles and desktops to the battery-powered ‌iPhone‌ and iPad. As a developer, it blows away OpenGL in every way.", Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games.

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Ritsuka said:
Vulkan specifications were finalised two years after Metal, and Apple wanted full control on its own 3d and compute api, after the failed OpenCL collaboration with Khronos.
Would a native Vulkan driver help? Maybe it would be easier to port some indie games (which can be still easily ported using MoltenVK), but most AAA titles are DirectX anyway, and in the end the only thing that matters is not the technology, but the fact that the Mac marker is smaller, which means less sales, and most games developer don't even have a Mac to test their game, and most Mac out there have only Intel gpu that's not really made to play games.

Linux "better support" is just reimplementing Windows, "wine" or "proton" are just an implementation of all the required Windows API. It allows playing Windows games, of course, but how many native Linux games are there out there?
Click to expand...

If developers will make DirectX games for Windows, and favour Metal for Apple OS , what was the point of Vulkan then? I thought Vulkan was meant to replace DirectX to make games work on Windows, Mac, and linux?

Homy said:
See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/c/andytizer/videos



"We've been making use of Metal on iOS to great effect since its release in 2014. A fast, agile, feature-rich API like Metal is exactly what we need to bring a game designed for modern consoles and desktops to the battery-powered ‌iPhone‌ and iPad. As a developer, it blows away OpenGL in every way.", Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games.

www.macrumors.com

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney Admits App Store's 30% Cut Is Similar to Consoles, Would Have Accepted Special Deal With Apple

Apple's legal battle with Epic Games is continuing on, and during the second day of the trial, Epic Games' CEO Tim Sweeney continued his...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
Click to expand...

How is this possible, even if Parallels run on M1 and you somehow get your hands on Windows ARM the games are still x86?!
 
Vulcan is an open standard (I think it is also Open Source). Metal and DirectX are not. Vulcans issue is the OS vendors (lets ignore Linux for the moment) do not optimize for it like they do their own proprietary API's. Vulcan also moves slower than (at least) DirectX.
 
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