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Future for Mac games in M1 era
- Thread starter cocoua
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What are you adding up? The individual tags? Your screenshots make no sense.LOL
First lets compare apples to apples, you're exhibit is showing everything on steam, they don't just sell/host games.
So lets narrow the search down and compare Windows games to macOS games. The numbers are rather dire and is basically proving my point. Adding them up Windows has 216,727 games where as macOS has 59,616 Looks like a quarter of what windows has
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Now lets compare your exhibit of macOS software with what windows has (just filtering on operating system and including everything). Windows has 369,617 vs. 88,523 - surprisingly macOS maintains a near 25% of what windows has - it didn't lose any ground, go figure
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We can't filter by AAA games AFAIK but if I was a betting man, the ratio would be closer to 90% to 10% or 95% to 5%
Is it non-existent? Well to me it is, since the games I choose to play are not available on macOS but but hey at least you have puzzle games
There are 101,746 titles available TOTAL on Steam, 30,090 of which are available for macOS. That's pretty much exactly 30% of the catalogue available for a platform that makes up 3% of surveyed users.
If you narrow it to just "games" there's 56,015 titles for Windows, 13,240 for Mac which is 24%
Dumb speculation that could have been solved in five clicks; they are all 64 bit
LOL
First lets compare apples to apples, you're exhibit is showing everything on steam, they don't just sell/host games.
So lets narrow the search down and compare Windows games to macOS games. The numbers are rather dire and is basically proving my point. Adding them up Windows has 216,727 games where as macOS has 59,616 Looks like a quarter of what windows has
Now lets compare your exhibit of macOS software with what windows has (just filtering on operating system and including everything). Windows has 369,617 vs. 88,523 - surprisingly macOS maintains a near 25% of what windows has - it didn't lose any ground, go figure
We can't filter by AAA games AFAIK but if I was a betting man, the ratio would be closer to 90% to 10% or 95% to 5%
Is it non-existent? Well to me it is, since the games I choose to play are not available on macOS but but hey at least you have puzzle games
If I'm not mistaken, you're narrowing by tags. That might not be the most accurate way to count because I think many games can actually have multiple tags.
When I check "games" and "macos", I see "12,949 results match. 290 titles have been excluded based on your preferences." When I check only "games" and "windows", I see "54,396 results match. 1,650 titles have been excluded." Personally, I do agree that the top Mac gaming titles are targeting a much different audience. Numerically, it might not seem as bad, but in reality, I find it pretty abysmal. I don't think Mac is a true serious gaming platform today.
The most telling way IMO to filter the stark contrast between the two is your graph showing the PC vs Mac audience. It shows that 96.57% of total Steam surveyers play on a PC vs a sad 2.54% on a Mac.
It's all kinda speculative at the moment. There may or may not be a new chip (they may go along the yearly route like the iPhones and iPads or not), and that may or may not include some redesigns or ARM versions of existing Intel machines.
The principles are kinda the same - if the hardware is vastly more performant, there may be more of an impetus for some of the porting houses to port more games, but the gap is getting those AAA studios publishing on Mac, which at the moment I can't see changing quite yet. They should make friends with Valve again, and get Proton working well on ARM.
Same as before. Apple can have the best hardware in the world if there is no software, people won't care. Besides, whatever comes Monday, it's not going to change anything. Apple won't have anything that Nvidia/AMD don't have already (chip shortage aside).
But why would they port more games, when there's no one around buying them? It's not like magically everyone with a Mac starts to play games.
Has Apple ever worked with another "api" vendor to get something working when it competes with their own solution?
They wouldn't port that many more - it'd be catering to the existing crowd, really. But maybe they may have more graphical superpowers (unlikely), which may make the performance differential on some very visual 4K/120Hz games better, and worthwhile porting as such.
The key is to get publishers to consider Mac alongside their other platforms, but it needs to be easier to publish for and work alongside their existing toolset. No-one's (barely anyone) producing games on ARM at the moment, they're still x64, with a very few being Intel/Apple universal.
Otherwise we may just get upsized mobile games in the future...
Doubt it, plenty of candidates out there for business applications which would be a better choice for Apple. If Apple would step up, they'd have to make massive changes to macOS and their paradigms which dictate how macOS works in the core.
If anything, it's up to Valve to bring Proton to macOS. But I doubt this is going to happen as it would require major changes to Proton. They'd have to find a replacement for OpenGL, which is needed for Wine. So they would have to recreate Wine from scratch. They need Vulkan support, which they could get around with MoltenVK, but it's not there yet. But this is certainly the easy part. They'll also have to find a replacement for eventfd, which doesn't exist on macOS (Linux only). So they would have to completely start from scratch and implement event handling according to how Apple requires it. At that point it turns into a massive project, costing a lot of money.
The available hardware is near irrelevant for bringing game developers to macOS.
The issue is the lack of demand from the Apple user base. There are plenty of games ported to Nintendo Switch for example which much more restrictive hardware than Mac, yet they still do so because of the player base.
Steam gas around 100M active users per month, that’s roughly 2.54M MacOS users. Now consider than a game like Destiny 2 sold 1.9M copies in the first week alone. The MacOS user base starts to look really tiny. To reach the sales figures to make it worthwhile they really need to be selling their game to over 50% of the MacOS player base. Each game genre just isn’t going to have that kind of reach.
Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in 2020. As a percentage even AAA games have a small percentage of market penetration into PC gaming. Assuming a similar penetration on by uses on MacOS you’d be looking like a couple of hundred thousand sales maximum.
It’s not worth the time or cost to do so.
The issue is the lack of demand from the Apple user base. There are plenty of games ported to Nintendo Switch for example which much more restrictive hardware than Mac, yet they still do so because of the player base.
Steam gas around 100M active users per month, that’s roughly 2.54M MacOS users. Now consider than a game like Destiny 2 sold 1.9M copies in the first week alone. The MacOS user base starts to look really tiny. To reach the sales figures to make it worthwhile they really need to be selling their game to over 50% of the MacOS player base. Each game genre just isn’t going to have that kind of reach.
Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in 2020. As a percentage even AAA games have a small percentage of market penetration into PC gaming. Assuming a similar penetration on by uses on MacOS you’d be looking like a couple of hundred thousand sales maximum.
It’s not worth the time or cost to do so.
Indeed that is the case and it's Apples ball right now. There's virtually no support for them compared to Nvidia, so it is very unattractive to port games for developers. Even if it would be feasible financially for them, the hassle of getting something to work on macOS these days is a pain and that does include "complex" projects with Unity and Unreal.
My point about all this is:
Could the merging iOS and MacOS app stores make developers create iOS games with Mac in mind in a near future?
As regular iPad could soon have same chips as base Macs, maybe AAA games could come in iOS flavor, wich means, in Mac flavor. Or maybe AAA games would always need as much power as the latest workstation could offer so this is a never ending story.
I think it depends on the take rate for games on iOS that could be brought over to macOS. Plus the take rate for games where that has already happened (for example Divinity Original Sins 2, wonder what the sales of the iOS version looks like compared to the macOS version).
What will likely happen is the "Mac App" toggle will be turned on and you'll be told that you're on your own if you use a Mac as opposed to the iPad.
But you know, ZERO support from Apple even if you're using XCode and Metal for a game. Seriously, why Apple isn't trying to buy a game developer right friggin' now is beyond me.
Also FUN FACT: Halo was originally designed to be a Mac only game.
I think Apple doesn't want their marketing to reflect encroachment into another industry for starters. You can't deny you got all kinds of powers just itching to put apple on a leash if they could for their own monetary gain. How do you think EPIC would react if Apple bought a game company?
I realize MS invested into games, but Apple is going out of their way to illustrate how powerful AS Macs are for creative/business initially.
I think we all need to watch how Apple shows off the redesigned MBP's capabilities as what the future entails. Enough of the Apple Arcade dumbness focused on satisfying iPhone users that also own iPads. They badly need to grow their Mac ecosystem never mind the love for initial M1 Macs.
iOS games will always be "tablet games" and not what we're used to from PC/consoles. So sure, those games will come to the Mac, but I doubt we'll see the next major FPS, action adventure, etc. on the Mac.
What would they gain buying one game developer? They need a wide variation of games and they need to be exclusive. So unless they buy EA or similar, it's not going to change much. The ship of "single game as a system seller" is sailed unless you're Nintendo and even that doesn't work anymore, at least not as well as back in the day. I also don't think people would just switch to a Mac for playing games, even if Apple bought MS or Sony.
Ecosystem is a mess right now. The M1 Mac was well received by many and sold well. What virtually no one considers is, that Apple had stock of these machines and was able to deliver while most of their competition (Dell, Lenovo, ... heck everyone) didn't have stock and an order came with long pre-order times. Since many, many people worked from home and needed new machines, Apple were the winner as many bought the M1 machines for reading/writing, browsing the web, emails and Word/Excel. I ordered a Lenovo X1 this week, not the config I wanted. The config I wanted has an expected delivery date of May 2022! Same for Dell and others. Apple better have massive stock of the new machines to sell right now, because if they don't and the chip shortage is over, their sales will go back to "normal" Apple levels.
It never was. Bungie already was a multi-platform company at that time. Marathon Infinity, Myth, and Oni all were developed and released for Windows and Mac concurrently, the latter even for PS2. Halo always was meant to be released for Windows and Mac at least.
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It was shown at an Apple event by Steve Jobs with Bungie in attendance. I was waiting for it then it disappeared cos xbox (as I understand it). Appeared on the Mac after it had been used for the hook in game for a while.
If memory serves.
Wasn't sure it was mac only but pretty miffed we got sidelined.
Never.
Can't wait for benchmarks though. At some point they claimed 7x faster than Intel iGPU?!? That would be disappointing. Their "x-times faster than" was a mess to be honest. They also played the power card again, showing that Notebooks with dGPU are still faster, but require more power. Question is, how much faster are they? Are they talking RTX5000? 3080? 3060? Curious to see real work benchmarks. We already know the M-series is fantastic when it comes to power consumption.
The Unity-guy was funny though, he looked like "They can't have UE5, so they had to invited me instead". 😂 What the "showed" was more like the usual tablet/phone games based on Unity.
On a side note, looks like the 16" comes with a 140W power supply. That's more than the old 16" Intel + AMD GPU. 😲