Future for Mac games in M1 era

[Ethosik]

Not to take anything away from your POV , but clearly you are looking at it from a "today" POV , and if as a business , all you can see is that "today" , that is fine , you are missing some clearly obvious signs of why putting games on the Mac does make sense , ill name a few and you can try to be objective about it , lets see if we can have a real discussion.
1) No competition , even though it is a smaller portion of users , the fact there is no competition from other games will make your game stand out.
2) Consumer buying power - Mac users have more money to spend per machine (of course more PC machines cancels it out in the end) , you cannot just say that x% Macs vs (100-x)% PC is the best way to look at the buying power of the users.
3) Future - you can bet your house that Apple will push hard on all fronts in regards to their HW , raising the floor of the GPU baseline to a very respectable level , also Macs are getting more and more market share , writing your new games in a multi platform engine is already a thing , keeping ARM and Macs in mind will only do your future games good , as you will need to take into account new players are coming (Qualcomm with their own ARM solution).
4) Free publicity , having your game on the Mac will generate far more publicity for it in Social media and forums , as the lake is dry now , that game will be talked about a LOT , it will be a reference game in benchmarks , which overall will increase sales.

Studios that ignore the future and have a shortsighted mindset will be in a risk to be left behind , you can see how all of the big players are scrambling to get into mobile gaming once they realized (most of them VERY LATE) that there is a big money in that market , you will note that looking at threads back in the day you would EASILY find your line of thinking on why creating mobile games doesn't make sense : "Ppl want only free games , ppl wont pay more then 1$ for a game , ppl don't want to play games on their phone".

Welp hope I gave it a good go on trying to see the other side of things , cheers !

Apple has never overtaken the PC in marketshare and never will. Or it might be 10 years from now by then the current implementation of my game won’t even work. MacOS is not going to suddenly take to 50% marketshare on Steam in the next few years.

Mobile games are a different market. My game isn’t mobile and it’s not suitable for mobile. It requires a lot of input and mouse to work well.

So where the “big money” is from a desktop class operating system market is Windows.

And “Mac owners having more money to spend” is not really true. I know people, myself included, that saves for Macs for months (and I make well into six figures). I have $4,000 ready now I can get one of the new laptops, but that doesn’t mean I want to shell out more money for new apps. Or I could get a gaming PC for $1,500 and actually do have all that extra money left over to buy a few dozen games.

I have done my research and analysis over the next few years. Even if Windows dies NOW and macOS takes off NOW, it will still be a few years before the marketshare split becomes to the point where I should consider a macos port. It’s not just “flip a switch” even on engines that support multi platform. I will need to do extensive testing and fixes to help optimize on a platform that is not really worth it for a small amount of sales.

But Windows isn’t going to die NOW.

 

[ErikGrim]

 

[NotTooLate]

Apple has never overtaken the PC in marketshare and never will. Or it might be 10 years from now by then the current implementation of my game won’t even work. MacOS is not going to suddenly take to 50% marketshare on Steam in the next few years.

Mobile games are a different market. My game isn’t mobile and it’s not suitable for mobile. It requires a lot of input and mouse to work well.

So where the “big money” is from a desktop class operating system market is Windows.

And “Mac owners having more money to spend” is not really true. I know people, myself included, that saves for Macs for months (and I make well into six figures). I have $4,000 ready now I can get one of the new laptops, but that doesn’t mean I want to shell out more money for new apps. Or I could get a gaming PC for $1,500 and actually do have all that extra money left over to buy a few dozen games.

I have done my research and analysis over the next few years. Even if Windows dies NOW and macOS takes off NOW, it will still be a few years before the marketshare split becomes to the point where I should consider a macos port. It’s not just “flip a switch” even on engines that support multi platform. I will need to do extensive testing and fixes to help optimize on a platform that is not really worth it for a small amount of sales.

But Windows isn’t going to die NOW.

If you understood from my post that apple will overtake windows , then I’ll chuck it to my English , but I couldn’t see where I made that mistake, how can you say Mac users buying power is not bigger per machine is beyond me , it isn’t to say PC ppl are poor or mac users are rich , it’s just on avg ppl that buy more expensive machines will , on avg , have more buying power , also writing for multi platform will help the developer to easily port his game to PlayStation/Nintendo/steam deck / Mac , again , I understand the now , it’s obvious , if your game will not be multi platform you risk the future for the now , that’s reasonable but not optimal , we will see who is right in the next 5 years, cheers.

 

[diamond.g]

If you understood from my post that apple will overtake windows , then I’ll chuck it to my English , but I couldn’t see where I made that mistake, how can you say Mac users buying power is not bigger per machine is beyond me , it isn’t to say PC ppl are poor or mac users are rich , it’s just on avg ppl that buy more expensive machines will , on avg , have more buying power , also writing for multi platform will help the developer to easily port his game to PlayStation/Nintendo/steam deck / Mac , again , I understand the now , it’s obvious , if your game will not be multi platform you risk the future for the now , that’s reasonable but not optimal , we will see who is right in the next 5 years, cheers.

Guess we will have to see how the Steam stats stack up (unless we expect developers will start selling more Mac games on Mac Apps Store).

 

[Ethosik]

If you understood from my post that apple will overtake windows , then I’ll chuck it to my English , but I couldn’t see where I made that mistake, how can you say Mac users buying power is not bigger per machine is beyond me , it isn’t to say PC ppl are poor or mac users are rich , it’s just on avg ppl that buy more expensive machines will , on avg , have more buying power , also writing for multi platform will help the developer to easily port his game to PlayStation/Nintendo/steam deck / Mac , again , I understand the now , it’s obvious , if your game will not be multi platform you risk the future for the now , that’s reasonable but not optimal , we will see who is right in the next 5 years, cheers.

Do you have ANY stats to prove that Mac buyers have more purchasing power than Windows PC buyers? People build their own RGB gaming systems for over $2,000. BUILD a system for over $2,000. That is an insane amount of performance for a Windows PC. My custom built gaming PC is $2,500 and I even had an existing GPU to put in it, otherwise it would be $3,000.

I have not seen proof that Mac buyers === more rich/more purchasing power. There is no evidence that supports that. I have seen college kids that work at McDonalds with Macs that can barely pay their bills but they have a mac!

And in 5 years, I will either be on a new game, or my game will have evolved where its not the same game. Porting a game now does no good.

Also, lets take a road down in history since you claim to be judging my lack of ability of "forward thinking". Steam unfortunately doesn't have the ability to go back in time in their history page, but I found several pages that reference the Game marketshare in Steam was above 8% in 2010.

Steam survey finds more than 8% of gamers use Apple's Mac OS X | AppleInsider

More users of Valve's Steam gaming service ran a version of Apple's Mac OS X in its first month of availability than the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista combined, according to a new hardware survey.

appleinsider.com

NOW, it is at 2.47%

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

Therefore, in 11 years, the marketshare has tanked for macOS. Windows grew.

Who the heck knows what will happen in 5 years. Microsoft could (very unlikely) go out of business and macOS could have 80% of the marketshare in 5 years. But as of NOW and the projected estimated growth of macOS gaming in Steam (where I intend to release my game), it will not grow big enough to be a CRITICAL necessity to port my game to macOS.

 

[Adarna]

Provided that there is a lot interest in the M1 Max's 57 billion transistors and 32-core GPU cores I can see the next 2022 Mac event or WWDC 2022 where in they'll show off Apple Silicon-optimized, Parallel & Crossover games.

It isnt stressed enough how big of a deal is 57 billion transistors of the M1 Max is. Its the most transistors on a 5nm process chip & the most transistors on a chip that was released in 2021.

This would make a great show case when they release the iMac Pro/27" & Mac Pro that are rumored to have multi die M1 Max SIP(?)

Apple couldn't do this 2 weeks ago as they didn't want to risk a leak on the M1 Max & M1 Pro.

 

[pmiles]

Provided that there is a lot interest in the M1 Max's 57 billion transistors and 32-core GPU cores I can see the next 2022 Mac event or WWDC 2022 where in they'll show off Apple Silicon-optimized, Parallel & Crossover games.

Apple couldn't do this 2 weeks ago as they didn't want to risk a leak on the M1 Max & M1 Pro.

You must be able to live without air.... because that pipe dream of yours requires a hefty amount of holding one's breath.

 

[Adarna]

You must be able to live without air.... because that pipe dream of yours requires a hefty amount of holding one's breath.

Showing emulated games running at better than native Intel speeds will show off how powerful Apple Silicon is.

 

[2021]

Showing emulated games running at better than native Intel speeds will show off how powerful Apple Silicon is.

How many games have they shown during the last event? Seemed like a perfect opportunity.

 

[NotTooLate]

Do you have ANY stats to prove that Mac buyers have more purchasing power than Windows PC buyers? People build their own RGB gaming systems for over $2,000. BUILD a system for over $2,000. That is an insane amount of performance for a Windows PC. My custom built gaming PC is $2,500 and I even had an existing GPU to put in it, otherwise it would be $3,000.

I have not seen proof that Mac buyers === more rich/more purchasing power. There is no evidence that supports that. I have seen college kids that work at McDonalds with Macs that can barely pay their bills but they have a mac!

And in 5 years, I will either be on a new game, or my game will have evolved where its not the same game. Porting a game now does no good.

Also, lets take a road down in history since you claim to be judging my lack of ability of "forward thinking". Steam unfortunately doesn't have the ability to go back in time in their history page, but I found several pages that reference the Game marketshare in Steam was above 8% in 2010.

Steam survey finds more than 8% of gamers use Apple's Mac OS X | AppleInsider

More users of Valve's Steam gaming service ran a version of Apple's Mac OS X in its first month of availability than the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista combined, according to a new hardware survey.

appleinsider.com

NOW, it is at 2.47%

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

store.steampowered.com

Therefore, in 11 years, the marketshare has tanked for macOS. Windows grew.

Who the heck knows what will happen in 5 years. Microsoft could (very unlikely) go out of business and macOS could have 80% of the marketshare in 5 years. But as of NOW and the projected estimated growth of macOS gaming in Steam (where I intend to release my game), it will not grow big enough to be a CRITICAL necessity to port my game to macOS.

Of course , again , you are lumping the entire PC market vs the Mac , giving me an example about your PC gaming rig and McDonald workers having Macs , like reddit is not full of kids saving their livelihood to buy a single scalped GPU , give me a break with anecdotes ..... you realize (I know you do) that Steam is full with old PC`s , you are making it seem like PC gaming == 3080`s GPU`s 3K machines , cant be further from the truth.

Look , you do your risk calculations , other will do theirs , you are ignoring the AS transition which is the topic of the discussion taking me back a decade , yes , I understand that Macs in the past were bad HW proposition vs the PC market , the point of this discussion is if the AS will make a difference to the current state of things or not.

If you are writing a new game today , and choose to keep DX12 only in mind , that's fine , If expect others to keep a multiplatfrom support in mind for new projects.

I would say this , if you have a game that is desirable on MacOS , due to lack of current competition , its a good time to capitalize on it , and I would bet that BG3 will do just that when released , it gets SO MUCH free publicity for being M1 native that I cant see them not making big time return on their investment, hopefully they will do a dual lunch to really gauge the market, as a staggered release wont be reflective of what ppl prefer.

You need to stop harping on MacOS taking over MS or MS going out of business like its the only scenario where gaming on a Mac is profitable.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Provided that there is a lot interest in the M1 Max's 57 billion transistors and 32-core GPU cores I can see the next 2022 Mac event or WWDC 2022 where in they'll show off Apple Silicon-optimized, Parallel & Crossover games.

That won't happen. If anything, it will be a hobby project by an enthusiastic group, similar to emulators. An interesting one though, if I had time, it'd like to get my hands on it and play around a little with Crossover.

Showing emulated games running at better than native Intel speeds will show off how powerful Apple Silicon is.

Goalposts are moved quite a bit here, we went from "the next AS will dominate the gaming market due to performance", over "there will be ports" to "running via Crossover and only beating Intel". The latter will probably be it. But Intel is not the competition here. Sure games run via iGPU, but that's usually not what gamers use. Right now the Crossover performance is around native 1050/1060 GPU performance, so that's a good thing and good enough for some games. Some games won't be supported though, but it's a good start. It brings the new MBPs to entry level 13"-16" gaming laptops via Crossover.

Native, I have to say I'm disappointed. The 32C Max is more around a 3050/3060, at least for games/graphics. These things are really optimized for high fill rates and photo/video work. That's where they really shine. For compute/graphics, they're not bad, but after the whole keynote and rumors before that, I expected more. Curious to see what the M2 will bring to the table next year.

 

[Adarna]

That won't happen. If anything, it will be a hobby project by an enthusiastic group, similar to emulators. An interesting one though, if I had time, it'd like to get my hands on it and play around a little with Crossover.

Goalposts are moved quite a bit here, we went from "the next AS will dominate the gaming market due to performance", over "there will be ports" to "running via Crossover and only beating Intel". The latter will probably be it. But Intel is not the competition here. Sure games run via iGPU, but that's usually not what gamers use. Right now the Crossover performance is around native 1050/1060 GPU performance, so that's a good thing and good enough for some games. Some games won't be supported though, but it's a good start. It brings the new MBPs to entry level 13"-16" gaming laptops via Crossover.

Native, I have to say I'm disappointed. The 32C Max is more around a 3050/3060, at least for games/graphics. These things are really optimized for high fill rates and photo/video work. That's where they really shine. For compute/graphics, they're not bad, but after the whole keynote and rumors before that, I expected more. Curious to see what the M2 will bring to the table next year.

I think I wasn't descriptive enough.

Apple showing Parallel or Crossover games will frame how Apple Silicon is powerful enough to run Windows games on Apple Silicon.

Apple will then invite a developer on stage to demo M1 Pro/Max-optimized titles.

Optimizing apps takes a few years to accomplish. The Developer Transition Kit was released June 2020.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

I think I wasn't descriptive enough.

Apple showing Parallel or Crossover games will frame how Apple Silicon is powerful enough to run Windows games on Apple Silicon.

Apple will then invite a developer on stage to demo M1 Pro/Max-optimized titles.

Optimizing apps takes a few years to accomplish. The Developer Transition Kit was released June 2020.

Ah, sorry. I thought you meant an optimized Crossover version from Apple similar to what Steam is doing for Linux.
Time will tell I guess.

 

[Adarna]

Ah, sorry. I thought you meant an optimized Crossover version from Apple similar to what Steam is doing for Linux.
Time will tell I guess.

Linux on the desktop has been an unfunny running joke as early as 1999. Steam knows there is demand for games on Linux but it isn't worth the developer's dollars to create a native port for it.

Its the chicken or the egg paradox. For there to be Apple Silicon-optimized games then there should be Macs with Apple Silicon.

I'd start seeing optimized native titles around Nov 2023.

 

[Ethosik]

Of course , again , you are lumping the entire PC market vs the Mac , giving me an example about your PC gaming rig and McDonald workers having Macs , like reddit is not full of kids saving their livelihood to buy a single scalped GPU , give me a break with anecdotes ..... you realize (I know you do) that Steam is full with old PC`s , you are making it seem like PC gaming == 3080`s GPU`s 3K machines , cant be further from the truth.

Look , you do your risk calculations , other will do theirs , you are ignoring the AS transition which is the topic of the discussion taking me back a decade , yes , I understand that Macs in the past were bad HW proposition vs the PC market , the point of this discussion is if the AS will make a difference to the current state of things or not.

If you are writing a new game today , and choose to keep DX12 only in mind , that's fine , If expect others to keep a multiplatfrom support in mind for new projects.

I would say this , if you have a game that is desirable on MacOS , due to lack of current competition , its a good time to capitalize on it , and I would bet that BG3 will do just that when released , it gets SO MUCH free publicity for being M1 native that I cant see them not making big time return on their investment, hopefully they will do a dual lunch to really gauge the market, as a staggered release wont be reflective of what ppl prefer.

You need to stop harping on MacOS taking over MS or MS going out of business like its the only scenario where gaming on a Mac is profitable.

Where the heck did I say pc gaming is all 3080s? I’m referencing Steam survey which lists GTX 1060 as the most used. But you are also failing to prove that Mac buyers have more “purchasing power”. It’s just simply false.

And my example of “windows completely dying” was a best …..absolute BEST CASE for macos growth. Yet I don’t foresee even a 30% marketshare 5 years from now in macos if that were to happen today.

 

[decafjava]

This thread make sme wonder how a small outfit like Laminar (developers of X-Plane) manage to create ports on 3 desktop OS and both main mobile OS.

 

[cardfan]

If anything apple silicon fractured macOS. If market share was bad before its even worse now. Intel macOS is legacy. You don’t touch this despite most macs being this. It’s downhill. Even most threads would laugh at anyone wanting to buy intel macs now and heavily recommend they don’t.

So you have m1 macs now vs windows. Although apple is off to a good start, they started from zero a year ago. M1 dominates this extremely little market share. It’s a mobile chip. It won’t run aaa games worth a crap.

If apple was even interested at all in this, they’d have to do a console first and do their own version of steam (apple game store). And hope it trickles to macs. All that would require several years to set up properly.

This is a company that has no consumer monitors. No controllers. Nothing gaming related on macs. It’s all iOS. Any thought of games starts with iOS. And usually ends with apple taking 30% while having nothing much else to do with it.

What I saw at presentation is that apple is only interested in macs just enough to build hardware to push Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Xcode (quite essential for iOS development). That’s beyond the m1 which handles typical tasks well.

What I also saw this past year is that apple silicon is basically a laptop market. Sure they’ll sell Mac mini and iMac both running laptop chips. And sure there’s Mac Pro but that starting price and target market has never been us. Point is if I want games on pc I get a desktop pc. Apple doesn’t even compete there. My current desktop with rtx 3080 will blow away the unannounced iMac in 2022.

Bottom line if you care about games all you don’t buy a 2k+ Mac with that in mind.

 

[Ethosik]

If anything apple silicon fractured macOS. If market share was bad before its even worse now. Intel macOS is legacy. You don’t touch this despite most macs being this. It’s downhill. Even most threads would laugh at anyone wanting to buy intel macs now and heavily recommend they don’t.

So you have m1 macs now vs windows. Although apple is off to a good start, they started from zero a year ago. M1 dominates this extremely little market share. It’s a mobile chip. It won’t run aaa games worth a crap.

If apple was even interested at all in this, they’d have to do a console first and do their own version of steam (apple game store). And hope it trickles to macs. All that would require several years to set up properly.

This is a company that has no consumer monitors. No controllers. Nothing gaming related on macs. It’s all iOS. Any thought of games starts with iOS. And usually ends with apple taking 30% while having nothing much else to do with it.

What I saw at presentation is that apple is only interested in macs just enough to build hardware to push Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Xcode (quite essential for iOS development). That’s beyond the m1 which handles typical tasks well.

What I also saw this past year is that apple silicon is basically a laptop market. Sure they’ll sell Mac mini and iMac both running laptop chips. And sure there’s Mac Pro but that starting price and target market has never been us. Point is if I want games on pc I get a desktop pc. Apple doesn’t even compete there. My current desktop with rtx 3080 will blow away the unannounced iMac in 2022.

Bottom line if you care about games all you don’t buy a 2k+ Mac with that in mind.

Yep. Also, as I have said before as a developer, I don’t care if the $700 Mac mini has an equivalent of an RTX 3090 in it. It’s marketshare simply put. Apple can have controllers, consoles and the best hardware out there, but until marketshare improves, it will be a item FAR FAR down on the priority list to get to, if at all.

Also, just like with everything, there are good and bad things about macOS and Windows. On Windows I can still play 20+ year old games on Windows 10. And that’s NOT by using DosBox or emulation/virtualization or any tools like that. But that leads to Windows having so much bloat.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

This thread make sme wonder how a small outfit like Laminar (developers of X-Plane) manage to create ports on 3 desktop OS and both main mobile OS.

Laminar is a research company above all. Their focus is on realistic physics and the game is one way for them to show off their actual work, a demonstrator if you will. They're selling these physic models to businesses/researchers and that's how they make their money. The game is a side product, probably making a loss which is compensated for with the high prices of their "actual work".

This is very common in the research world. I'm using Unreal/Unity and others as well for simulation and visualization purposes. You can fire up a "game" control and interact with robots/cars/drones, have fun with them, complete missions and so on, like a game. This is not the core of what I do though, it's a side product necessary to show the people who pay for it what I do. I could of course show them published papers or algorithms and they wouldn't understand it. This stuff has to be "dumbed down" for those pushing numbers. If I can show this cool interactive stuff, they can use and see how it works, they'll be happy to pay a few millions for research for the next two or three years and then it starts all over again.

If anything apple silicon fractured macOS.

Indeed, it's back to the PPC days, but even worse. The whole graphics/simulation and deep learning market is jumping the ship right now when it comes to Apple. It's probably not event the hardware in the low-end segment (and yes, the new MBPs are low end), it's the absolute lack of software while Nvidia spent the last decade to build tools for everyone on any scale. From simple laptops to high end desktops and HPC clusters. Apple is aggressively targeting the YouTuber, photography and music market, will gain sales there and lose all the other markets. Risky game. People go where the software is, not where the best hardware is. And people can't run their Windows business software anymore on Macs. That will have an impact. In the end, Apple will merge the Macs with iPads and the app system and none of this will matter.

 

[diamond.g]

Out of curiosity has anyone gotten AoE4 running on Crossover or Parallels?

 

[maflynn]

Out of curiosity has anyone gotten AoE4 running on Crossover or Parallels?

It appears that it won't work on crossover

As for Parallels, I'm sure it will work, but I suspect given the high amount of graphic detail, and computation overhead it won't be terribly fast.

If anything apple silicon fractured macOS.

Also add the M1 vs. the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Yes, the M1 Max provides a very good GPU, but who wants to spend 3,500 dollars for a M1 Max with 32gb and 1TB of storage to play games? Or another way to look at it, how many professionals that do need a M1 Max will want to play games? Seems like no matter how you paint it, Apple's most capable Mac is will be Apple's least likely to be playing games.

I suspect that publishers look at their return on investment when choosing what platforms to write for and right now when AAA games are being story boarded, and planned the Mac is not something that will largely make the cut and these AAA games take 5+ years to produce. Also consider that right now Apple's GPUs are being compared to mobile GPUs where most of the gaming is on desktops AFAIK with more powerful and capable GPUs I gotta believe publishers look at that metric as well.

 

[diamond.g]

It appears that it won't work on crossover
View attachment 1900432

As for Parallels, I'm sure it will work, but I suspect given the high amount of graphic detail, and computation overhead it won't be terribly fast.


Also add the M1 vs. the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Yes, the M1 Max provides a very good GPU, but who wants to spend 3,500 dollars for a M1 Max with 32gb and 1TB of storage to play games? Or another way to look at it, how many professionals that do need a M1 Max will want to play games? Seems like no matter how you paint it, Apple's most capable Mac is will be Apple's least likely to be playing games.

I suspect that publishers look at their return on investment when choosing what platforms to write for and right now when AAA games are being story boarded, and planned the Mac is not something that will largely make the cut and these AAA games take 5+ years to produce. Also consider that right now Apple's GPUs are being compared to mobile GPUs where most of the gaming is on desktops AFAIK with more powerful and capable GPUs I gotta believe publishers look at that metric as well.

I was more curious if games that are DX12 only work to be honest, lol.

 

[l0stl0rd]

I think another factor is how slow the industry is adapting / implementing new features, just look at how many games there with RTX and that came out like 3 years ago, or how long it took for DX12 to become more common.

Which in a way is normal considering the time it takes to make games.

So I am guessing in 2-4 years we will see if there are more OsX games.

 

[diamond.g]

I think another factor is how slow the industry is adapting / implementing new features, just look at how many games there with RTX and that came out like 3 years ago, or how long it took for DX12 to become more common.

Which in a way is normal considering the time it takes to make games.

So I am guessing in 2-4 years we will see if there are more OsX games.

Intestingly you have to use DX12 to make Xbox games. On the PC side, unless you use Vulkan, you have to use DX12 to DXR, and you are right most games don't have it because it wasn't until last year that both GPU makers came out with a GPU that supports it. As it stands I believe there is only 1 AAA game that actually requires a DXR/RTX GPU to run, and they actually include the old engine version in case you don't have it.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

As for Parallels, I'm sure it will work, but I suspect given the high amount of graphic detail, and computation overhead it won't be terribly fast.

Don't think it will, Parallels still lacks full DX12 support. Or was that added in a update recently?

I think another factor is how slow the industry is adapting / implementing new features, just look at how many games there with RTX and that came out like 3 years ago, or how long it took for DX12 to become more common.

To be fair, DX12 was a mess, to a certain degree it still is. Can't blame anyone not adapting DX12 if certain issues arise. From a technical point of view DX12 is what you want, but sometimes it's just not feasible to work around issues facing the costs and possible delay of release.