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Gaming isn’t dead for ARM
- Thread starter Sledneck52
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I really hope this will become reality but nearly all mobile games are made for kids.
The litmus test will be whether GTA6 is released on ARM Macs.
If we see multi platform AAA games coming to PS5/PC are also released to Mac, then I will agree.
If what you want to play is glorified mobile games, no thanks for me.
We shall see. Interesting times indeed. What I got to lose?
If the worst comes true, I'd still have a nice custom built PC and PS5 for all my gaming needs.
If what you want to play is glorified mobile games, no thanks for me.
We shall see. Interesting times indeed. What I got to lose?
If the worst comes true, I'd still have a nice custom built PC and PS5 for all my gaming needs.
Apple secures three month exclusive on Apple Silicon Macs. Free copy with every Apple Silicon Mac sold during those three months.
Boom, Apple has 10 million new Apple Silicon Macs out in the wild!
Also you don't have a chance of playing AAA games with MacOS running on less than 16gb of ram. So they would have weird segmentation since the sub $1300 machines are likely going to come with 8gb.
The PS5 has 16gb has ~$200 of GDDR and ~$300 worth of APU in a loss leading expected 500-600 machine which isn't running a full OS!
The PS5 has 16gb has ~$200 of GDDR and ~$300 worth of APU in a loss leading expected 500-600 machine which isn't running a full OS!
They certainly have the cash for it, and if the only way to play GTA VI is to buy an Apple Silicon Mac or wait three months, then there will be a lot of Mac sales...?
Would it really cost $5B for that? Seems way too high. Do they even make that much from total sales?
GTA5 broke $1b is sales after three days.
We can put the GTA fantasies to rest. Apple is not paying for exclusive rights to a game where you murder prostitutes of color.
Has it been confirmed that there will be no discrete gpu? Just because there will be an integrated gpu doesn’t mean there won’t be a discrete gpu. Sure, I don’t expect one in a MacBook Air, but I do for a MacBook Pro. We already have this with current intel cpu + amp gpu.
Ultimately I don’t see AAA games coming to the Mac unless it first comes to iPhone. In which case it’s not really the same class that we see on consoles/windows.
Ultimately I don’t see AAA games coming to the Mac unless it first comes to iPhone. In which case it’s not really the same class that we see on consoles/windows.
I think saying they're for kids depends on your perspective. I prefer to say they are "pick up and play" - quick, relatively easy to master, satisfying games that you can do for the commute or coffee break. They naturally grab the attention of kids purely because kids attention spans are short.
There are some fantastic mobile games out there but what has really hurt the platform is the trend for free games with in app purchases. This cheapens them imo, but if you look specifically at the games you pay once for, there are some gems there.
If games are going to come to ARM Macs and other Apple devices then they need to move past the in app purchase model and make bigger deeper games that you pay for upon purchase.
I think that's a misguided assumption. There are games I'd love to play that are forever exclusive to Microsoft PCs and Xbox, or then Switch - platforms and companies with long histories in gaming - but I'm still not buying any of those just to get access to those games. I'm satisfied with the games I have access to on the platforms I'm already invested in.
If I was a Windows user, waiting for three months for an Apple-exclusive game to arrive on my gaming platform of choice would be no big deal compared to spending a couple of thousand euros on an Apple Silicon Mac capable of running GTA VI with high quality, resolution and framerate.
So GTAV made $6B in revenue up to the end of November 2018 and is the most profitable entertainment 'item' ever. I had no idea. I'm guessing they spent some money on marketing but even if $5.5B of that was profit, Charging $5B for a 3 month exclusive seems very very steep. I can't see that paying off for Apple. Selling enough extra Macs to cover $5B in outlay would be a tall order. How many gamers can afford $1000+ to play one game a bit early? Is it 5M? Not sure a out that.
Holy frakk, if I see this idiotic video with its clickbait title brought up once more, I'm going to puke.
That nonsense only shows how little this guy knows about what he's talking about.
Let's have a closer look at his arguments, okay?
Apple uses SoC, PS5 and Xbox Series X use SoCs, so Apple's SoC must automatically be great for gaming, right?
No. There are a lot of SoCs which aren't the slightest suitable for high quality gaming. At best, this only shows that SoCs don't necessarily have to be bad for gaming.
Metal developer tools for Windows make Mac development sooo much easier!
No. What can be done with these tools is at most a tiny step in the development process. There still are a lot of expensive dedicated Macs necessary for the complete process. There's already a whole discussion about this, so there's no need to rehash all this.
ArMacs run iOS games, which are totally successful, and AAA developers are bringing their titles to mobile platforms to profit from this success.
None of these are AAA games. He's citing here a number of stripped down, casual, free2play spinoff games, which have sometimes very little in common with the full, original games. Pokemon Go is no full Pokemon game. Diablo Immortal is no full Diablo game. Elder Scroll Blades is not a full Elder Scrolls game. Hearthstone has been developed as casual game with mobile platforms in mind in the first place. It's not World of Warcraft.
The majority of these mobile spin-off games aren't even made by the original developer.
He's also nonsensically conflating download numbers for a free2play spinoff game (CoD Mobile) with the sales number of $70+ games. Apples and oranges.
Developers can cover the whole Apple ecosystem when developing for the Mac. They just have to adapt the control scheme.
Technically correct, but he's obviously not knowing that there are a lot more differences: apps for iOS/iPadOS/tvOS have strict size limitations, which makes them unsuitable for true current AAA games. These often are now dozens of GB big, some even 100+ GB, which by far exceeds the hard 20ish GB limit for iOS/tvOS apps.
Also, the necessary adaptions for different control schemes are much larger and difficult than he makes them.
On top of all this, he does not even know the difference between raytracing support in Metal and Nvidia's RTX, which is based on dedicated raytracing cores in their chips. As far as we know, Apple's GPU lack something comparable.
The bottom line is that Apple Silicon does absolutely nothing to make Macs more interesting for AAA developers. There will be no Battlefield V, no GTA 6, no Elder Scrolls 6 for Mac.
Not everyone thinks like you. While I for myself would agree, there are quite a lot people actually buying a specific gaming platform just for its exclusive games.
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Absolutely, and I never said otherwise. That's why the paragraph you quoted had a lot of me / I / I'm. It was there to provide background for my opinion.
The second paragraph was the one where I went beyond personal preference and proposed what kind of behavior I'd expect (or not expect) to see in others - that is, not many would pay a couple of thousand euros to get a machine for the sole purpose of getting access to a game three months before a release on their actual platform of choice.
I'm fairly sure we agree there, too?
I assume his point is in opposition to all the people saying AS Macs will suck for games" because integrated GPU". Clearly this is not a given.
It does if their GPUs are good enough.
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I think he makes some good points, about the game controller in particular. He does make mistakes, but what he says is generally more informed than what we typically read on the internet "Macs suck, PCs better", "no RTX on Macs", "Consoles more powerful".
He never said that. His point is that an SoC can perform well. His mistake however is saying that Sony and MS are moving towards SoCs. They've already done so with their current consoles.
I don't understand his message this way. He just says that there is less constraints against developing a game for Apple OSes and that Apple seems to pay more attention towards gaming development.
But he does show a trend. We're not there yet, but the revenue generated by mobile gaming is clearly drawing the attention of AAA game studios.
That doesn't seem insurmontable.
Not if the game uses a controller. But it's true that the argument about correspondance between tap and click is rather weak.
Indeed, and the demo he showed was run on AMD hardware. However, I'm getting his general point that Apple is not ignoring ray tracing, and I expect them to ship their own ray-tracing hardware soon. The neural engine may already be able to to interesting stuff with respect to denoising (which uses AI on nVidia RTX GPUs).
Absolutely nothing? I disagree. We'll see what Apple does. I believe there is great potential if they do the right thing.
Attractiveness of a potential gaming platform does not hinge on the performance of its GPU alone. Otherwise, none of Nintendo's consoles in the last one and a half decades or so would have been as successful as they are.
It surely is, but that does not change that AAA games target an in part wildly different target audience than mobile games. The extremely negative reactions of the audience to Diablo Immortal and Elder Scrolls Blades at the presentations of these games at BlizzCon/E3 should be evidence enough of this.
No one will create a game on the same level as GTA V, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, or Destiny 2 for mobile platforms anytime soon. At most, the AAA studios will keep releasing dumbed down spin-offs of their franchises to skim of these sweet microtransaction profits.
Only if Apple suddenly changes their minds and allows installation sizes of 100, 150, 200 GB. With the impending release of the next console generation, games will only become even larger. What Apple allows at the moment is basically a joke in comparison.
...which you are not allowed to rely on. Apple demands that games for iOS/iPadOS are playable with just the touch screen. They demand that games for tvOS are playable with just that stupid remote. Otherwise your game does not get approved. These are all just more limitations making the Apple ecosystem less attractive for AAA developers.
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Rebirth.
4-5 million Mac AS per quarter.
4-5 million iPads per quarter.
Both using A14 variants. Potent hardware in 40 million units sold in one year.
Add that to iPhone A14.
That's alot of gaming. Apps. £££.
As soon as the 1st AS Mac hits the shop...it gets millions of iphone and ipad apps and games.
Write once. Deploy all.
The full realisation of this on tuned incoming Apple hardware will start to dawn later...
Azrael.