Mac vs iOS gaming: which do you prefer and why?

[MisterSavage]

If you want to play games for the major game publishers, then you either get a console or a PC. Steam has some incredible games, both old and new that are simply not available on Macs. Conversely, as I said before, imo, iOS games are more casual pieces of fluff meant to pass time.

Also the Epic games store gives away at least one game every week for free. I always grab them because some of them are AAA titles. It's depressing how many of them are PC only with no Mac version.

 

[maflynn]

Also the Epic games

True, I opted not to mention Epic, only to avoid any sort of Epic vs. Steam discussions, but you also bring up a great point when you mention AAA titles. There's simply very few of those titles for Macs and that's generally not going to change. It costs millions of dollars to produce some of these games and why add on more cost to roll out a Mac version when the marketshare is tiny (10% or there abouts), and within that small segment, only a tiny fraction of mac owners will be gaming.

 

[MisterSavage]

True, I opted not to mention Epic, only to avoid any sort of Epic vs. Steam discussions

You are a wise moderator!

 

[maflynn]

You are a wise moderator!

Many people would disagree

 

[Aika]

When an update kills most of your games I can see how this might kill what’s left of gaming on the Mac. In Window 10 there are options to run games in compatibility mode back to Windows 7. Although Boot Camp was a great idea, it’s Apple encouraging you to use Windows because Apple just does not care enough about gaming, if they were even thinking about gaming when they implemented it and has never has given it priority hence a self fulfilling prophecy.
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Yeah Mac (native) gaming is just not a viable or a sensible option. I've attempted to use older Macs for this (see here) but they're not a good option either for vintage gaming. I got out my Mac copies of Prey and Command & Conquer 3 thinking they'd be good test games (and I wanted to replay them anyway) and formatted an old machine for Snow Leopard only to realise that Apple's graphic drivers for that GPU didn't support v-sync (this is the second Mac I've owned with this issue) and was hit with the reminder that C&C3 was a terrible cider port that literally takes 2 minutes to load (if at all).

I rebooted into Windows 10 on my main Mac, bought a Prey Steam key on eBay and a CD key for Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection on CDkeys.com instead and have had a much better experience. If an old game doesn't work out of the box, somebody has probably made a fan patch or figured out which settings to change to fix it. That's given me the confidence to sell off the rest of my Mac games and rebuy them on Windows.

It's a shame that Apple are so hostile to gaming and they should probably watch their back as Windows is not the dumpster fire it used to be and with Panos Panay in charge, maybe it will finally look the part too.