I don’t think there’s a silver bullet option here.
Agreed. Before Game Porting Toolkit they were effectively in the same spot as Microsoft trying to entice developers to use WPF (“it runs on your phone, Xbox, and Windows!”) But even at Microsoft’s scale it never caught on, including internally.
Apple’s North Star seems to be games compiled for Apple Silicon that shine on all of its devices. So I’d expect:
- more tools that lower the cost of implementation and conversion like Game Porting Toolkit, the Shader Conversion utility, and wouldn’t be surprised if they leveraged an LLM to help with converting lines of code
- porting more high profile games, but prioritizing ones that port engines and not just one off implementations (games that have a social network effect could also make the cut)
- widen the conversion funnel for games that already work on iPad to run on Mac. These should be the cheapest to convert and employs devs already familiar with Apple’s ecosystem. Many (most?) Apple Arcade games seem to fall in this category.
- improve Mac App Store conversion, including highlighting sales, adding price matching and wish list features, etc. (as an aside, Stray was on sale for $19.99 USD yesterday on the Mac App Store.) “Sales” might be a no-go from a brand perspective, though, since Apple never highlights sales on its store fronts (eg AppleTV, App Store, Apple.com). Sure, they’ll have items on sale, but you only ever see the current price and no mention of the discount.
But nowhere in this strategy do I see open sourcing Game Porting Toolkit, especially after the lackluster experience I had with the most recent production build of Crossover. Nor do I see them buying a studio, while their current strategy is working within Apple’s timeline (which is admittedly much longer than many would like)
