Tom's HW too wrote an article yesterday. They also confirmed the possibility of installing games on external drives: "Future updates will also let Mac owners install games to separate disks from the Mac App Store, which is helpful given the ballooning size of games."
"Just a few years ago, the idea of gaming on a Mac was a joke among the enthusiast PC community. But I'll give Apple this — it's clearly putting in the work. And while it definitely can't compete with Windows PCs or consoles on its library just yet, Apple does have one trick up its sleeve that I think, in time, may be able to draw a certain type of person to gaming on its platforms: the ecosystem."
"Where Apple may have an advantage is where it typically excels: in its ecosystem. If games are released for the Mac, but then you can play them on your iPad or iPhone, it could open up gaming to tons of people who wouldn't have done so previously — and make it easier for enthusiast Mac gamers to play anywhere. Playing anywhere has been a bit of a white whale for gaming companies lately. Think of cloud services like Game Pass from Microsoft or GeForce Now from Nvidia. The idea was you'd stream games to play them anywhere. Apple's vision strikes me as a slightly more traditional version of the idea. Never mind streaming, but how about running the game locally on each device?"
"The company is catching up on some recent releases, like
Palworld, which is set to release later this year. But toss in new developer tools and the idea that your games could carry over to other Apple devices, and that's where things get interesting."
"A
MacBook Pro with an M3 Max played Control at 46 - 50 frames per second on high-quality settings and high ray tracing with a resolution of 1728 x 1117. I picked up the DualSense controller Apple had in front of the Mac and took on some Hiss guards as Jesse Faden, and it felt largely ready to go. If this is what convinced Remedy to port the game over, I can kind of see why it happened. With the M3 series and M4 chips supporting ray tracing tech, the game looks great."
"But sitting in that room, playing some
Resident Evil on a MacBook Pro
, Assassin's Creed on an iPad,
Palworld on a Mac, and
Control through x86 emulation tech makes me believe Apple is taking gaming seriously this time. It may never release a gaming laptop — instead, the idea is
any Mac (with Apple Silicon, of course) can be a gaming machine. So can any iPad, any iPhone. It's a bold claim that will take continued successes to convince the often-skeptical PC gaming community."
Apple has to catch up to PCs on its gaming library, but making everything just work across devices is an attractive proposition.
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