Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games

[diamond.g]

Yes.

I am not clear on how not being able to see active player counts is a good thing in the long term.

 

[maflynn]

That’s a good thing ultimately.

Why? I think the more information we have the better we the consumer can make decisions. It can help game publishers see actual gaming information to maybe nudge them closer to producing games for the Mac platform.

Its like when apple released their M1 vs highest end GPU graph, no real numbers, no information. Once the computers were in people's hands they saw how laughable this was. While the M1 Ultra is a great chip it did not have the same performance of a Nividia's highest end RTX GPU

 

[thenewperson]

I am not clear on how not being able to see active player counts is a good thing in the long term.

Users are annoying with those.

 

[crazy dave]

@Homy do you really think it's physically possible that the Mac market share jumped so much in month? How many Macs would Apple need to sell in a single month for it to happen?

Those browser data might be useful to check for year to year changes, but surely not a single month variation.

Yeah there's noise in that data set, no question. But there are outside sources to support some sort of increase in Mac users. Rather than take this particular data set at face value, it's better to simply say, it is so far a (minor) supporting data point in a recent increase in Mac users.

I am not clear on how not being able to see active player counts is a good thing in the long term.

I think I get where @thenewperson is coming from, gamers and even journalists tend to obsess over those numbers to unhealthy degree which can actually harm games. There have been a number of articles and videos released about this topic about the misuse of active player counts for games. On the other hand, you can also argue that the remedy to that is educating people on what it means and what it doesn't (especially for single player games) rather than hiding the data and Apple, in particular, needs to tout wins IF more people are using the App Store/Game Center (though I suppose only the latter might have the Steam-like functionality, the App Store itself is likely to only contain download data, which is still useful). But again I can see where @thenewperson is coming from and agree to some extent - in the larger context of gaming beyond macOS vs Windows, active player counts haven't always been a healthy addition to the discourse.

 

[Homy]

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[Homy]

Epic launcher for Mac now supports Apple Silicon natively. First EA, now Epic but Steam is still in Beta.

 

[diamond.g]

Yeah there's noise in that data set, no question. But there are outside sources to support some sort of increase in Mac users. Rather than take this particular data set at face value, it's better to simply say, it is so far a (minor) supporting data point in a recent increase in Mac users.

I think I get where @thenewperson is coming from, gamers and even journalists tend to obsess over those numbers to unhealthy degree which can actually harm games. There have been a number of articles and videos released about this topic about the misuse of active player counts for games. On the other hand, you can also argue that the remedy to that is educating people on what it means and what it doesn't (especially for single player games) rather than hiding the data and Apple, in particular, needs to tout wins IF more people are using the App Store/Game Center (though I suppose only the latter might have the Steam-like functionality, the App Store itself is likely to only contain download data, which is still useful). But again I can see where @thenewperson is coming from and agree to some extent - in the larger context of gaming beyond macOS vs Windows, active player counts haven't always been a healthy addition to the discourse.

But we know publishers are looking at this data for what kids of games to release. And in the case of macOS if they should do a port of a game.

I guess I look at it this way: It seems like Capcom has been successful with it's RE series on Apple platforms, so why haven't games like the Monster Hunter or Street Fighter been worked on?

 

[salamanderjuice]

But we know publishers are looking at this data for what kids of games to release. And in the case of macOS if they should do a port of a game.

I guess I look at it this way: It seems like Capcom has been successful with it's RE series on Apple platforms, so why haven't games like the Monster Hunter or Street Fighter been worked on?

Have they been successful with RE on Mac? They haven't announced a Requiem Mac port for example. Were the ports not just a partnership with Apple?

I thought the iOS versions of all the recent AAA games have really underperformed in general.

EDIT: Supposedly the iOS version of RE4 Remake only sold about 16,000 copies by Dec. 2024 (https://www.pocketgamer.biz/resident-evil-4-remake-surpasses-10m-unit-sales-in-record-breaking-time/).

 

[JordanNZ]

Have they been successful with RE on Mac? They haven't announced a Requiem Mac port for example. Were the ports not just a partnership with Apple?

I thought the iOS versions of all the recent AAA games have really underperformed in general.

There's no good data on how well they sold, just some sketchy reports. But considering Capcom kept releasing them, they must have been doing OK. Considering they were iPhone 15 Pro + for all of them, I'm sure the market was somewhat limited on iOS. But being universal purchases and running on iOS/iPad/macOS probably helped somewhat.

 

[salamanderjuice]

There's no good data on how well they sold, just some sketchy reports. But considering Capcom kept releasing them, they must have been doing OK. Considering they were iPhone 15 Pro + for all of them, I'm sure the market was somewhat limited on iOS. But being universal purchases and running on iOS/iPad/macOS probably helped somewhat.

Not if they had a contract with Apple that required them to release certain or some number of games.

 

[maflynn]

There's no good data on how well they sold, just some sketchy reports.

Isn't that the reason why @diamond.g stating that having steamdb.info type info may be beneficial