Major gaming news at WWDC: Metal and New games

[Homy]

Why would PC players brag about a day one PC release of a game released months ago? It's not a "day one" release.

All these bugs were introduced as a result of porting, not because of day one. It's just a ****** port which the Mac has had plenty of too.

In discussions here and in general about the state of Mac gaming people like to point out the late releases on Mac as one of the reasons against Mac gaming. The recent example is RE Village which was only a year old when announced for Mac. Then just two month after the release of the latest DLC Shadows of Rose people expected Capcom to release RE 4 simultaneously on Mac which was unrealistic. Capcom wouldn’t suddenly start to port its entire catalogue to Mac, at least not so soon, just because they’ve ported their game engine.

So I was talking about the bigger picture and general terms. Day-and-date releases on Mac would be great but I rather wait months or a year until the early problems have been solved instead of getting disappointed at the release, because the bug infested releases on PC have been anything but few and it’s been an increasing trend for the past years. Paying customers have been forced to act as beta testers. The last of US is just the latest. Other examples are Company of Heroes 3, Cyberpunk, Borderlands 3, Fallout 76, No man’s Sky, Batman: Arkham Knight, Final Fantasy 14, Battlefield 4 and more.

It doesn’t matter if the bugs in The Last of US was a result of porting, the bad port is the result of rushing the game to capitalise on the TV series making it having the notorious release day bugs, more common in the PC world. Sure, there may have been bad Mac ports too but during my 27 years of Mac gaming all the games I have played, both AAA and indie have been solid ports with maybe minor bugs only. That’s why I say day-and-date releases are nothing to brag about when many of them are just buggy beta (or alpha) releases on PC.

 

[Homy]

A rather big increase for Apple Silicon on Steam in March.

 

[diamond.g]

A rather big increase for Apple Silicon on Steam in March.

View attachment 2183370

Something has gone wrong cause macOS is below 2% for March.

 

[salamanderjuice]

In discussions here and in general about the state of Mac gaming people like to point out the late releases on Mac as one of the reasons against Mac gaming. The recent example is RE Village which was only a year old when announced for Mac. Then just two month after the release of the latest DLC Shadows of Rose people expected Capcom to release RE 4 simultaneously on Mac which was unrealistic. Capcom wouldn’t suddenly start to port its entire catalogue to Mac, at least not so soon, just because they’ve ported their game engine.

So I was talking about the bigger picture and general terms. Day-and-date releases on Mac would be great but I rather wait months or a year until the early problems have been solved instead of getting disappointed at the release, because the bug infested releases on PC have been anything but few and it’s been an increasing trend for the past years. Paying customers have been forced to act as beta testers. The last of US is just the latest. Other examples are Company of Heroes 3, Cyberpunk, Borderlands 3, Fallout 76, No man’s Sky, Batman: Arkham Knight, Final Fantasy 14, Battlefield 4 and more.

It doesn’t matter if the bugs in The Last of US was a result of porting, the bad port is the result of rushing the game to capitalise on the TV series making it having the notorious release day bugs, more common in the PC world. Sure, there may have been bad Mac ports too but during my 27 years of Mac gaming all the games I have played, both AAA and indie have been solid ports with maybe minor bugs only. That’s why I say day-and-date releases are nothing to brag about when many of them are just buggy beta (or alpha) releases on PC.

Ok. Again though The Last of Us Part One was not a day-and-date release. I don't think anybody was "bragging" about it either. It is important to mention it's a port and that the port is bug riddled. You've mentioned several times how late Mac releases benefit from having release day bugs fixed but these are bugs introduced in the porting process.

Not everybody will encounter bugs either and not everyone will complain about them online. With the size of the Mac gaming market being about 50 times smaller than the PC market you are much less likely to hear about issues hitting the Mac version only especially since on places like Steam where the reviews are pooled and the Mac version are drowned in a sea of PC player reviews.

If Mac was an important market for Capcom then they probably would have at the very least announced a Mac port of RE4 being in the pipeline. Heck with the original RE4 the PS2 port was announced before the GameCube version shipped and that was originally announced as a GameCube exclusive.

 

[Homy]

Something has gone wrong cause macOS is below 2% for March.

Yeah, I saw that but not unusal since the stats are based on the total number of players each month, but if it continues it'll make you wonder a bit.

 

[Homy]

If Mac was an important market for Capcom then they probably would have at the very least announced a Mac port of RE4 being in the pipeline.

Not unless Apple wants to do it first as a nice surprise like last year. None of them, Capcom, Hello Games or Feral said a word before Apple.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

If Mac was an important market for Capcom then they probably would have at the very least announced a Mac port of RE4 being in the pipeline. Heck with the original RE4 the PS2 port was announced before the GameCube version shipped and that was originally announced as a GameCube exclusive.

All marketing at this point. Apple paid Capcom to update the engine and release RE Village as a show case for WWDC. Part of that deal was App Store exclusivity for Apple. RE4 is using the exact same engine. There's really not much to port as nothing changed. Same for going from RE Village to RE4 in Windows. If you talk to the devs, it's already running on macOS. The relation between Apple and Capcom isn't the best after a bug that made RE Village unplayable for some and Apple decided to sit it out, wait and made Capcom take all the blame when it was really an issue on their side (so much for bug free Mac releases after a long time waiting for a release. We've seen more than enough broken Mac releases). It simply comes down to Apple putting down the money for a release and setting a release date. Capcom could have released it day and date.

 

[Colstan]

Something has gone wrong cause macOS is below 2% for March.

Something was really wonky with the March survey.

There's no way Intel suddenly gained 9% CPU share in such a short time period. We've used the Steam survey as a general barometer, but with fluctuations like these, I'm starting to think Valve is providing garbage data.

 

[Homy]

Something was really wonky with the March survey.

View attachment 2183480

There's no way Intel suddenly gained 9% CPU share in such a short time period. We've used the Steam survey as a general barometer, but with fluctuations like these, I'm starting to think Valve is providing garbage data.

I suspected that too. They have corrected the Mac stats.

 

[diamond.g]

Something was really wonky with the March survey.

View attachment 2183480

There's no way Intel suddenly gained 9% CPU share in such a short time period. We've used the Steam survey as a general barometer, but with fluctuations like these, I'm starting to think Valve is providing garbage data.

Yeah the 3060 is now the top card (by itself not including the mobile card). Looking at the GPU table appears that they have just duplicated the stats across difference versions of DX. The Vulkan numbers looks even more crazy.

 

[Nugat Trailers]

Mm. I think the stats need to be rerun. Otherwise, the implications are, assuming Steam has 100 million users...

Over 6 million people went to using RTX 3060s, 2.5 million to 3070s, and 2.13 million to 3060 Tis in a month.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Mm. I think the stats need to be rerun. Otherwise, the implications are, assuming Steam has 100 million users...

The stats are based on returning, active users. So anyone who hasn't played a game in a while won't show up in the stats.

 

[diamond.g]

The stats are based on returning, active users. So anyone who hasn't played a game in a while won't show up in the stats.

Do you happen to know how long/often you have to be active in the Steam client to get prompted for the survey?

 

[GrumpyCoder]

Do you happen to know how long/often you have to be active in the Steam client to get prompted for the survey?

Not exactly. I talked to someone a few years ago and remember being told a 3 months period. Could have changed in the meantime. Independent of the time period, it's certainly not a former statistics, people drop out after a while if they've not played for a while.

 

[mi7chy]

I normally opt out of the Steam hardware survey and for the longest time it never asked again until recently on a whole slew of devices which I opted in this time.

Mac results is going to be skewed, though, since it counts one physical device multiple times since many have native Steam, Crossover Steam and Parallels Steam installed to cover the bases plus maybe Porting Kit Steam. Those are the four active projects for getting PC games to run on AS. So, for Steam MacOS results divide by 3 to get a more realistic count.

 

[Nugat Trailers]

I normally opt out of the Steam hardware survey and for the longest time it never asked again until recently on a whole slew of devices which I opted in this time.

Mac results is going to be skewed, though, since it counts one physical device multiple times since many have native Steam, Crossover Steam and Parallels Steam installed to cover the bases plus maybe Porting Kit Steam. Those are the four active projects for getting PC games to run on AS. So, for Steam MacOS results divide by 3 to get a more realistic count.

Um. I'm going to want a source on that, because that doesn't make sense.

 

[quarkysg]

Um. I'm going to want a source on that, because that doesn't make sense.

The assumption is that ALL Mac users uses steam via ALL 4 ways, all the time. I find that very very unlikely.

Most users just use what's most convenient. Besides, wouldn't CrossOver and Parallels registers the users as Windows? If so, Mac users are actually under-represented. Steam's stats are for macOS only right?

 

[Nugat Trailers]

Yes, and it wouldn't make sense for Valve to count each Mac 3 to 4 times. By that logic, why couldn't they count it 6 times, if the Mac could boot into Windows and Linux. Or 8 times, using a virtual machine on both Windows and Linux as well.

 

[diamond.g]

I haven't been asked in a while to participate in the survey, but I wonder if it is flagged for the account and not for the device. As in if I get asked, I should be asked for all the devices I log into if I log in on the same day I am asked.

 

[Homy]

The assumption is that ALL Mac users uses steam via ALL 4 ways, all the time. I find that very very unlikely.

Most users just use what's most convenient. Besides, wouldn't CrossOver and Parallels registers the users as Windows? If so, Mac users are actually under-represented. Steam's stats are for macOS only right?

Yes, and it wouldn't make sense for Valve to count each Mac 3 to 4 times. By that logic, why couldn't they count it 6 times, if the Mac could boot into Windows and Linux. Or 8 times, using a virtual machine on both Windows and Linux as well.

Yes, strange reasoning. I think Steam registers your HW and in all those cases it would register as one and the same Mac with the same IP adress and user account. If Steam registers different OSs it would actually be a benefit to Windows showing there are more Win users than the opposite. I also read that the survey is like others a summary of a small amount of participants, not all Steam users because that would be too much data from hundreds of millions of users.

Maybe it's the Chinese gamers' "fault" because they are now 25% more. So more than half of Steam users are from China?

 

[diamond.g]

Yes, strange reasoning. I think Steam registers your HW and in all those cases it would register as one and the same Mac with the same IP adress and user account. If Steam registers different OSs it would actually be a benefit to Windows showing there are more Win users than the opposite. I also read that the survey is like others a summary of an small amount of participants, not all Steam users because that would be too much data from hundreds of millions of users.

Maybe it's the Chinese gamers' "fault" because they are now 25% more. So more than half of Steam users are from China?

View attachment 2184344

Gaming cafe's.

 

[dmccloud]

I normally opt out of the Steam hardware survey and for the longest time it never asked again until recently on a whole slew of devices which I opted in this time.

Mac results is going to be skewed, though, since it counts one physical device multiple times since many have native Steam, Crossover Steam and Parallels Steam installed to cover the bases plus maybe Porting Kit Steam. Those are the four active projects for getting PC games to run on AS. So, for Steam MacOS results divide by 3 to get a more realistic count.

This would only apply and be even remotely accurate under two conditions:

1. Everyone using Steam on a Mac uses it in every way you have listed here. That simply is not the case. Many people (like myself) have a dedicated gaming PC and consoles, and only install the base version of Steam and run games compatible with MacOS rather than using Parallels, Crossover, WINE, etc. to run Windows-based games. Your approach would dilute that segment of the userbase (which is likely a far greater percentage of Mac users than those running third-party solutions for running Windows apps on a Mac).

2. Those using Steam in multiple ways on a Mac would have to opt into the hardware survey under each install of the OS they are running. This is not a likely scenario either, especially given that the hardware surveys only touch upon a small sample of the user base rather than everyone using Steam.

 

[mi7chy]

Crossover, porting kit, heroicgameslauncher, homebrew wine, wineskin, etc. are translation software so the host OS is still MacOS and containerized so Steam survey can and do present multiple times because I've opted in to a few. Currently have three installed and haven't gotten around to the others but usually the more options the better the chance of getting PC games to run on MacOS which is in itself a game figuring out how to get things to work.

 

[mi7chy]

View attachment 2183521

I've made many contributions to that. Last time wasn't all my fault though since Ventura 13.3 broke Crossover+Steam so had to reinstall Ventura 13.2.1+Crossover+Steam which counted again.

 

[Nugat Trailers]

Gaming cafe's.

I think back in 2017, there was a massive spike on the Windows side because of gaming cafes. Caused 4 core CPUs and Windows 7 use to rise by about 14% for a few months.