What this guy says is mostly subjective, except perhaps about the yearly $100 cost of the developer program. But is Visual Studio free?
And are their games any good?
If a developer isn’t willing to put ANY effort into developing or testing their game on macOS, then it’s perfectly valid for them to not release their game on the platform. But there are plenty of other indie developers that aren’t complaining like this one is.
That must be a new low for the quality level of the posts in this thread. Some just love to prove a point by posting random stuff without further investigation. The formula is like this:
1. Find something/anything negative about Apple, Mac, macOS or gaming like an article, a video or a post in social media.
2. Post it without checking the circumstances involving the negative news and the reasons behind it.
3. Use that one negative news source to generalize and make it look like a rule that applies to every other case and situation.
4. Ignore all other evidence of the opposite no matter how recent they are.
5. Repeat until you succeed to create a false image by making more people to believe you.
The video reminds me of LTT feeding the YT algoritm. The comment section is flooded with people hating everything about Mac and calling it ”dog ****”, ”trash” and the usual ”Apple and Mac suck”. The video also raises many questions. A game developer not willing to even buy a cheap Mac to develop and test their game on is not one I would buy a game from. Does he expect to be able to test a Mac game on his PC? Does he expect Apple to hand out a free Mac to him? Is this even a new video?
A new Mac mini costs $599, not $800. He can find even a used cheaper one. The game is a simple 2D RPG that apparently runs on a potato. It’s been in development since 2016. It had an alpha version for Mac. Even a beta was released for Mac in 2017. So he must have had a Mac back then. If his Intel Mac broke and he must buy a new one why is he complaining about the cost? If his PC breaks he must buy a new one too so it’s nothing unique to Mac. It’s like complaining you have to buy a PC if you want to make Windows games. I’m an average user and I bought a Mac studio for $2000 on sale when my iMac broke but this guy works as a developer and can’t afford a cheap Mac Mini which costs $50 a month with an annual plan?
The whole project was aslo funded on
Kickstarter so they haven’t invested any money themselves. They pledged for $5,000 and got four times more, $19,272 so they should have plenty over for a new or used Mac mini. At the same time the project has been going on since 2016 and the game has been in early-access on Steam for five years since 2018 despite abandoning the Mac port early. Despite being good according to Steam users (
1345 reviews, not 2000) it’s ”super incomplete” which makes you wonder what Pirate Software has been doing all these years with such a simple game. If it takes so long to port an unfinished game to Win/Linux despite a super easy development process for those platforms according to the video it’s no wonder they don’t have time for Mac.
So what more can you expect from a developer with no time and money? They should call it for what it is instead of making it sound as if it’s so hard to develop for Mac. He should just say they are broke (despite collecting four times the costs) or simply no Mac gamer wants to buy our game for whatever reason. It’s simple math and completely understandable. If nobody buys your game you stop making it for that platform but it wouldn't hurt if you actually manage to deliver a finished product in time before complaining.
So no, the problem is not Xcode or lack of a ”compatibility layer”. Apple won’t and shouldn’t change their entire API just because an indie developer doesn’t have the time, money or the audience to make a Mac game. On the opposite side we have Hello games. They are also indie developers according to themselves. They were only 4 when they released the multi million selling Joe Danger for Mac among other platforms. They were 12 when they created NMS. When Apple Silicon was released they were excited to make a Mac port
completely in Xcode. They did the port and 7 years of content in just two years.
So yes, let’s throw out all these game development tools like Xcode, Unity, Unreal, Godot, Blender and more and make Mac games through a compatibility layer for that’s the best solution. It makes me wonder why Epic keeps developing and updating UE 5 for Apple Silicon or other companies all are updating their SW for Apple Silicon. They must be fools not listening to people here on Macrumors. Let’s send that video to Capcom, Kojima Productions, NEOWIZ, Hello Games, Sports Interactive, Bloober Team, Fallen Leaf, BlueTweleve Studio, Piranha Bytes, Saber Interactive, SGRA Studio, Rockfish Games, BlackMill Games, Feral/Sega/Codemasters, 4A, Larian Studios and Nimble Giant. Such fools wasting time and money on developing Mac games in native tools instead of working on a compatibility layer. Let’s not forget iOS and iPhone. Why make iOS game development easier when we can make it harder with a compatibility layer.
We’re lucky that we have other small or major developers that think differently.