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It should be noted that Proton was being developed for Mac back in 2018, but was dropped, from what I can find, 'due to a lack of interest from the Mac community'.

Apple was developing Proton with Steam and Steam decided to pull out about the time Steam started developing the Steam Deck.

As far as I know, the Mac community has always been interested in Proton.

 
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Oh boy, here we go again. It’s mind-boggling to see all these new twists and turns you manage to include in your posts and how you blow things way out of proportion over a simple disagreement about taste in computer graphics to the point of labeling people with psychoanalysis.

To deny the cultural impact of certain games and how it changed the industry is willfully ignorant of gaming at large, and makes me question if you're actually serious about gaming or just want games on macOS as a "got ya" to the PC Master Race crowd who probably bullied you for being a Mac user.

Would be like denying the impact certain movies have made to the industry, like denying the impact the original Star Wars trilogy made or John Carpenter's Halloween.

So now I’m a bullied ignorant amateur when it comes to gaming and pop culture? Really amusing analysis and way to label people you neither have met nor know anything about. When this happens and people avoid to stick to the main subject of the discussion it becomes clear that people are more keen to be right with quick responses than actually read the answers and leave relevant thoughtful comments. It becomes even more obvious when they move goalposts so much that they start to contradict themselves, forget what the discussion was about to begin with, get lost in sidetracks and others have to correct them and lead them back to track constantly.

It’s never a good practice to look down at others from a high horse acting as if one possesses superior knowledge and everybody else is an ”ignorant amateur”. Liking gaming history doesn’t mean one has to answer every post with a history lesson to show off instead of actually answering to the criticism. It was the same thing just recently with Star Citizen when you responded with ”Oh no…you don’t know…” and gave another history lesson taking for granted I didn’t know. These are just two examples and it’s understandable as long as one doesn’t cross the line since people can be passionate about different things but it quickly turns into a failure when they dictate their opinions and passion as the only ”serious” way, like in the case of Half-Life.

It’s astonishing how you manage to turn my dislike for an old game’s low-res graphics in modern time into me denying "the cultural impact of certain games and how it changed the industry" and being "willfully ignorant of gaming at large", being bullied as a Mac user and denying the impact of movies like Star Wars and John Carpenter’s Halloween.

They make most of their revenue from hardware sales and always have. The App Store and Services revenue is only one piece of the pie but the majority of their revenue has always been selling hardware, especially on the iPhone front.

aapl-3q23-line.jpg

As the graph shows the two largest revenue sources are iPhone and Services. With iPhone being the largest source and being the third largest gaming platform in the world by revenue Apple is not going to replace Metal any time soon.

Actually there are compatibility layers on Android. It's called the Dynamic App Framework, to insure your app works on newer versions of Android and different flavors by sandboxing the app into an instance most optimal


And this isn't factoring in emulators

Now you’re mixing things up again. That’s not a compatibility layer for playing non-native games on Android like Proton. That’s ”new developer tools for testing and debugging your app against the behavior changes in newer versions of the Android platform”. It’s some tools for checking the compatibility of apps with Android OS.

Just gonna screenshot this as a just in case this post ages like milk. You should learn by now to never say never when it comes to Apple. Three years ago we thought they'd never bring back legacy ports to the Macbooks, or bring back the Magsafe connector, and yet they did.

You mean like when you used to disbelieve Apple but then wrote back in June ”Maybe Homy is onto something. Maybe Apple actually is serious about making Mac gaming a thing.” and a few days later after GPTK you wrote ”Apple actually listened. Mac gamers....I KNEEL.”?

To add some physical ports to a laptop is not quite the same thing as changing/replacing an entire API deeply rooted in an OS. Especially when they’ve been developing Metal for almost a decade and invested in things like MetalFX upscaling, Fast resource loading, Game Mode, Game Porting Toolkit, Metal shader converter, Offline shader compilation, Frame pacing and HW accelerated Ray tracing and Mesh shaders among other things.

Now compare that to the countless other games that don't have native ports and work fine through Crossover and GPTK.

Native port are great, but so are compatibility layers. You can have both.

This a a perfect example of contradicting oneself due to the discussion of all the irrelevant sidetracks to the point one forgets the main subject. This whole discussion started with you stating that compatibility layers is the way to go for the future of Mac gaming, not the native ports which are doomed to fail because of a small audience.

Honestly, the future of Mac Gaming looks to be compatibility layers not native ports. macOS just does not have a big enough audience of gamers to warrant going through all the hoops of creating a port of a game for a brand new architecture, using a proprietary API vastly different than what developers are used to.

Now after three pages, several posts and a lengthy discussion we can have both? That’s what I’ve been suggesting as the best solution all the time here and here but you’ve been opposing to. This sudden turn of opinion makes all the previous posts an unnecessary waste of time and effort and even more confusing.
 
Can't find it when running on my M3 Max 16". And I am not sure if it is needed when MetalFX Quality mode is there.
Yeah I watched Daniel Owen talk about Dragon Dogma 2's system requirements. Since it too is a RE Engine game I guess the hope is it would come to macOS. The recommended system requirements is a 2080 running 2160i at 30fps. Which is kinda crazy compared to the requirements for RE4/8.
 
Didn't Apple already "Promote" a compatibility layer in the past with Cider? I remember them trotting out an EA executive at WWDC years ago to promote Cider with a batch of games that included Dragon Age Origins, Tiger Woods at the Masters, one of the Battlefield games, and a few others? However Cider didn't seem to stick around for long even though I played some of those games and they worked fine for me.

I have mixed feelings about this. I would prefer native games but I can't deny that this combination of Crossover and GPTK works pretty well. I don't think Apple is ever going to gain a significant amount of traction in the gaming market no matter what they do. It's near impossible to dig yourself out of a 2% to 3% (or whatever it is) market share that's basically been that way for decades while at the same time cheaper and better alternatives exist for the express purpose of gaming that command the overwhelmingly large majority of the market.

So I think the way we have it right now is probably the best we are going to get. Getting maybe a few dozen native big titles every year as well as a multitude more of Indie titles and geeks like us supplementing all of that with running games we don't get on the Mac via Crossover and GPTK, just GPTK, The Porting Kit, and cloud gaming services.
 
Didn't Apple already "Promote" a compatibility layer in the past with Cider? I remember them trotting out an EA executive at WWDC years ago to promote Cider with a batch of games that included Dragon Age Origins, Tiger Woods at the Masters, one of the Battlefield games, and a few others? However Cider didn't seem to stick around for long even though I played some of those games and they worked fine for me.

Let's not forget Rosetta 2 has been very important for the last three years driving the majority of Mac software, and under Rosetta said software has been running better than they were natively on Intel.

I have mixed feelings about this. I would prefer native games but I can't deny that this combination of Crossover and GPTK works pretty well. I don't think Apple is ever going to gain a significant amount of traction in the gaming market no matter what they do. It's near impossible to dig yourself out of a 2% to 3% (or whatever it is) market share that's basically been that way for decades while at the same time cheaper and better alternatives exist for the express purpose of gaming that command the overwhelmingly large majority of the market.

So I think the way we have it right now is probably the best we are going to get. Getting maybe a few dozen native big titles every year as well as a multitude more of Indie titles and geeks like us supplementing all of that with running games we don't get on the Mac via Crossover and GPTK, just GPTK, The Porting Kit, and cloud gaming services.

It's why a system wide compatibility layer would be gamechanging, not just for gaming on macOS, but for other stuff as well as it means a lot of productivity software exclusive to Windows would now work on macOS, eliminating the need to run a virtual machine and solving the problem that came with the axing of Boot Camp. So many people say they can't switch to Mac because their software is only available on Windows, but with a system wide compatibility layer that excuse goes bye bye, and the only excuse they'd have left is they just simply hate Apple (which tbh is kinda a fair excuse as of late. 8gb of RAM for $1600 good lord...)
 
Indie developer Pirate Software, maker of games like Heart Bound, was asked during a livestream why his games aren’t on macOS anymore, and this was his answer to why he’s never doing Mac versions ever again:


Just another reason why we need a compatibility layer
 
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Didn't Apple already "Promote" a compatibility layer in the past with Cider? I remember them trotting out an EA executive at WWDC years ago to promote Cider with a batch of games that included Dragon Age Origins, Tiger Woods at the Masters, one of the Battlefield games, and a few others? However Cider didn't seem to stick around for long even though I played some of those games and they worked fine for me.
It was a disaster. Terrible performance, poor support.
 
Indie developer Pirate Software, maker of games like Heart Bound, was asked during a livestream why his games aren’t on macOS anymore, and this was his answer to why he’s never doing Mac versions ever again:


Just another reason why we need a compatibility layer
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.
 
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What this guy says is mostly subjective, except perhaps about the yearly $100 cost of the developer program. But is Visual Studio free?
You don't need Visual Studio. You can build games for Windows without it.

You do need to do a bunch of extra crap on macOS to make sure it's notarized. That's not a requirement of Windows or Linux.

Hardware costs are valid too. You need a Mac to run macOS, otherwise you're breaking Apple's ToS.
 
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?

Seeing as Heart Bound is sitting at overwhelmingly positive reviews from 2,000 reviews and was played by several high profile Youtubers like Jacksepticeye, yeah I'd say probably lol
 
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What about the general thought that Apple is going to end Rosetta 2 in 2026 ?

That's speculation from people who's source is they made it up, or it was told to them in a dream. There is no evidence that Apple will end Rosetta 2. Why would they end Rosetta 2 when the majority of Mac software is x86 and since Apple is allowing Linux distros to run Rosetta 2?

This thought process comes from the fact Rosetta 1 was discontinued, but that was different circumstances. Rosetta 1 was a compatibility layer for PowerPC to x86. PowerPC was on the decline as the only organizations using it was Apple with the Mac, and the 7th gen game consoles the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii (and later the Wii U becoming the last PowerPC device ever.) When Rosetta 1 was officially axed, PowerPC was a dead architecture. IBM announced all development for PowerPC was over, and no software was being developed for it anymore. There was no reason to keep Rosetta 1 anymore since the majority of Mac software moved to x86, so there was no reason for Apple to keep supporting a compatibility layer for an architecture that was dead

x86 ain't dead. Not even close. x86 is still the standard for the majority of developers since the PC still uses it with the Mac being realistically the only consumer ARM computer worth a damn. A lot of software critical on Mac are x86 and will most likely be x86 for the forseeable future. Not to mention unlike Rosetta 1, Rosetta 2 actually works. People forget Rosetta 1 ran like ass and half the time didn't even work, so PPC programs ran worse through Rosetta than on a PowerMac. Rosetta 2 on the other hand there's practically no loss in performance whatsoever, and in many cases x86 applications run better on the M Series Macs through Rosetta than they do on a 2019 Mac Pro natively. And Rosetta 2 doesn't even need any changes, and isn't even preloaded on Macs like Rosetta 1 was. You can just download it with the push of a button through a macOS prompt or from Apple's download repository.

Now you may say "so developers are using it as a crutch and Apple should get rid of Rosetta 2 to force developers to make native ARM applications." Yeah good luck with that. Apple does that, and it's corporate suicide. The professionals who use macOS and find out their software that's x86 no longer works because Apple cut Rosetta 2, they're gonna move to Windows. There would be a mass developer exodus bigger than the macOS Mojave and Catalina exodus when OpenGL and 32 bit app support got axed. You can tell developers where and when, but you can't tell them how. You tell them to take your way or the highway, they'll take the highway.

tl;dr: It's highly unlikely Rosetta 2 is gonna get cut, because there's realistically no reason to cut it since x86 is still widely used. Rosetta 1 got cut because PowerPC was a dead architecture.
 
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Seeing as Heart Bound is sitting at overwhelmingly positive reviews from 2,000 reviews and was played by several high profile Youtubers like Jacksepticeye, yeah I'd say probably lol
Watermelon Game has overwhelmingly positive reviews from 400 people, and has been played by over 40 members of HoloLIVE.
 
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.
 
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Btw here is a newly released flight sim for Apple Silicon by the German company IPACS.


The game itself looks cool, the price though? EHHHHHHHHH. One of the reviews more or less points out that while the SIM is good the price hurts it.
 
They are, during WWDC Kojima even came on the event video announcing that. He even said “future games from the studio” will also be made for / ported to the Apple ecosystem (or something to that effect).

The Death Stranding 2 trailer above was made public long before WWDC 2023, so no Apple product is mentioned. But since then Kojima Productions has not made much noise about the development if at all. With how we imagine Kojima liking to take things slow, I am only going to assume a Mac port of DS2 isn’t going to be launched at the same time as the PC / consoles. But you never know.
I should have just looked at the game in the app store. I don't think they are doing the macOS port either, or at least the game isn't "published" by them on macOS. I also wonder how much Sony is involved with helping 505 Games getting this to work.

The first game is also pushed back to next year, which I feel like they knew well before now was going to happen.
 
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.

Because Unreal Engine is used for more than just games. It's used for CGI in major TV and movie productions, most notably used by Disney for The Mandalorian

 
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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.
It’s easy to do this because capital G Gamers can’t get hard unless they’re somehow ******** on Macs.

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.
A couple thoughts:

1. It’s a fallacy to assume that because most Mac software (though I doubt it’s MOST software at this point) is currently x86, that it will always be that way.

2. The issue that most developers cite is marketshare. And the marketshare of Apple Silicon is rising (citation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-by-operating-systems-since-2009/ ) even compared to the x86 days.

If the profit motive is there, then the development will happen.

And this isn’t to say that there isn’t a MOUNTAIN to climb.

They must be fools not listening to people here on Macrumors.
I love this sentence. If Apple listened to the gaming crowd they would just be another PC vendor now.

Though, I will say, that Proton has set a precedent for compatibility layers in place of native software. And should it kill native Linux ports, native Mac ports will likely follow, and that’s a trend that Apple, even as big as they are, won’t be able to ignore.
 
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It’s easy to do this because capital G Gamers can’t get hard unless they’re somehow ******** on Macs.


A couple thoughts:

1. It’s a fallacy to assume that because most Mac software (though I doubt it’s MOST software at this point) is currently x86, that it will always be that way.

2. The issue that most developers cite is marketshare. And the marketshare of Apple Silicon is rising (citation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268237/global-market-share-held-by-operating-systems-since-2009/ ) even compared to the x86 days.

If the profit motive is there, then the development will happen.

And this isn’t to say that there isn’t a MOUNTAIN to climb.


I love this sentence. If Apple listened to the gaming crowd they would just be another PC vendor now.

Though, I will say, that Proton has set a precedent for compatibility layers in place of native software. And should it kill native Linux ports, native Mac ports will likely follow, and that’s a trend that Apple, even as big as they are, won’t be able to ignore.
Marketshare will help, Apple spending cold hard cash for (timed) exclusives and ports will help even more. There are more Apple Silicon Macs than there are PS5's yet devs aren't switching to macOS as a lead development platform.
 
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