Yes, this subject has been beaten to death here and elsewhere. Even you have posted about it here and in other threads before with similar arguments about the graphics APIs. You’re stating the obvious. Game development on any platform is not for everybody. If people don’t have the time, money, knowledge, audience, creativity, game quality or other resources they shouldn’t make games for different platforms, or at all.
At the same time some of such arguments sound as usual overblown. It is in the nature of things that you need a Mac to develop and test Mac games just as you need a PC to do the same. At the same time the cost can be the same. With so many different PC configurations with components and drivers from Intel, Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft and all third party manufacturers of computers, motherboards and GPUs it can cost quite a lot to test and make sure your games run on as many combinations as possible. Depending on your game you can’t always buy the cheapest PC either. Sure, you can buy a RTX 3060 but it gives you about 20 fps in Unreal 4 according to
Puget Systems. RTX 4090 gives you 92 fps but it also costs between $2000 and $3200 (
Asus ROG Matrix Platinum GeForce RTX 4090) alone. Many developers buy the top systems due to use of many different game development tools. So HW for game development is not always cheaper on the PC side.
That’s why many game developers also say it is harder to port games to PC than consoles. As Disparity Games cofounder
Jason Stark points out:
”Gamers ask, ‘Why can’t they just release the version they develop with?’ Then, when developers do just release [that] and it’s a buggy mess, they ask: ‘Why are developers so lazy?’ Well, It’s because they released what they had. Think about how many components that make up your setup. Each runs on drivers that may or may not be up to date and interact with one another in complex ways. Throw a game that hasn’t had much troubleshooting into this soup of software and hardware and it’s no wonder tweaking game settings is a foundation of PC gaming. In this context, the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ PC release can come down to how much time and money you can throw at your title. Bringing a game to consoles is difficult, but at least you know that a bug that happens on your Xbox One is going to happen on every Xbox One.”
Apple Silicon with its unified architecture is more like consoles and have an advantage there being used in iPhones, iPads and Macs.
We have also cross-platform tools like Unreal Engine, Unity and Godot. I know it’s not like a click on a button but it can be easier than Xcode, even though
Xcode is one of the best dev tools according to some.
That $99 fee was mentioned recently and honestly it’s a very lame excuse as some developers here have already explained. We’re talking about 27 cents a day, or $8.25 a month. Many TV streaming services cost twice as much and many people use more than one. Netflix, Max and Hulu cost 15-18 dollars a month. So we must be talking about a fresh broke developer who just has started their business and can’t afford much more than their own home PC.
Fortunately there is a great solution even to that. Many small or even major developers have made it thanks to Kickstarter. It’s becoming more of a rule than exception. The most successful case (leaving Star Citizen out) is
Shenmue 3. So you don’t have to buy that Mac or pay Apple’s fee yourself if you have a great idea.
The Mac market is not small with its over 20% of desktop computer share worldwide but I agree that the Mac game market is small. Yet we continue to get both small indie games and major AAA titles that defy everything you said so the market is apparently there and enough for many others. There is also some help to get from Apple. As I’ve said before they helped 4A with Metro Exodus, Larian with BG3, Piranha Bytes with Elex 2 and Hello Games with No Man’s Sky for free to optimize their games and have worked with Capcom, Bloober Team, Fallen Leaf and more.
The best example perhaps of an indie developer defying everything you said is
Team Cherry, the makers of Hollow Knight and Silksong. They’re a small team of only three people, they used Unity to be cross-platform to make Hollow Knight and they funded their project with
Kickstarter. They needed just AU$ 35,000 to make the game for PC, Mac and Linux from the start but got more than 57,000. It is also the most financially successful low-budget game. It has sold more than
2.8 million copies and made over $42 million. Imagine if they were ”unwilling to do” it because ”it's too troublesome”.
I also posted about
Bzzzt before. It’s made in Unity by a single developer from the Czech Republic named
Karel Matejka. The game was rated as nr 1 best Hidden Gem on Steam with very positive reviews from journalists and users. He has worked 30 years though in the business on titles such as Mafia, Operation Flashpoint, ArmA, Memento Mori 1 and 2, Star Wars: Assault Team, Nemo's Reef, Toy Story: Smash It and more so he has the experience. ”Undertaking a project like this requires exceptional dedication and incredible skill. In the end, Bzzzt required drawing an unbelievable amount of 10,000+ sprites, crafting hundreds of meticulously hand-made animations, and spending over 1,000 hours on gameplay and control coding and tweaking.”, all made by a single dev.
A recent example of a major title that also proves otherwise is Lies of P,
Mac Game of the Year that surprised everybody with its day-and-date release on Mac, using Metal 3 with MetalFX, made cross-platform in Unreal Engine.
Then we have Hello Games that was
eager to port NMS entirely in Xcode. They also consider themselves a small developer and started the project a year before Apple jumped in to offer help for optimization.
It’s a good thing then that we have devs like Team Cherry, 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, 4A, Larian Studios and Nimble Giant that can afford a $600 Mac and a $99 Apple fee and aren’t afraid of learning and using Metal to make native ports for Apple Silicon despite the small market share.
