All iPads Non-mobile gaming on iPad isn't ever going to be great

[teh_hunterer]

While I mostly agree with OP, frankly I think this is a good thing. Touch-first games will always find their home on iPad. Touch control can enable creative gameplay not found elsewhere (even hybrids like Switch or Steam Deck; I won't play touch rhythm games on Switch for one).

I get where you're coming from, but I think the prevalence of touch first on iPad probably isn't really the App Store rules but the fact that touch is the only input you can rely on 100% of iPad users having.

Requiring every console and PC game to have touch controls inserted into them to be allowed on the iPad though means you're just going to have way less developers bothering to bring those richer console/PC experiences over. Case in point most Nintendo Switch ports don't utilise the touch screen at all.

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And I'm not even having a go at Apple about this. They can shape the destiny of the iPad any way they like and I'll probably still own one - the intent of this post is more for the person waiting for non-mobile gaming to take off on the Apple platforms. It's been long enough and the problems are pretty much permanent, so better to just go to another platform rather than wait around.

I've had a great time recently with my Switch 2. It's nice to be on a platform where you can reasonably expect more good games to be coming across all the time. Instead of the yearly keynote announcement of yet another Resident Evil, or maybe a No Man's Sky that quietly doesn't even happen over on the iPad.

 

[radow]

Requiring every console and PC game to have touch controls inserted into them to be allowed on the iPad though means you're just going to have way less developers bothering to bring those richer console/PC experiences over.

Actually I expect adding a virtual gamepad being the least hurdle porting games to iPad. Game engines like Unity and Unreal have on screen touch control built in.

Things like Apple requiring Metal graphic API and arm64 architecture are way more challenging than touch controls. Most Windows games are written with DirectX or Vulkan in mind, they work different from Metal. That's why we have Game Porting Toolkit on macOS (MoltenVK, Rosetta 2). Games usually don't just run fine with Game Porting Toolkit, there might be issues like rendering error and poor framerate. Plus who knows what will happen with another iOS upgrade breaking/deprecating some API, developers need to assign a specialized team for that.

Game developers and (arguably more decisively) publishers will consider if it's worth all the effort. Not just development, publishers should have dedicated support for iPad. Not forget Resident Evil Village sold like 2000 copies on iOS. Revenue not even enough hiring one developer for a month. Of course people won't even think about it.

By the way, before Proton on Linux is a thing, there aren't lot of games Linux native, either. You might want check out Ethan Lee, developer of FNA-XNA, port ~70 games and keeping these running on newer versions of Linux userspace with one-man effort.

 

[teh_hunterer]

Actually I expect adding a virtual gamepad being the least hurdle porting games to iPad. Game engines like Unity and Unreal have on screen touch control built in.

Things like Apple requiring Metal graphic API and arm64 architecture are way more challenging than touch controls. Most Windows games are written with DirectX or Vulkan in mind, they work different from Metal. That's why we have Game Porting Toolkit on macOS (MoltenVK, Rosetta 2). Games usually don't just run fine with Game Porting Toolkit, there might be issues like rendering error and poor framerate. Plus who knows what will happen with another iOS upgrade breaking/deprecating some API, developers need to assign a specialized team for that.

Even with all that, there are plenty of games that are released on Mac but not on iPad, and Mac requires all of that as well. You've also got Nintendo Switch which requires translation to ARM and the Switch's graphics API, not to mention all the extra hurdles of making sure your game can run in those hardware constraints - yet developers go the extra mile to do that and are nowhere to be found on the iPad.

But I'm no expert on that subject by any means.

Game developers and (arguably more decisively) publishers will consider if it's worth all the effort. Not just development, publishers should have dedicated support for iPad. Not forget Resident Evil Village sold like 2000 copies on iOS. Revenue not even enough hiring one developer for a month. Of course people won't even think about it.

Yep, and I just don't see this changing without some seismic shift from Apple. It's a mess - you have games on the iPad that should be on Mac but aren't, games on Mac that should be on the iPad but aren't.

Developers/publishers aren't going to fix it on their own. Apple isn't going to stop talking about gaming either. So it is reaching the point where it's just like... DO SOMETHING, or just stop talking about proper games.

When you have the success of all these gaming handhelds like the Switch, Switch 2, Steam Deck etc, Apple's stuff is so pitiful.