I think Apple may get into serious gaming, but it might start at the Apple TV side of things (ie. console competitor) and then perhaps migrate to the Mac.
It's certainly possible that they could create hardware that would blow current PC & Consoles out of the water.
it would take many, many, many years, and it would be so prohibitively expensive that no one in this market would even care.
hardware that ”blows” current PCs out of the water would cost so much more than necessary to the point that gamers who build / buy their own PCs just arent going to take. apple’s devices until the M chips typically just lagged behind the competition anyway and werent even the top hardware offerings for insane prices. want to upgrade an iMac or MBP M1 to 16gb of ram? add $200 for some bulk ram just to add 8gb.
you can buy 32gb of fantastic DDR4 for that much, or cheaper if buying wisely.
something from apple that would be comparable to or exceed the power of my 3080 would cost way more than it, thus rendering it pointless to bother with. not to mention, apple doesnt have the industry relationships that NVIDIA has developed, and hasnt even gone through gen 1 of any raytracing technology. amd even lags behind NVIDIA on this right now and they’re the chip of choice for the current gen of consoles.
so then let’s say the make a console. it would also be stupidly expensive comparatively, with absolutely none of the benefits. with playstation, the first party content alone is ahead of everyone else in the industry. the dualsense controller is a highly developed peripheral that dynamically enhances the experience of any game that takes great advantage of it.
while xbox has had garbage first party offerings in the last handful of years and failed to deliver their one heavyweight first party launch title (halo infinite), they at least have the benefit of game pass.
apple has no major dev studios under their belt to deliver blockbuster games that would attract people to the platform. it’s not like ATV+ where they can buy contracts for top tier actors and have shows / movies made, or purchase the rights to such things in development. they’d have to hire top talent in the industry, form a dev studio, and then set those people loose for *years* before they bear any fruit, and then hope it’s not a bug ridden mess.
and they’d have to spend the time to develop great *feeling* peripherals that have any sort of reason to exist in the same echelon as the dualsense or xbox controllers. there’s a good reason why apple now directly sells dualsense controllers. those 3rd party MFi controllers have been astoundingly horrible.
Apple should just develop better support for things like DirectX, Vulkan, and raytracing. Their move to totally axe 32bit programs from being allowed to run on the platform shut out a lot of great games that were otherwise running great. And they didnt turn around and put their best foot forward to further support for games on Mac.
to which point, i think they just dont care. I think Metal & Metal 2 were all they cared to go after, which was just *another* API that devs would have to implement. now with apple arcade, i dont think they’re going to bother offering more for gaming on their platform than that.
