Considering they were already ported to the Switch and even the Nvidia Shield TV ARM powered machines you would have though that would be an easy task?
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Steam Beta Adds Native Apple Silicon Support for Mac
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Considering they were already ported to the Switch and even the Nvidia Shield TV ARM powered machines you would have though that would be an easy task?
Most of the larger studios have been purchased by corporations that won’t sell. The smart thing would be for Apple to partner with Valve to enhance the Proton translation layer for ARM to bring more games to the Mac.
Considering the Steam app is basically an Electron browser shell (and Electron has supported Apple silicon since 2021) it sure took them long enough.
The 10% that does run includes games like Baldur’s Gate III, recent Civ games, Dead Cells, Hades 1 & 2, Lies of P, Borderlands 2, Cult of the Lamb, Riven, Subnautica and XCOM 2.
I'm not gamer so I've not even heard of half of those, but my brother is and he said that none of the original Valve games (half-life series, Portal) were updated to 64-bit, so they won't play. That seems a bit odd, that Valve doesn't even update their own catalog.
How do you determine that it's a tiny minority ?
Although now that Whisky is no longer supported, I expect the number will go down.
Crossover works really well and it occasionally goes on sale.
Until Apple supports Vulkan, or there are some permanent built-in translation layer that converts to Metal, gaming on Mac will never ever take off because of the simple fact that game developers won't port games to Mac.
There's a too small pool of gamers using Mac, so it's not economical for game developers to port games to Mac.
There's a too small choice of games ported to Mac, so the gamers will never pick Mac.
And so the cycle continues.
At this point I'm debating on getting a Linux instead and ditching my Mac. Linux is great for developers like me (one of the reason I like Mac), plus gaming is now on parity, or in some cases BETTER, than Windows, resulting in a better all in one machine. There's also just way less bloat than Windows so it's a lighter OS as well, less background tasks, etc. that can eat up your performance when gaming.
There's a too small pool of gamers using Mac, so it's not economical for game developers to port games to Mac.
There's a too small choice of games ported to Mac, so the gamers will never pick Mac.
And so the cycle continues.
At this point I'm debating on getting a Linux instead and ditching my Mac. Linux is great for developers like me (one of the reason I like Mac), plus gaming is now on parity, or in some cases BETTER, than Windows, resulting in a better all in one machine. There's also just way less bloat than Windows so it's a lighter OS as well, less background tasks, etc. that can eat up your performance when gaming.
If only 1.8% of Steam users are running macOS, it's going to be fewer than that who are running Steam Windows games through something like Crossover. 1.8% is already a minority so anything less than that will also be a tiny minority. That's using the highly technical statistical term "tiny".
That is, of course, entirely Apple's fault. There was ZERO reason to drop 32-bit support.
Apple's bad behavior makes MicroSloth look good.
They were petty with the 32-bit to 64-bit conversion. I had the 2008 Unibody MacBook at the time, and it had a 64-bit processor (Core 2 Duo), but the firmware was 32-bit...Apple didn't update the firmware to 64-bit.
So you need the Intel version to enable the Arm version....LAME. They need a downloadable installer for Arm64 without having to rely on Intel.
it's mostly if you want to organize your library, check sales etc
This is the elephant in the room people keep ignoring. People keep blaming Apple saying they do not care about Mac gamers at all. But for steam 24% of all the games are playable on the Mac yet only 2% of steam users play on Macs. I play steam games on my Mac and the selection is not perfect, but pretty good. Apple well knows these statistics so do not go out of there way to put power hungry nvidias in their desktops, which goes against their energy saving mantra, which i agree with.
With all that said the GPUs in the studios and mac pros, while not on par with top of the line nvidias, are much better than the intel days. Yet gamers still do not play on Apple silicon macs. People buy macs to get work done or take to college. Apple cant force its customers to do something they dont want to. I really wish there were more mac gamers, but thats not the case.
Get info shows Intel but Activity Monitor shows Apple.
That too.
Maybe figure out away to do a soft merger: so it doesn’t matter which store you buy from but your library’s and such are shared. Think Movies Anywhere.
Just adding Vulkan won’t do anything. Most games don’t even use it. UE5 already has Mac support but devs aren’t using it.
Also, another thought on my original post.
Apple not only has the capital, but they also have tons of connections from Apple TV for actors, animators etc. With all the studios being shut down and IP cancellations, there is a ton of potential employees with game development experience. Spin up a few studios around the globe, have most of them work on small lite games for Apple Arcade as well as other platforms (games that take 8-20 hours with replay ability) then have a few other studios focused higher quality games that take more time (30-60 hours)
Less Ubisoft or Bethesda style games (massive maps with tons of filler) more Expedition 33, Stellar Blade etc type games.
Valve enjoys GOAT status still to this day, but I find them to be incredibly frustrating. And the more you learn about their business, the more questionable they become. Every employee is a multi-millionaire, and Gabe has a $100M superyacht, made mostly on their pure profit from selling gambling to children. They're a game company that can't seem to make games anymore. They get in the hardware business, and just throw up their hands and quit for no reason (Steam Deck notwithstanding). They take 30% of sales revenue, while every other store front gets excoriated constantly for doing the same. During the PS3 launch of Orange Box, Gaben makes a huge stink about being forced to write multi-threaded code, a gripe that has aged like milk. They announced this huge pivot to episodic releases, only to just ghost the whole concept after two episodes.
Supposedly HL3 is going to be shadow dropped this year... I'll believe it when I see it, but even if it does, who even cares anymore? What could possibly make that whole debacle worthwhile? If it's good, then that's great but 19 years and (possibly) billions of dollars had damn well better amount to something good.
Soooo, yeah, I guess that's just a long way of saying porting Steam or HL or Portal to Apple Silicon should have been a slam dunk afterthought for a company like this. But they're apparently managed by a groundhog or something.
and round and round goes the fallacy wheel. There are plenty of folks that own macs, and plenty of those game. Right now - they own windows and/or steam decks and/or linux boxes to do so as mac support is less than it could be.
So I'm not disagreeing with the reported numbers, nor the state of steam, only that there is a misrepresentation of potential mac gamers. I for one run Steam on my mac, it runs ok. Parallels back in the intel mac days did awesome for many windows games, but I haven't upgraded and seen what the AS version will do.
Converting old game code to work natively on new Macs seems like an actually useful task for AI to figure out and totally possible.
Did you just make up that rumor? It makes zero sense. The appeal of Steam is the enormous catalog.
A couple of years ago Valve released something (might have been a 25th anniversary release of Half-Life 1?) with new graphics and features... still as a 32-bit app that won't run on anything newer than OS 10.14.