The MacRumors Show: Is Apple Finally Taking Gaming Seriously? ft. TouchArcade

[MacRumors]

TouchArcade's Jared Nelson and Eli Hodapp join us on this week's episode of The MacRumors Show to talk through the current state of gaming in Apple's ecosystem.

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TouchArcade is MacRumors' sister site that focuses on iOS gaming. Jared is the website's Editor-in-Chief and host of The TouchArcade Show podcast, while Eli is Jared's predecessor, the founder of iOS gaming subscription service GameClub, and director of mobile publishing at GameMill Entertainment.

We discuss Apple's recent gaming push prompted by the A17 Pro and M3 chip's hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, as well as the arrival of console-level games on Apple platforms like "Resident Evil Village." We look at where Apple has made progress with gaming in recent years and where it still faces limitations, what the company should address to bolster gaming experiences on its devices, and the direction of Apple Arcade. We also consider the gaming potential of Apple's Vision Pro headset and how the new product line could evolve over time.

Listen to more of Jared and Eli over on The TouchArcade Show podcast. The MacRumors Show is now on its own YouTube channel, so head over and subscribe to keep up with new episodes and clips going forward:

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If you haven't already listened to the previous episode of The MacRumors Show, catch up for our discussion about Apple's "Scary Fast" event and the new Macs it introduced.

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Article Link: The MacRumors Show: Is Apple Finally Taking Gaming Seriously? ft. TouchArcade

 

[LedRush]

No. Next question.

 

[Sprocket_Proton]

I think Apple thinks it’s taking gaming seriously.

 

[phenste]

this is one hell of a juxtaposition in my news feed

 

[spaxxedout]

Dan with the fresh crew cut 💈

 

[Kalixt]

By letting Valve to cut off CS 2 support ? Yea sure...

 

[spinedoc77]

I'll believe it when I see it, namely Apple investing big money into developers and/or buying their own development. Still, it's at least a good step in the right direction, hopefully hardware sales alone can drive some devs to develop. Plus Apple likes to go in slow like they did with Apple TV, so this may be much more of a long term plan including the ultimate slow burn the Vision headsets.

 

[Plutonius]

Apple is taking gaming seriously when they specify iOS games.

As far as MacOS gaming, gaming doesn't seem to be a priority other than the games they can sell on the app store.

It may not get us AAA games but I believe that Apple should try to get every iOS game they provide to also run under MacOS.

 

[jclardy]

Vision Pro has the potential to be an excellent gaming machine already - just hooking up a PS5/Xbox controller.

The main problem though...is that is for "traditional" gaming, on a flat screen. I'm not sure what the solution for VP will be for more complex games. Hand gestures work for some things but there are just a lot of random controls needed for VR (teleportation, turning, recentering) and for now it looks like those things have just been passed over. It is a bit disappointing considering there isn't another MR headset even close to the vision pro's compute and tracking capabilities.

 

[cateye]

I think Apple thinks it’s taking gaming seriously.

Post of the year.

Apple likes to pretend it can conjure a lot of things into being true through sheer force of will, or marketing, or heartfelt maudlin aw-shucks earnestness. Words are cheap. Let's see an AppleTV+ style multibillion dollar investment in top-shelf gaming and a pivot away from match 3 trash for the easily distracted. Until then, all of Apple's bleating about how just gosh darn great Apple Silicon is for games is little more than a boring tech demo.

 

[pappl]

There is Proton for Steam, which is great on Linux and could easily run on MacOS and open massive numbers of AAA-games to the Apple ecosystem.

As long as Apple sticks to Metal and abandons Proton/OpenGL/OpenCL and other sytems to raise compatibility the answer is NO.
Next question.

 

[jayducharme]

Not with 8 gb of RAM…

 

[Plutonius]

There is Proton for Steam.

Apple worked with Steam to develop Proton but Steam decided to drop out of the partnership around the time the Steamdeck was released. It looks to me that Steam has no desire to work with Apple.

 

[anthogag]

I tried Resident Evil Village on my 12.9 M2 iPad Pro and it sucked. The iPad could handle it well but look-around movement is still lousy like all other games. Gaming will surely be much better on Vision Pro when the user can move his/her/they/them/it/that head to look-around.

Apple needs to get the great games on Vision Pro. Get the upcoming new GTA on Vision Pro.

 

[eicca]

When Halo MCC is native on Mac I’ll believe it.

 

[Sorinut]

I play zero video games, and even I know the answer to this..

No.

 

[fathergll]

Apple's issue is they have amazing hardware at this point but almost nobody wants to upgrade as their current M series systems are so fast they can't even see the reason to. Theoretically games could help that problem for Apple to keep selling hardware I think it's never happening and the only realistic future is cloud gaming on Mac(which can be done now with high end Windows games).

 

[HDFan]

Can someone explain why they would spend an hour listening to this podcast? It would take just minutes if they provided a transcript. Makes it useless for me as I don't have that much time available. Podcasts might be useful if I had a long commute but I don't.

 

[fathergll]

Can someone explain why they would spend an hour listening to this podcast? It would take just minutes if they provided a transcript. Makes it useless for me as I don't have that much time available.

Most of us on Macrumors are ultra wealthy and retired early so we like to kill time.

 

[bousozoku]

Apple has thrown money at the problem and will look for instant results. When the instant results fail to appear, they will go back to doing nothing about it.

I hope that I'm wrong, but I've watched this since Mac OS 8.x and Game Sprockets.

 

[klasma]

Can someone explain why they would spend an hour listening to this podcast? It would take just minutes if they provided a transcript. Makes it useless for me as I don't have that much time available. Podcasts might be useful if I had a long commute but I don't.

YouTube provides transcripts.

 

[iZac]

“We are starting to see some great games come back to the Mac, but this is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen…”

Apple trot out this lie every few years

The only way Mac gaming will ever be a thing again is when devs start supporting Windows 11 ARM, then we’ll all be running Parallels again

 

[ghostface147]

The answer is no. They can provide all of the hardware they need, but no AAA developer is going to spend time making a game for macOS. They’ll send it to a company to port.

 

[HDFan]

YouTube provides transcripts.

Wow. Thanks!

 

[Netrox]

Yes, well, if they keep progressing with the same rate of performance with their M Series as evident with their A Series, it will become a threat to any x86 chips and powerful enough to play games especially that their M3 Max cores are faster than ever and can perform as well as M2 Ultra. If that keeps scaling for the next decade, the days of x86 are over and considering that Apple has enough resources to design and build efficient ARM chips, will likely outperform any GPU cards. Just remember, the distance between GPU and CPU is a huge bottleneck. As games become complex, the distance between GPU and CPU needs to get much closer so they can relay data back and forth faster.