Dude are you ok? Vulkan is an API specification, it would be literally Apple implementing it, and they could make it as good or bad as they are capable.
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Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It
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If the title was "Apple doesn't want to support Counter Strike 2 game on their hardware due to lack of interest" or something like that, people would be saying things like "don't even know what this game is", "it's just another fps shooter, meh" or "well done, Apple. invest in better/other games". lol
Use Whisky app but we can miss more and more native Mac ports due to this..
So is it a good thing or not...?
steamcommunity.com
So is it a good thing or not...?
How to run released CS2 on macOS with Apple Silicon. :: Counter-Strike 2 General Discussions
Hello everyone. Valve released CS2, but removed macOS from the supported platforms. So I tried a lot of options to run it, and ended up with a simple & productive solution - Whisky . So here's a quick guide: 1. Install the latest release of Whisky from its GitHub repo & unzip it. 2. Run...
Yeah doesn’t surprise me they didn’t bother adding a Metal renderer to Source 2
They could stick to MoltenVK but, who cares? Also the Vulkan renderer for CS2 is kind of bad ATM
I gave up and got a PC back in 2014 for gaming on the side and I haven’t looked back since.
The transition to Apple Silicon did not have to spell doom for “real” games on the Mac, but the focus on Metal sure did
Nobody is going to target an API that covers a minuscule fragment of the market, no matter how good it is
Just ask AMD how Mantle went for them
Apple is content with just having mobile games ported to the Mac with minimal effort and the occasional Resident Evil port that has to run with MetalFX upscaling
And yeah I know about crossover and Game Porting Toolkit, but unless Apple implements a proton style translation layer that’s not gonna be something most people will be interested in working with.
Not to mention that’s not really attracting devs to your platform, ultimately it boils down to devs having to use Metal and that’s not something everyone can afford to sink development time and money into
They could stick to MoltenVK but, who cares? Also the Vulkan renderer for CS2 is kind of bad ATM
I gave up and got a PC back in 2014 for gaming on the side and I haven’t looked back since.
The transition to Apple Silicon did not have to spell doom for “real” games on the Mac, but the focus on Metal sure did
Nobody is going to target an API that covers a minuscule fragment of the market, no matter how good it is
Just ask AMD how Mantle went for them
Apple is content with just having mobile games ported to the Mac with minimal effort and the occasional Resident Evil port that has to run with MetalFX upscaling
And yeah I know about crossover and Game Porting Toolkit, but unless Apple implements a proton style translation layer that’s not gonna be something most people will be interested in working with.
Not to mention that’s not really attracting devs to your platform, ultimately it boils down to devs having to use Metal and that’s not something everyone can afford to sink development time and money into
Well, yeah. Real gamers build gaming PCs. No way they waste time and resources to make less than 1% of the player base happy.
The ROI must be unattractive (or negative) for Valve not to pursue a Mac port. A handful of opinionated Mac forum keyboard jockeys does not necessarily translate into a viable business market, and if anyone would know the numbers it would be Valve.
i did the same thing around the same time. Haven’t looked back either. Being able to play with friends right when a new, interesting game is released instead of waiting 2 years for a Mac port is awesome!
Seeing as CS2 made $40,000,000 from skin case openings on the first day, yeah I don't think the majority of the customerbase cares. Valve said it themselves, macOS players were less than 1% of the entire playerbase. They're a drop in the bucket compared to the people who play Counter Strike daily.
Plus Valve's business philosophy is you can work on whatever you want so long as it brings value, so ideas remain fresh and employees not feeling burnt out. Employees jump from projects constantly, to the point all their desks are on wheels to easily move their work around. A common saying around the Valve office is "oh, bring your desk," and they even reference this in their Steam Deck tech demo Aperture Desk Job. Through this philosophy we got VR, the Steam Deck and well, STEAM.
Valve just ported the entirety of CSGO to a brand new engine, making sure everyone's inventories they built over the course of a decade is there, and said engine upgrade is free instead of being paid. The work required to do that took over four years, and you're calling them lazy?
This is why y'all ain't getting a Mac port and why gamers hate Mac users.
Apple needs to actively invest money into game dev companies as an incentive to build up the gaming market on Apple Silicon, badly. The hardware is there to run every game in existence, but the software is simply not compatible. If Apple is serious about gaming on Apple Silicon, pay them as incentive.
M-series MacBook Pros have 120Hz displays.
The limitation is the amount of work to port. Whether it’s “easy” or not, Valve doesn’t think it will be worth the effort.
FWIW, it was cool to see No Man’s Sky come to Mac, but I had so many issues with controller support in Steam for Mac (using an 8bitdo Ultimate) that I went back to playing on Windows with an ROG Ally. Maybe I’ll get a PS5 or Xbox controller and use that instead.
I had zero issues getting my Dualsense to work on Steam for Mac. I just plugged it into the USB-C port and boom I was ready to go
Wish Apple's monitors had a KVM switch or at least a higher refresh rate. There are many good monitors out there that let you pair a mbp/mac with a gaming pc/laptop/xbox. It's a beautiful thing to see them work together and almost seamlessly.
Yes of course, but the route to achieve that (both in initial porting and maintenance) is made considerably easier, which is the point I'm making.
In addition, the ability to port a game to macOS could mean that the porting to iOS or iPadOS could also be viable. We might be seeing the start of this with Resident Evil Village being released for the iPhone 15.
Linux uses the same APIs as Windows so it takes little to no effort to support Linux for Valve (the beauty of using Vulkan.) macOS is not the same since you are forced to use Metal, so that would require rebuilding the entire game again (which they just spent four years doing that to make CS2) and that is just not worth it since there are very few people playing the game on Mac.
Yet they support the wildly fragmented 1.67% of Linux users? I don’t play CS, nor do I play games on my Mac, but this seems to fly against Valve’s wide platform support. Will their Linux builds on target SteamOS going forward? Even though they can’t properly count Ubuntu users? (Rumor has it, those still outnumber SteamOS.)
Also, didn’t Valve build out an API for Vulkan to Metal? MoltenVK?
Also, didn’t Valve build out an API for Vulkan to Metal? MoltenVK?
Macs are pretty darn crappy for gaming purposes, unless you have an M1/M2 Pro or Max chip. That's a small percentage of a small market.
Yes because there are more people playing on Linux than on Mac, and Valve wants Linux to become more popular which is why they made the Steam Deck to begin with. Plus again, it's a lot easier to support Linux than it is macOS since the Linux build uses the same APIs
And now you know why Valve doesn't support macOS anymore. You admitted yourself you don't play the game, or any game on your Mac. The majority of people on Steam for Mac weren't playing CS, they were playing other things. So it's not worth it in Valve's eye to support macOS anymore, especially given how much Apple makes game development on Mac a nightmare that the majority of gamedevs do not want to bother.
Arch Linux is listed as the #1 Linux distro on Steam, which SteamOS runs off Arch.
Also Ubuntu sucks lmao. Snaps are so awful.
MoltenVK lacks many features of Vulkan and is not a be all end all solution. You'd still have to do a lot of testing to make sure everything works right in the update, and in a highly technical game like CS where any small change could drastically change the game (like over the weekend hitboxes were broken) it's not worth it in their eyes.
I think this was well said. I think Mac OS's hope for new games is really ports to it from iOS as that forces the Metal coding already (as laughable as the statement might seem serious games can run on iOS these days). That will get better / easier as time goes on, JMHO. Doesn't help us much now.
Metal is not single platform. It's used by Mac, iOS and Apple TV. Considering the market share of iPhone, there are a lot of potential customers out there with metal compatible devices...
I guess you could say it was 'single platform' in so much as its only used by Apple, but then again the same is true of DirectX which only runs on Windows, Xbox or the hugely successful Windows Phone.
Macs are not viable for games like this. There are gamers that require 240+ hz monitors and even PS/2 mouse/keyboard setup to eliminate their input lag. I know someone that avoids USB input devices for this reason.
Agree.
It seems they are admitting their game is kinda trash and wont entice new players on a different platform.
At best their game continues to survive on legacy players. Such a weird take.