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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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Yes. That’s lazy. If they took four years, they have enough time AND resources to port the engine to the Mac with Metal. No excuse for it.
The game makes millions of dollars a day from skin case openings and has millions of concurrent players daily. I think they're doing fine lol. If Valorant couldn't put a dent in Counter Strike, dropping Mac support won't either.
That’s not strictly the case. DirectX is still going strong. But yes, they don’t want to support both Metal and Vulkan but can be persuaded due to market share to support DirectX. (Also, people don’t seem to have any issue targeting the Switch despite it having its own proprietary graphics systems.)
Theoretically, couldn’t you target Vulkan and Metal via some transcription layer? I doubt they’re so incompatible that you couldn’t transcribe one to the other. You’d take a performance hit, sure, but Metal and the M series processors could probably take the hit.
POTENTIAL. The potential customer base is so small it doesn’t have a good ROI for a Mac version. This is why I’m not making a Mac version of my game. It takes time and money to get the game on Mac. It’s not free.
And, of course, they can’t exactly drop Linux (despite it having a similar user share) since they’re selling Linux hardware.
This is actually true, especially given how the key rifles are one shot headshots. You need to shave off as many milliseconds as possible as whoever can click the head first wins the gunfight.
You've addressed zero of what I've said.
There are lots of crap games making millions of dollars and are unable to attract new players. They have a base of legacy players who at best deal with the game remembering of a time when the game was better.
I am one of them when it comes to EA/Dice and how they have destroyed the Battlefield franchise.
With the amount of users of MacOS or iPads and iPhones there is enough people to boost their player base if they had a decent game.
I used to play COD on Macs back in the day. It was a better experience than on my Windows desktop.
If you lose the ability to entice new players then your game is trash.
$40,000,000 from gambling with a thin veneer of respectability. Loot boxes and CSGO skin trading have been well known to be gateways to problematic gambling for years now.
Oh geez, as a software developer, that sounds horrifying! There’s very real cost associated with context switches, moving between assignments on the same job (for instance, switching back to code you yourself wrote six months to a year ago still requires some time to become refamiliar with it), let alone switching between projects (even with very strong common coding practices). And, even as an extrovert, I like being able to go away for the day and work on some code by myself, because context switches suck that much. What’s more, that work environment sounds like the latest diabolical creation of whatever inhuman demon created open office plans and cubicle farms!
The Direct3D API being exception I guess?
And the API used for Playstation and Nintendo Switch?
My impression is that it isn't that many games that use Vulkan after all. Maybe I'm wrong?
It the API is good and the platform it runs on has a large enough user base I don't see why Apple's Metal is so different, except of course that the amount of Mac users that are willing to play games are a relatively small number as it stands now.
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Odd timing. The Vision platform is soon to be launched, and all Apple platforms share a common hardware now, so why is just the Mac being mentioned? Sounds like they are kind of anti-Apple.
Yes it is gambling opening skin cases, but Counter Strike skins are worth a lot of money because of the economy system the game is designed around. Valuable skins are worth a lot of money, even the most lowest end skins, and players can sell those skins for profit should they so choose to. Several skins can go for lots of money due to factors related to the skin, like the skin isn't made anymore or has a specific random value that makes it even more valuable. For example a Factory New AK-47 Case Hardened with Stattrak sold for $150,000, as the skin had a very rare float on it that made it's unique pattern highly desirable. To add more to the value of the gun the owner applied four holographic Titan | Katowice 2014 stickers to the gun. Those stickers are highly valuable and rare because they aren't made anymore and the holos were rare enough as it was
Most Expensive CS:GO Skin Sells For Record $150K
Most expensive CS:GO skin in the world sells for a record $150,000 USD
Well that work environment we've gotten so many things that we didn't even knew we wanted, like the Steam Deck. So they must be doing something right if they shipped an entire handheld gaming PC with this philosophy.
But it's not just a single platform in the Apple-sphere.
- Mac
- Apple TV
- iPhone / iPad
- soon... Vision
Correction, Valve started to push Linux with the Steam Machine. They realized no dev was going to waste their time making native Linux versions of their games. They did a course correction in 2018 by developing the Proton layer to help emulate Windows games through Linux. It works well and helps to bridge the wide gap. While the Steam Deck has entered into the conversation, Valve might have missed the boat to effect PC gaming. Companies like ASUS are showing Windows will clap back. Yes, thanks to Proton, it would be much easier to move games from Windows to Linux; with Valve pushing it through themselves. CS is a Valve game, so they had their teams build out both versions together. However, games like RE Village that can play on the Deck, aren’t native and Valve does all the Proton layer testing for the publisher and developer.
There’s an old MacSurfShop shirt that used to read: “Mac for productivity, Linux for development and Windows for solitaire.” Yes, I did build a PC strictly for games and use my Mac mini for everything else. I used to be into Mac gaming back into the PowerPC days, plus a little bit when I got my iMac late 2012 model. Someone like me admitting I don’t play games on my Mac hardly moves the needle either way. Apple’s long history of being anti-gaming (especially during Jobs time) is still to blame for this one; plus this App Store push with their new Metal tools.
I do agree with a lot of your points. Yes, I get why they did it, but this flies completely in the face of what they were advertising as “PC freedom,” so they choose to support Windows (which is 96% and still growing) and Linux (their project); but Mac need not apply? Drop the choice portion and then it’s all good.
Yes, I’ve been a Steam fan for a long time. Got burned on the Steam Machine and just got rid of my 256GB Deck. It’s best to use Steam as a storefront, whether it’s Windows or Mac. I suspect Microsoft will try to push Steam off Windows at some point too.
That’s a valid point. Vision is probably going to be a major VR platform if just because it’s got Apple’s name on it and people will buy it as a luxury good. It’s also probably the most powerful independent headset. Maybe they figure that the people who don’t own a PC but want to play Source games would buy a Steam Deck?
Still, if Source 2 is supposed to be a game engine for the whole market and not just Valve, you’d think they’d want to cast as wide a net as possible. Because Metal is more than just the Mac, it’s also the iPhone and iPad, the Apple TV, the AppleWatch, Vision Pro, etc. That’s a lot of popular hardware and a lot of potential user share they’re ceding to… who? I’d say Epic, but Epic decided to risk Unreal support on Apple platforms in the name of getting the Epic Store on iOS. Unity seems to be the biggest name remaining, but Unity has the reputation of being less for AAA projects and more for hobbyist projects and indie titles.
So they had no plans for a Mac version of the game, yet allowed the Mac version to be updated?🤔 The updater managed to update the Mac version inspite of incompatibilities?😵
There are over 1 million words in the English language. I can't string together enough to describe this level of incompetence. A few lines of code would have save their server terabytes of bandwidth (26GB x 500 mac players🤭). Now those same players will have to re-download the older version of the game again.😩
You are correct. This game might, but there are a lot of AAA that don’t have Vulkan. This is why the statements “Mac gaming will be infinitely better if all they did was support Vulkan” isn’t true in 95% of the case. Also just because APIs exist on multiple platforms doesn’t make it free to port. We still suffer from bad console ports even though it uses the same DirectX.
Maybe because the previous Mac version of CS:GO wasn’t ported well and more compatible hardware was less accessible?
Valve just middle-fingered their “1%” gaming base that could have grown with a more supported game to save less than 10% in dev costs.
I still refuse to purchase a PC and rather game on my PS5, or Mac if more games supported it.
Valve just middle-fingered their “1%” gaming base that could have grown with a more supported game to save less than 10% in dev costs.
I still refuse to purchase a PC and rather game on my PS5, or Mac if more games supported it.
Of course, if you asked me, I’d say that Valve ceased to be a good game developer around the time they introduced Steam. They realized that there was more money in being a publisher, and they haven’t really had a strong original title since (a bunch of games they purchased from others and subsequently developed, sure, but not an original). And Half Life 3 will never come out, and Team Fortress 2 became a free to play cosmetics cash cow for Valve. It’s always surprised me just how much leeway PC gamers give Valve.
It’s also shocking how tolerable windows is when you don’t do much other than gaming and general browsing
I still get the occasional bugs from botched windows updates but for the most part I’ve been running windows issue free since 2014
