I honestly don’t get this rationale though. Why is this different from Linux? It’s like blaming Linux users for using Linux and they should have used Windows instead if you really want to game.
How is it the same? Apple runs a closed ecosystem and has shown it doesn’t care for gaming for a long time so its user should know that by now. Linux is an open platform and the results show. SteamDeck is running on Linux and can run most Steam games. Macs still can’t. Apple users should take responsibility on this one.
I am now having a brief fantasy of a world where Apple pulls Proton into the OS as a Windows emulation layer for games and starts pushing their changes upstream just like Valve does.
I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.
* Apple has billions of dollars and a hierarchy of decision-makers who could prioritize the R&D and implementation of making "gaming on Mac" a reality
* Linux is a distributed, community project without billions of dollars or top-down decision-makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
> Linux is [...] without [...] top-down decision makers who can unilaterally prioritize making "gaming on Linux" a reality
I'd say Valve is exactly that. Valve pays many developers their salary who are responsible for making almost all single player games work on Linux via proton (wine, dxvk, vkd3d). Although they do push their changes upstream.
Kind of. But I wouldn't call Valve a top down decision maker for Linux. Simply a very talented contributor and influencer. And you always need to keep in mind that their work is still in the interest of supporting their proprietary platform.
No it's not. Valve is just a member of the community. It cannot for distributions to adopt anything. Valve cannot prevent kernel developers from making it difficult for them to improve gaming on Linux. Valve just does its own thing and offers up its work. They cannot force anything into Linux like Apple can with its OS.
To some degree, Valve can. It's a bit weird, but Valve basically is running its own distro on top of whatever Linux distro you're using. It's called the Steam Runtime and is quite literally just a bundle of things like specific versions of glibc. It exists as an attempt to prevent the usual versioning mess that comes with any form of binary distribution on Linux.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Steam Runtime is considered a bit of a mess on the technical end; Valve used to only test it with Ubuntu LTS, which caused plenty of issues for those on other distros or on newer versions of even Ubuntu.
IIRC Arch literally comes with a package whose sole job is to substitute certain steam runtime libraries that are known to cause conflict problems when used, otherwise you get fun X Window errors (or whatever equivalent you have for those on Wayland).
For the end consumer it isn't different. But in a pragmatic sense:
1. Apple has multiple teams of well paid engineers to solve any problem that arises. There's a lot more money in the game supporting Mac than Linux.
2. Apple has been shown to be hostile towards game development and make active decisions to make it harder to port to them, whereas Linix's most hostile issues arise from the proprietary nature of games vs. the open source nature of Linux (e.g. Package management, DRM, etc).
3. Linux makes concessions on its philosophies for games while Apple makes ultimatums. You can't ever trust that your game on Apple will work in 5 years, at least if you were developing in the 2010's. Meanwhile there are proprietary ways to deliver your game if you want to launch on Linux (not as sure about DRM but I've heard of solutions that simply haven't had mass adoption yet).
Much less, much much less. Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company with $2.8T market cap and blaming anybody except Apple for the drawbacks of your platform.
Apple's absolute top end models might go for $5,000, but then again, have you bought gaming computer components lately? I can't imagine I spent far off of $3000 for my gaming computer all things taken into consideration (besides peripherals of course.) I only have not attempted to tally up the cost because I fear it would make me sick. Without actually listing a real drawback to using the platform besides "software providers decided not to support the platform," you come off as one of those drones that mindlessly hate on Apple products only because you don't want to pay for them. And to be clear, I'm not even your supposed opposition, in that I don't even own any Apple products besides an iPhone SE (which are notoriously cheaper than flagship Android phones.) I just find the Apple hating bickering to be about as childish as the Playstation vs Xbox console argument.
And yes, I consider your comment to be childish bickering primarily because you don't have another argument besides "their product is more expensive than it's worth comparing hardware to hardware." Apple users understand that they're actually paying a premium for the software (the operating system), as well as the designed and usually fetching exterior (which to be fair does look nice, and I tend to prefer Macbook charging ports over Dell's old barrel ports.) Which, there is something to be said about an operating system that decided they don't want to run Java anymore. I'll grant that their software might have merit. Java web start apps are the bane of my enterprise existence.
You get a budget gaming machine for 1k these days, if that. The GPU almost steals your 1k budget by itself. Apple's new top end Mac Mini goes for $1300 and has a 10 core M2 Pro with a 16 core GPU, 16GB memory, and a 512GB SSD. More than enough to play Counter Strike 2 if Valve decided to support the platform. It's not comparable but not as outrageous as people say.
But again, you're still thinking in terms of money here. Where the problem isn't with how much the computer costs. It's completely irrelevant, actually. The problem for Mac users is that the software providers in question in this discussion don't want to support MacOS, which is a decision totally on them. I have no strong opinions against their decision to not support them if the user base just isn't there. There's no doubt that there are tons of MacOS users, they just might not be users that intend to game on those computers the majority of the time. But I do feel empathy for Mac gamers, as that was historically the opinion of game studios refusing to support Linux machines. And to be honest, it's still the case that Linux users are second class citizens when it comes to games that require an anticheat to run (many online FPS games fall into this category.) None of the big anticheat providers want to port their software to run on Linux.
You can play almost any game on ancient GeForce 1080 (i do) with decent fps, except Starfield and maybe some other poorly optimized titles. On windows, that is.
You can also play almost anything on SteamDeck (15W TDP max) on linux ($400 before discounts).
You can't really play 3/4 of game catalog on MacBook Pro M1Pro or newer ($2000+)
> Imagine paying $4,999 USD for a device from a company
A high spec Mac Mini is $1299 USD (10 core CPU, 16 core GPU, 16 GB).
Anyone paying $4,999 for a Mac Studio/Pro is doing media creation for work and doesn't give a fuck about games or will have a separate console/PC for that. Those are workstations, not for gaming.
But that's the trouble: there's more than enough hardware in a Studio to game with. Saying that people who need a "media" computer don't care about games is silly. I used to run $5,000 PC's for CAD/FEA, and you better believe I ran games on it after hours. I've had high-end Mac laptops for software development work for 10 years now. I keep buying the ones with GPU's. They ALL suck for gaming. Not for lack of hardware! My $4,000 Intel MBP with a Vega 20 runs Elder Scrolls Online (NOT a demanding game) at 720p and 30 FPS. It runs BETTER if I force it to use the internal Intel "GPU". So I bought a $700 PC which runs the game at 4K, "high" settings, and an unwavering 60FPS. A friend just bought an M2 Studio. It manages to run the game at 4K, but < 30 FPS. On the fastest computer in the world, currently! I have another friend who boots Windows on a cheese grater Mac Pro to play World of Tanks. Lots of people WANT to play games on Macs, but wind up moving back to Windows.
IMO, this terrible situation is on Apple. They have the resources to fix this ecosystem, and buy a seat at the table, the same way Microsoft has, at so many tables.
Fair enough except for your example. ESO does not support M1/M2. It's running on Rosetta. Bethesda officially do not support M2 so obviously they haven't made any effort to make it run efficiently on an M2. How is that Apples fault? The hardware is there for anyone to use but Apple can not force developers to use it.
How did Windows become the de facto gaming platform? Microsoft made easier-to-use API's, and then subsidized developers to use it. I don't program against it, but it seems that Vulkan and Metal are reasonable to use. It's the second part I want Apple to do now.
Neither of those two reasons are why Windows became the de facto gaming platform.
Microsofts market share was nearly 100% in the 90s and that's how they became the de facto gaming platform. Because it was the de facto PC platform. Apple was a much smaller company and nearly went bankrupt in the 90s. Microsoft dominated for reasons unrelated to gaming and the legacy continued. Bill Gates was in court for antitrust violations. Apple focused on other niches besides gaming just to survive and avoid bankruptcy.
Mac only has 8% market share, hence Bethesda not caring about Mac. The market is just too small. Even if Apple had the worst possible graphics API, everyone would release games for Mac if it had the biggest market share.
Gaming in the 90's started out on OpenGL, which was and is cross platform. Ports for Quake were being made for things like SGI workstations, because it was relatively straightforward. Microsoft headed off further development in a cross-platform gaming environment by creating a Windows-only API, and making sure developers used it, with lots and lots of money. Windows became the de facto platform because Microsoft used their monopoly to kill off the burgeoning threat of an open ecosystem. If it hadn't done this, Macs and Linux could have been viable gaming platforms, despite their relative marketshares.
As I said the vast majority of games. For example Minecraft is not a native Windows application in any way. It just creates a window and then renders the entire contents of the window itself instead of using win32 to make an interface.
No, only a tiny minority of PC games run on the JVM. The vast majority are native and not running on any kind of VM. Even with the Unity engine the games are natively compiled.
I didn't intend to bring up the JVM. Minecraft Bedrock edition is written in C++ and renders the entire window contents and even has its own UI framework that it uses.
There's way more to it than GUI libraries. That is a native Windows application calling Windows APIs. You can't run that Windows executable on Linux without Wine/Proton.
Even a console application (no GUI) depends on operating system APIs.
> That's like saying you can't run Firefox without freetype. Requiring a dependency doesn't make you no longer native.
At this point you're just trolling.
Take notepad.exe and try to run it on Linux. It wont run because its Windows native. That's a native application. Same as 99% of games that aren't JVM based.
> How, by having a different OS? Sorry about that I guess.
> (If it had native Vulkan it wouldn't matter. The most effective strategy, the one Microsoft uses, is to buy all the game studios.)
By making their OS easy to target by game makers. There's no good excuse - Apple has access to the same graphics pipelines as everyone else. XPlat game engines have boiled it down to mostly a checkbox these days... so where's OSX? Apple has a lot of work to do before that's a reality.
> Calling Valve a game maker is a stretch;
You can't be serious, are you? Valve's titles are among the most popular games in the history of games. They may make most of their money through Steam, but to say Valve doesn't make games is ridiculous.
That wasn't even the point - Apple users will blame the actual studios/developers for not supporting OSX when the blame lies at Apple's feet.
Billions in annual profit, zero f's given about gaming on their platform. It's a choice - and one Apple users need to comprehend. Apple doesn't care.
Valve is not a normal company; there's no hierarchy and they're only capable of doing things if someone at the company decides to pay attention to it.
Do you remember what happened to TF2? It first degraded into an item trading game, then they abandoned it for years and it was full of bots. There's no reason Overwatch and Apex should've replaced it except that they stopped fighting for it.
TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
Counter-Strike is still one of the most-played games ever. CS:GO had an average of almost 1 million daily players while AAA Games like CoD Warzone hover around 200-500k.
DOTA/DOTA2 also rakes it in. They also have many very successful single-player games. Valve is a wildly successful game company - they just don't do the "yearly release" dance...
TF2 today is mostly unplayable due to bots and weirdness with their player matching game. I put a lot of hours into TF2 and the experience is almost unrecognizable today. CS:GO was, I think, completely outsourced to a third party. They still produce some game-like artifacts but primarily they're the owner and operator of the premier online games store
CS:GO is complicated - it started as a console port of CS:Source by a 3rd party developer, then was taken in-house and transformed into a full stand-alone new Counter-Strike game. So, it was indeed developed by Valve.
IDK anything about TF2 - but bots or not, 100k active daily players is nothing to sneeze at for a 16 year old game.
They are indeed the premier online game store - yes... but saying they are not a game developer is absurd. They don't release a new title every year, but when they do, it's a huge hit.
> TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
They fixed it again after people sassed them enough about it, but it was always a better game than Overwatch and there's no reason people should've been tricked into playing that.
(Though, I don't know if the people on right now are actually playing TF2 or just trading hats.)
Who else supports Metal? Oh, that's right - only Apple.
There's more to game support than just graphics API.
Apple chooses to make game support on OSX hard - and shocker... you don't get games supporting OSX. Who can we blame? Apple...
Just like Apple chooses to make Linux kernel support hard on M1/M2 and leaves it entirely up to volunteers to make it work. Who do you blame? The Kernel developers or Apple?
The Metal API is heavily documented and Apple provides a plethora of code samples in four programming languages, with literal step-by-step how-to guides on porting from OpenGL to Metal.
You can complain that they don’t support third party low-level frameworks, sure. But they definitely make it easy and inviting to support their homegrown solutions
Depends what you mean by "default". Windows ships with DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan support. Call of Duty runs on Vulkan by default, for instance.
Vulkan is notable as being new (doesn't have legacy baggage OpenGL and DirectX have), is natively cross-platform, and is often more performant than other options for modern games.
It's cross platform in that if you want, you can write implementations for other platforms. In addition to supporting multiple platforms in its current state.
The difference is that Microsoft is responsible for the DirectX API on Windows but does not have anything to do with shipping OpenGl or Vulkan for Windows.
Microsoft plays roughly the same role a Khronos (specifies the API, provide conformance test suite, provide an SDK, etc.) but when it comes to actually “shipping” DirectX, Microsoft doesn't have anything to do either, it's all on the graphic card vendor to ship DirectX drivers. As an example, for a while after its release, many people didn't have access to DX12 at all, just because their GPU didn't have DX12 drivers.
So the situation is much less different between DirectX and Vulkan than you make it sound.
qemu is dog slow, and it's barely working enough to get Windows 7 x86 to boot on a M2 (not to mention that the UTM guest tools are mostly broken, so no acceleration anywhere).
If you're judging how much sympathy people "deserve" by what they spend their own money on, you deserve even less.
Here's the most basic thing about purchases: People spend money on what they think is worth it. So the millions of Mac users decided the drawbacks of Windows/PC weren't worth the money.
I think you're missing some nuances of the conversation here. A lot of Apple buyers celebrate the fact that Apple intentionally prevents interoperability with large swathes of software. So if someone is complaining that software doesn't work on an Apple product, they don't "deserve sympathy" because they've deliberately chosen a product where that is ostensibly a selling point.
What? Who is "celebrating" that Apple prevents interoperability? Unless you're saying that buying a macbook is equivalent to celebrating all of Apple's decisions, a clearly false equivalency?
Every time the EU forces Apple to open up some of their platform (USB C, alternative app stores, etc) there's a top comment in the thread saying how the new change makes Apple platforms somehow "ickier", that they chose Apple because of the walled garden-ness that somehow makes it safer, and so on.
We are not talking here about people trying to uplift themselves or humanity around them, and get/give access to education, Internet, computing, etc. We're talking about people who dropped 2 grands to buy into an luxurious anti-freedom walled garden.
Who said anything about enemies. I just don't think someone that consciously bought into a exclusionary walled garden deserves any sympathy... because some external software doesn't work for them.
I sympathize with them but I also sympathize with Valve for being put in a position where they have to support an extremely close and opinionated platform that can change at any moment just because a trillion dollar company decides to.
