Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I
Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
Apple is so obsessed with how their product is marketed and perceived that they all but eliminated gaming on the platform. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been effective, but I'll never understand why people accept that the people who make the computer should decide how you use it.
I wouldn't say 'eliminated gaming', they just have they've put a lot of encouragement into Mac gaming in recent years to the point that they're maintaining Rosetta 2 for game ports (via Crossover/Wine/Proton) even after its broader deprecation.
The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.
And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.
It's weird, they still try to market it as a machine you can play games on. They make sure a lot of games make it over. It's just never the new cool ones, it's always stuff like a resident evil game from a few years ago or death stranding
I think Apple may have burned a lot of developer bridges with Metal, deprecating OpenGL, and ignoring Vulkan.
To be fair Microsoft ignored Vulkan with Windows leaving it up to 3P to implement.
I don't think Valve funded Proton and Linux development by accident.
Microsoft is not a GPU manufacturer, Apple is. The 3rd parties Microsoft left it up to are the GPU manufacturers.
How is that "fair"?
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This was more Apple's doing rather than Valve's.
Valve wanted steam to co-exist on the mac in the early days and John Sculley of Apple didn't want Apple to be seen as a gaming device or a "personal home computer". So they ceased contact with Valve and the rest is history. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPTLPXNtb2I
Apple refused to license joysticks so they could prevent customers from considering early mac's as game machines and deliberately refused to support games on the machine. Myst was only few that were exclusive to the Mac; that they then ported to PC.
Your timeline doesn't make sense. Steam launched in 2003. Scully was forced out of Apple in 1993.
Most valve games are 32bit macos binaries I assume for powerpc or Intel or something but they flat out refuse to run on modern ox
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So, your right. But the still holds true, that seed was what was sown not to encourage games for the Mac.
If you watch the YT video they go in to depth that they attempted to port the game and was axed by apple.
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Apple is so obsessed with how their product is marketed and perceived that they all but eliminated gaming on the platform. It's hard to argue that it hasn't been effective, but I'll never understand why people accept that the people who make the computer should decide how you use it.
I wouldn't say 'eliminated gaming', they just have they've put a lot of encouragement into Mac gaming in recent years to the point that they're maintaining Rosetta 2 for game ports (via Crossover/Wine/Proton) even after its broader deprecation.
The main issue IMO is the Apple hardware itself isn't focused on raw performance, it's on energy efficiency and mobility. You'd need a MacBook Pro or Mac Studio at least to have the GPU cores & RAM to play the most recent PC games. And so they just tend to lead with casual games, live service games, and second run AAA games. Technically Apple maintains the world's largest gaming platform (by users & revenue) in iOS.
And plenty of AAA games have been ported to macOS like Cyberpunk 2077, the last few Assassin Creeds (Shadows, Mirage), or even iOS/iPadOS/visionOS like Control & Death Stranding, the recent Assassin's Creeds, Resident Evil 2 & 4 Remakes, RE 7 & 8, Civ 6 & Civ 7, etc.
It's weird, they still try to market it as a machine you can play games on. They make sure a lot of games make it over. It's just never the new cool ones, it's always stuff like a resident evil game from a few years ago or death stranding
1 reply →