Comment by nottorp

9 hours ago

They also dropped the Mac version.

They complain there are few Mac players on Steam. Well, I'm not going to buy it if it doesn't run on the desktop OS [1] i use most, duh.

[1] My Linux boxes are headless. And the windows boxes I have to RDP into them. That may work for a game with a beginning and and end via Steam streaming or something, but not for a forever game you just keep around.

15 comments

nottorp

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rkido  8 hours ago

While individual game developers choose whether to support macOS, the broader phenomenon of developers dropping macOS support is Apple's fault. They either have no interest in being a serious gaming platform, or else they've made catastrophic missteps in their quest to stay relevant for gamers.

  • scratcheee  7 hours ago

    I don’t think it has anything to do with their gaming specific capabilities, just their general philosophy matches poorly with the games industry.

    Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.

    As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).

    There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.

    • Shitty-kitty  4 hours ago

      Optimization and bug hunting makes supporting multiple graphics api's a pain. I really don't understand Apple's stubborn refusal to make vulkan drivers. Between Apple and the better performance on SteamDeck, I can see PC game developers seriously considering Vulkan over directx.

    • wlesieutre  3 hours ago

      > Game devs don’t want a major support burden

      What fraction of game studios still even exist 10 years after releasing a game?

flurb  8 hours ago

I was a quarterly(-ish) contributor for years. There was no way for me to justify buying anything when they announced dropping keyboard support, when I've spent years developing muscle-memory to their (admittedly insane) control scheme.

Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?

musictubes  2 hours ago

The sad thing is that current Macs are perfect machines for DF. The recommendation was always to get as fast a single threaded machine as possible with the biggest cache. Even the least expensive Macs are monsters in those regards. The game is more multi-threaded than before but still is dominated by single threaded performance.

gloryjulio  5 hours ago

Mac gaming is a pain in the **. It's Apple's fault. It's fine they can't justify the maintenance.

bigyabai  9 hours ago

The game runs fine in Proton, including with dfhack. You can probably get it working on your Mac with a tiny bit of Crossover/Wine/GPTK tweaking.

  • hamdingers  8 hours ago

    That's missing the point. There were official native MacOS builds and now there aren't.

    Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.

    • zamalek  7 hours ago

      What benefit does a native build have over proton? I used to care more about it on Linux, until I realized that "native build" probably means "doesn't work." I can only imagine this being much worse on a niche gaming target which there are extremely few users making (and voting for) bug reports.

      Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.

      Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).