Comment by paulryanrogers
6 hours ago
This was shocking to me as a gamer who loved Windows and had to use Mac. Rosetta helped for a while. Nowadays it feels like an intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up.
6 hours ago
This was shocking to me as a gamer who loved Windows and had to use Mac. Rosetta helped for a while. Nowadays it feels like an intentional treadmill to purge any dev not willing to keep up.
Oh yeah, Mac and games don't mix for other reasons besides that too. Like Apple wants devs to use Metal, and devs don't want to use Metal. I occasionally play whatever few games happen to run on my Mac, and that's enough.
No? Mac and games mix great in 2026. I'd wager 90% of games released in the last 30 days on Steam run out of the box under Wine on Mac, or at worst - usually when a custom in-house engine is used, which is now rare - with minimal modifications that Claude will whip up for you. AAA blockbusters and eSports, sure, but all in all that's only a small percentage of games. And of course some of the highest quality AAA games like Baldur's Gate 3 or very popular indie games like Slay the Spire run natively on Mac.
Yeah, it makes no sense. The standard is OpenGL, Vulkan, but Apple ditches it just to be different or something. At least some big game engines support it, e.g. OGRE, so if you do want cross-platform dev, it's possible.
Even the cross-platform stuff tends to not support Mac as well. Like CSGO had a Mac version like the other Source-engine games, but it never worked quite right on Mac. I had input lag and inconsistent framerates, and it's not that I cared about winning, but the game was painful to play like that. Game was perfect on the same machine running Windows via Boot Camp.
Also, there's Vulkan on Metal, but there's translation overhead, and I have no idea what other issues it causes. Dolphin emulator did some research on that.