Comment by wmichelin
15 hours ago
The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.
I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).
I'm very excited for the future.
> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem
This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.
Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.
Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm
This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.
> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used
This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
(raises hand)
its also the exact opposite of what an os is supposed to do: provide a base and abstraction for applications/programs to run stably; if apps breaks all the time whats the point?
I agree with everything here. Apple has a perverse incentive to create support churn for games and blame developers, but overall the strategy doesn't work on Mac. It only really panned out on mobile, where gambling apps and gacha games take up Apple's mantle in exchange for access to a larger audience. Which is a rich parallel to Apple's story about the App Store "protecting consumers" and the other knee-jerk DSA/DMA apologia.
> They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton
> Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.
Well, Valve steered away from the cowpie this time. Proton is a concession that Windows won, and the equivalent for Linux (Steam Linux Runtime) is still a great idea but goes relatively unused. Valve went to where the gamers were and met them halfway, which is why the Steam Deck became an instant hit despite costing more than an iPad. Proton could be optimized to fix games that were objectively broken on DirectX (see: Elden Ring, Fallout 3/New Vegas) without developers lifting a finger to port anything. It gave customers a real alternative to suffering through Windows and the Windows runtime.
I personally love development on Linux, and I'm making a few hobby games on NixOS right now. The dev experience wasn't the problem for the original Steam Machine or for macOS either, it's the concentration of game devs, modders and players that all treat Win32 and DX11 as the lingua-franca of gaming. Valve threw in the towel on native ports, and it enabled them to focus on curb-cutting efforts that made Linux stick.
Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.
>Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.
"windows is the most stable ABI"