It may not be compelling, but what if it's reality?
I'm going to argue that "game machine" means something beyond "...it can play games too." It's about audience.
Consoles, obviously, are game machines because that's all they do, play games. No one is buying a console for anything else. There is no need to convince a console buyer of the value of paying for or playing games.
Most PCs aren't good at playing games and aren't designed to play games. That's why there are gaming PCs and laptops that are purposefully designed and built to support the technologies important to gaming. They are game machines. No one buying a gaming PC needs to be convinced of the value of paying for or playing games.
These "game machines" exist because there is a culture of gaming that makes them economically viable. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft have created generations of consoles and poured untold billions into supporting deep catalogs of titles and the ecosystems to make them destination devices for gaming. Build it and they will come, yes, but also, constantly give them reasons to come back.
Gaming PCs and laptops allow buyers to customize and tweak their capabilities to support specific games, game types, or performance targets within the boundaries of almost any budget. Add a diverse range of equally-supported storefronts to buy games (most importantly, Steam) and you have console-like purpose and ease of use.
Macs are good at games as a side effect, not as a goal. There is no audience of gamers paying top dollar for a purpose-built "gaming Mac" and there is no passionate culture of people willing to pay day-one money for the games to run on them. There is no investment by Apple to seed a deep catalog of native games to make the Mac a destination for gaming and specific games.
Ultimately, as the last few messages in this thread attest, technologies designed to harness the power of modern Apple hardware and act as a shim, translation layer, or emulator for software designed for other systems, may end up being the best way to pursuing gaming on the Mac. Because by their very nature and complexity, setups like this are going to appeal to people with the skill and passion to make them work with the reward of gaining access to a depth of titles that will never be duplicated natively. What gaming culture exists on the Mac will recognize this opportunity and take it. Because there is no other viable option.
You and I are largely agreement here, so I’m trying to pick my words carefully to avoid looking like I’m pushing back harder than I am. But I still think that doesn't fully explain things.
First, I’m going to ignore the consoles and, the Steam Deck, and even gaming handheld PCs. Those are dedicated devices bought solely for gaming that do nothing else, so even as cross-platform development has become the norm the crossover between them and the PC gaming market is minimal.
But on the PC side, gaming PCs are a
tiny subset of the market. Just look at gabemaroz’s Steam survey above. A xx60 GPU or lower makes up not just the majority of the market, but the vast and overwhelming majority of it. A 3080 or higher makes up less than 10% Steam’s demographics, and as a service dedicated only to games that's the ceiling for penetration of high-end cards. True gaming PCs are the DSLR of PC gaming, a dedicated device for the dedicated gamer. For most PC gamers, their game machine is the PC they already have. Maybe they splurged and bumped from the Intel integrated graphics to a dedicated GPU (although two of Steam’s top 20 GPUs are integrated), but they didn’t aim high. I would argue that the same point you made about Macs, that they’re good at games as a side effect and not a goal, is true of 80+% of PCs that play games (distinct from gaming PCs).
In that competition that Mac holds up pretty well. A base Mn is in the ballpark of the contemporary x050 from Nvidia, the Mn Pro somewhere around an 060 Ti, and a Max an 070 Ti. That’s…actually pretty reasonable. The slowest Mac on sale today, the M2 MBA, would only be a little below average for Steam and the M3 is probably about the 50th percentile.
If you want to talk culture, it's hard to believe that gamers aren't heavily represented in Apple's core demographics. They have business users sure, but they're over-represented with end consumers and students, which is where your gamers are. You’ve got millions of college students walking around carrying MacBooks of various guises, and college students are known to enjoy the occasional game. They may not play games on their Macs, but they play games.
And that’s why I don’t find the arguments about Macs as gaming machines or Mac users as gamers compelling. It’s the easy, obvious answer, but if you really look at things I'm not convinced it holds up. "Macs aren't good game machines" simply isn't true. Maybe Macs aren't designed to play games, but their performance is reasonable at minimum and respectable at the high end. Yes they're more expensive than a comparable gaming PC, but if you're already buying a Mac anyway splurging on the next tier of processor is still cheaper than a second computer just for games (buying a console is another matter). "Mac users aren't gamers," well without actual surveys I can't make any definitive statements but Apple's main demographics include a lot of people you'd expect to be gamers.
On top of that, looking at the larger gaming industry publishers are
desperate to increase sales. Development costs for AAA games have skyrocketed. AAA games cost $2-300 million easily, if not more. Third parties have essentially abandoned exclusives; console manufacturers can't subsidize them enough to make up for lost sales. MS has gone so far as to try to be the first console manufacturer to abandon even first party exclusives. And here's Apple sitting with a platform that's only slightly less standardized than a console and a highly affluent customer base. There ought to be gold in them there hills.
What about development environment? That Apple requires Metal (or shims) does create a hurdle, but hardly an insurmountable one. And current game engines are already abstracted enough anyway that supporting platform-specific APIs isn't overly difficult (DIrectX on Xbox, Vulkan/DirectX on PC, whatever private API Sony and Nintendo use). But I think we're finally getting closer.
You want my best guess? Go to Jason Snell's latest
Apple Report Card, then scroll down towards to bottom to the section labeled "Developer Relations." Grade D, average 2.4 down from an already mediocre 3.0 a year ago. In a reprise of mid-90s Nintendo going into the N64 era when third parties abandoned them in droves for the far more friendly PS1 environment. Nintendo's reputation was so toxic that a decade later, long after Iwata had reversed course and worked on building relationships, when the Wii frequently outsold the PS3 and 360 combined with development costs a fraction of those systems, third party support was still terrible. It wasn't until the Switch that they finally restored those relationships to a meaningful degree, and some devs and publishers like Rockstar and EA have still held out until the Switch 2 (which it looks like they'll finally be supporting wholeheartedly).
The problem isn't hardware, or user demographics/culture, or size of installed base, or the platform in and of itself, or any of the other obvious answers. The problem is Apple and the disdain they've shown for games since the beginning compounded by all the developer relations they've spent the last number of years setting on fire then salting the earth afterwards. And if Nintendo is any indication once apple finally acknowledges their actual problem and reverses course, it's probably a 10-15 year process to build that trust up. It's built by drops and lost in buckets.
