Consoles give very strict contracts that you can rely on to not change for the whole lifetime of the console. In contrary macOS changes stuff every year apparently based on what a fortune teller says for Steve Job's ghost.
That means that early on, yeah it's as bad as Mac, but it gets way better over the lifetime of the console.
Yeah, no. There's talks of Blizzard for instance dropping support for Mac. Dice has a blog post that's messaging concern. It looks like a bunch of engines are going to limp on MoltenVK which kind or imposes a weird impedance mismatch and gives weird perf issues soemtimes that you probs wouldn't see with a native Metal backend.
And that's before getting into the release of Metal 2. There's a non zero amount of work to support it, and it's not clear how long Apple is going to support Metal 1.
And all of that is before all sorts of other crazy stuff with Apple changing their app signing requirements, messaging that they're going to require all apps to be signed by Apple in some future macOS release (but won't tell you when that is).
I wasn't talking about in-house solutions, rather engines that many AAA studios buy in order to actually focus on the game itself.
As for the rest of your remark, it comes up in places like HN, but not at all when attending local game developer meetups, developer articles on Making Games, Gamasutra, Connection, IGDA, or many other professional publications.
I mean, my day job is supporting an application across Win/Mac/Linux. Even ignoring the graphics, Apple is easily the hardest to support. I don't really care if you haven't read a magazine article on it.
And to pretend like FrostBite doesn't matter is ridiculous.
(not in the game industry, but a graphics programmer)
Are there really no games out there that program their own graphics anymore and don’t rely on “middleware” engines? This seems shocking to me. Then again I was shocked the first time I learned that most games don’t hand-code assembly anymore. Things move so fast.
Even with Switch's adoption of Vulkan, most games are actually using middleware that makes use of NVN.
If a platform is relevant to professional games developers, they will target it, regardless of which APIs and OS it requires.