[pjmlp]

Lack of OpenGL and Vulkan support never mattered on game consoles.

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.

[monocasa]

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.

[pjmlp]

All the middleware that matters for professional game studios has supported Metal since for at least one year now.

[monocasa]

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).

[pjmlp]

> All the middleware that matters....

Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, ...

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.

[monocasa]

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.

[pjmlp]

It doesn't matter for developers that want to support OS X, as it is mostly focused on game consoles and Windows.

Whereas the ones I listed do support those systems, Apple platforms, Android and GNU/Linux.

[ryandrake]

(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.

[pjmlp]

AAA studios always use middleware, if it isn't bought, it is done in-house.

The actual set of 3D API is a tiny portion of everything that a game engine requires, among scene management, materials handling, graphical editor, plugins, sound, physics,....

So one always ends up with a pluggable rendering layer, where adding a new API is relatively simple.

Now what has been happening is that with production costs skyrocketing, most studios are increasable adopting external middleware that they just adapt to their purposes than writing everything from scratch.

For example, you can get Unreal and get support for NVidia's raytracing features out of the box, or invest the money to develop the same features from scratch in-house.

The culture in the games industry is that what matters is the story, gameplay, taking advantage of hardware features and getting the game out there, tech comes and goes.