[sysbin]

How is using something like unreal engine not able to compile to all operating systems. I'm not a game developer so pardon my ignorance but can you not just run macOS on a VM from Windows to compile?

Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS and the complete build quality that has been slipping over the years. All Apple users know we're paying more for the hardware than machines preinstalled with windows.

Did Steve Jobs really dislike games? I assume he might have viewed them naively as a waste of time. Most people consider that assumption true and unless you consider them some type of therapy to unwind from the world but even then it can be argued there are healthier options for the majority of people that play games.

edit: ah yes, I get downvoted for writing an honest comment because that's HN crowd.

[ShakataGaNai]

You cannot run macOS virtualized on anything but Apple hardware. It's against the Apple Terms of Service. Is it technically possible to do? Yes. However most companies will not do so because that's ground for getting sued, or having your developer licenses revoked.

For the same reason as macOS games must be build on Apple machines, iPhone and iPad applications must also be build on Apple hardware. There is an entire market of companies that rent out "server farms" of MacMini's in datacenters for this exact reason. It massively raises the cost and complexity of a modern development/integration system to have "special snowflakes".

As it comes to hardware, the problem is you can't get something "reasonable". You can build a $500 Windows compatible PC that's not half bad. You can stick a low in Nvidia RTX card in that (for a few hundred more) and get some really reasonable gaming performance out of it. However to get an RTX level gaming performance out of a mac... you're out however much it cost to buy the new MacPro... so let's call that $10k. Most normal people are not going to pay that.

[sysbin]

Sure, you're right about running macOS on non apple hardware but I know a lot of windows user do that and if you're a serious developer why not just buy an apple computer. I really doubt the cost of the apple computer to then compile isn't going to be paid off from macOS users if the game is any good.

Renting out a mac mini isn't raising the cost or complexity to something unreasonable either. It's like people are forcing their ideology upon a company that decided whats best for itself.

The hardware comment your wrote in regard to mine is cherry picking out the part where apple users know they're overpaying for the hardware they get.

[rleigh]

There are quite a number of costs here relating to the "why not buy an apple computer" point. I know because I paid them in both previous jobs and as a sole developer.

Firstly, the hardware cost. It's expensive and slow, but for a business it's a justifiable expense. The real cost is in the ongoing hosting and maintenance. Keeping Mac minis or whatever in a datacentre is a costly waste of space. There's zero remote management, and any failure means a trip to visit the system along with a monitor to hook it up to. Then there's the ongoing system administration cost, keeping it updated, keeping the development tools and build dependencies current. This is an ongoing expense.

Typically, if you need to keep clean environments you need to virtualise, and this means using VMware Fusion or similar. It makes a slow Mac mini system even slower. But if you need to support multiple MacOS versions, or multiple environments, what other choice do you have? It's not like there's a containerisation system for MacOS.

Every other platform can be run virtualised on big metal, like VMware and OpenStack clusters. Linux, BSD, Windows, everything we need to care about. MacOS is a special snowflake exception. This nonconformity adds costs.

As for renting. It's bloody expensive for very little in return. That entire market segment exists solely due to how terrible the hardware and software licensing options are. And the hardware and software procurement and management pain is reflected in the uncompetitive pricing. If Apple offered a developers-only generic VM licence for MacOS this market would vanish overnight.

[rswail]

As a single developer, that's an incremental cost that would be hard to justify for a small potential market.

As a company, adding an additional different testing infrastructure (rent a macmini farm) with the additional pipeline costs (setup, build pipeline etc) as well as the additional opex, again, for a small potential market, is not economical.

[slavik81]

> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games?

Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent:

> Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of their own which was going to be a bad idea, then I'll personally port the Quake 3 stuff rather than working with a partner company on that. And we went through all that. All of our Apple ports have been successful - they've all made money - but it's marginal money, and we have worked with Aspyr usually on all the other ones after that, but I do think it kind of comes from the top.

> The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his shithead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer. It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it.

> There are people at Apple who want to support all this - and there's no roadblocks for us right now, we're going to support the Mac on Rage, we hope to get a version of Quake Live going up on the Mac there - but it's just that's not what the Mac platform's about, and I don't really expect that to change because it's a tough equation now that you've got everybody dual-booting their Macs and everything: why would you want to go to the extra trouble of [developing games for Mac]?

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack...

[bangonkeyboard]

This always struck me as highly shortsighted of Jobs and other Apple leadership. Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes, and the virtuous cycle of gamers growing up on those platforms and then wanting to try their hands at developing their own games for them is how many, many software developers got their start, including some who later found themselves at Apple. What's especially strange is that that list of former videogame developers includes Jobs and Wozniak.

Apple later lucked into a gaming market with iPhone, but they're still awkward at it (just see the games they choose to showcase onstage) and there is very little cross-pollination that considers the Mac as a gaming platform.

[kalleboo]

When the Mac was originally launched, there was an industry perception that GUIs were toys not suitable for business, so Apple was very worried that being a games platform would reinforce that image[0]. That initial worry seems to have left scar tissue in their corporate culture that would haunt Apple for decades.

[0]e.g. see the concluding paragraph on https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

[CountSessine]

Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes

Apple II, but Macintosh? I'm not sure I agree with that.

I think a lot of Jobs' opinions about personal computers gelled in the 80's. Back then, with the various Sinclair machines, the Ataris, the C64, and the Amiga, there were a lot of people who said that games actually harmed those platforms. In North America at least, having a large library of games made businesses see those platforms as toys and game consoles. Why would you buy an office full of game consoles? You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!

[wtallis]

> You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!

To be fair, that mindset predates the use of personal computers to do serious graphics business. The Mac is largely responsible for making that mindset obsolete with things like desktop publishing and Photoshop. The same attributes that made the Mac a good platform for those use cases also made it much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

[aksss]

> much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

Is that really true? I was alive during DOS-era gaming and still remember kids from Mac families standing out on the sidewalk in the rain crying like Oliver Twist weenies because they couldn’t get their game on. Meanwhile PC - read _intel_ - games we’re writing their own low-level memory managers to eek everything out of the platform possible. I was inside playing Ultima VII or playing Falcon 3.0 with a remote friend _over modem_ drinking hot chocolate. I think any review of the games catalogs would show that the market clearly judged the Mac as less well-suited for gaming.

[pjmlp]

In Europe most serious graphics business during DOS-era PCs, was done in Amiga and Atari STs.

[kroltan]

> just run macOS on a VM

As far as I know it is against the terms of service to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, so you can't just run a macOS VM.

> Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS.

Is that not the same thing, effectively? For a given buying power, a player that chooses mac will have objectively poorer hardware.

Yes, there are a few capable rigs for Apple systems, but they are ludicrously expensive and thus provide a minuscule install base for your game, so it's basically not worth the effort for a triple-A studio. Less demanding games might be more viable, but it's still a lot of costs in porting, build infrastructure and publishing for very little return.

[eschaton]

When games are targeted to the Macs potential users have, they have always sold reasonably well. Back when the Mac market was far smaller, and it was much more difficult to develop a game, developers did OK.

If you start with the premise that you should just barely achieve 60fps with all effects enabled on this year’s top-of-the-line PC video card you’re artificially constraining your market. Make your game fun and make it run on as broad a set of users’ systems as possible and you have much better chances of doing well in any market.

[kroltan]

I understand and agree with "make the game fun despite computer power", but you got to understand that at least in the current industry climate it means less games are even viable for porting at all.

Basically every triple-A studio banks on having The Latest Technology for their games, so that is a whole nonviable segment.

Sole developers or small indies often can't bother keeping up with the product lineup (XCode often requires the latest macOS version and that means buying a new machine way more often than for other platforms) just to be able to keep building their game. Remember, these are possibly multi-thousand dollar purchases, not to count the actual porting and testing costs. So, another segment made largely nonviable, at least for initial/planned releases.

This leaves us with what's informally called the "double-A" part of the industry: Studios large enough to have a bunch of cash to spare and one or two people who can work on sussing out the multitude of platform requirements and compatibility/performance issues that arise from the Mac platform.

Not only that, but if you are a "double-A" studio that works with a in-house engine, the costs might be increased still due to the required proprietary Metal graphics API, that must be integrated or at least integrating something like MoltenVK (assuming the engine is new enough to have a Vulkan based renderer already).

The only remaining viable projects are on an exception basis, and that leaves very few candidates for porting.

[SahAssar]

> When games are targeted to the Macs potential users have, they have always sold reasonably well.

The mac market has always been small, and the supply of games even smaller. So that supply has sold pretty well and for example Aspyr and Bungie made pretty OK money off of that.

If the mac supply of games was more competitive I'd wonder if those economics work anymore.

[jfkebwjsbx]

What you ask is basically impossible: most Macs sold only have an integrated GPU, while all major platforms (gaming PCs, Xbox, PS...) do have dedicated GPUs. This means the performance is not even comparable.

Targeting macOS is only feasible for simple/casual games and some eSports.

[barkingcat]

MacOS Vm's on any other platform other than Macs are disallowed by the EULA. And while you might or might not believe in EULA's, Apple's legal department certainly does and will prosecute commercial entities (for example, if you are trying to build and sell a game)

Re Steve Jobs on games, you can believe in your own skepticism, or you can hear it directly from John Carmack, the creator of DOOM, who tried to work with Steve Jobs to get a proper foundation for gaming on the Mac. He did not succeed.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/john-carmack-talks-stev...

[bangonkeyboard]

> Did Steve Jobs really dislike games?

'[Steve] claimed to have never read a comic book in his life (“I hate them more than I hate video games,” he told me)...' — https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/bob-iger-remembers-s...