[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.