[smoldesu]

Apple had a shot at making Mac gaming a reality around 2019. They decided to axe 32-bit library support though, which instantly disqualifies the lion's share of PC games. You could still theoretically update these titles to run on MacOS, but I have little hope that any of these developers would care enough to completely rewrite their codebase to be compatible with 15% of the desktop market share.

[modulusshift]

Yeah, and they also deprecated OpenGL, which would have wiped out most of those games even if the 32-bit support didn't. I'm not expecting to see much backwards compatibility, I'm expecting forwards compatibility, and we're starting to see new titles come out with native Apple Silicon support, slowly, but surely.

[smoldesu]

I wouldn't hold your breath. Metal is still a second-class citizen in the GPU world, and there's not much Apple can do to change that. Having powerful hardware alone isn't enough to justify porting software, otherwise I'd be playing Star Citizen on a decommissioned POWER9 mainframe right now.

[wolrah]

The major factor Apple has working in their favor with regards to the future of gaming on Macs is iOS. Any game or game engine that wants to support iPhone or iPad devices is going to be most of the way to supporting ARM Macs for "free".

My older Intel Macs I'm sure are more or less SOL but they were never intended to be gaming machines.

[smoldesu]

That won't get the top 10 Steam games running on MacOS. There's just too great of a disparity in the tooling, a 'convergence' like you're describing would take the better half of a decade, conservatively speaking. And even if they did converge, that's only guaranteeing you a portion of the mobile market, and just the new games at that. Triple-A titles will still be targeting x86 first for at least the next 5 years, and everything after that is still a toss-up. There's just too much uncertainty in the Mac ecosystem for most games developers to care, which is why it's a shame that Proton doesn't run on Macs anymore. Apple's greatest shot at a gaming Mac was when MacOS had 32-bit support.

Your older Intel Macs are probably just fine for gaming, too. I play lots of games on my 2016 Thinkpad's integrated graphics, Minecraft, Noita, Bloons Tower Defense 6, all of these titles work perfectly fine, even running in translation with Proton. If you've got a machine with decent Linux support, it's worth a try.

[wolrah]

> That won't get the top 10 Steam games running on MacOS.

Top 10 Steam games according to https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

* New World - Amazon Lumberyard

* Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Source

* Dota 2 - Source 2

* Team Fortress 2 - Source

* Apex Legends - Source

* PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS - Unreal

* Destiny 2 - Custom

* Rust - Unity

* Dead by Daylight - Unreal

* MIR4 - Unreal

Unreal, Unity, Lumberyard, and Source 2 all support iOS and thus Metal on ARM already. A game developer using one of those engines should generally be able to just click a few buttons to target an additional platform unless they've gone around the engine's framework in ways that tie their title to their existing platform(s). Obviously in all but the most trivial cases there will still be work to be done, but those game developers using a major commercial engine are doing so because someone else has already done most of the hardest work in platform support for them.

That means six of the top 10 could add native MacOS support with relative ease (as in significantly less work than doing it from scratch) if they wanted to. The three Source titles are likely stuck on DX/OGL platforms forever because it doesn't really make sense to rework such an old engine, but at least the two Valve in-house titles have had persistent rumors of a Source 2 update for years.

[dlivingston]

I mean…the “tooling” these days is usually just Unity3D. And Unity supports Apple silicon as a compile target. Tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the ability to support multiple platforms and architectures in gaming has never been easier.

[DeathArrow]

AAA games are developed using in house engines, not Unity.

[bombcar]

iPhone games are an entire different beast however, and likely not what people “want”.

At least we still have Minecraft.

[wolrah]

> iPhone games are an entire different beast however, and likely not what people “want”.

Most of those mobile games you're thinking of are made with Unity, Unreal, or one of a few other general purpose game engines. Those same engines are used for a significant chunk of PC games as well. The AAA developers who have in-house engines like to reuse them as well. It doesn't matter if a given game does or does not support mobile if it uses an engine that does.

[thomastjeffery]

Metal is 4th class:

1. Vulkan 2. DirectX 3. OpenGL 4. Metal

IIRC, there are some efforts to translate Vulkan to Metal similar to how the WINE project translates DirectX into OpenGL/Vulkan, but that's still an imperfect workaround.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Yeah, I was living with gaming on a Mac when that happened, and watched 2/3rds of my Steam library get greyed out.

[WantonQuantum]

That's why the 2015 Macbook Pro I'm writing this on is still running Mojave.