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I love my Macbook too, and am hoping it revitalizes the dead OSX games industry. But its lack of backward compatibility further hurts its gaming capabilities vs the already-limited x86 OSX games. It's nice when it does work and you have some M1-native titles (Baldur's Gate, etc.) but those are far and few in between. Sure, it's a great business machine, it's just not a gamer's laptop (even though its hardware is fully capable). I use my M1 for most things, but still have to use Windows x86 for actual gaming. Yes, Windows's backward compatibility carries a high cost. Nobody doubts that. But as a gamer, I would rather to be able to play games on a shitty OS than to have the latest, most vertically integrated all-in-one chip and stellar OS and be limited to a library of like 15 five-year-old titles. As for the "right choice", eh, maybe from a business angle... but as a gamer, iOS games suck. They probably have that revenue mostly from lootboxes, not actual gameplay. I don't know that Apple should be applauded for turning video gaming into online gambling. That's not really a hardware/OS stack question anyway though, but a business decision. And to be fair, many of the actually curated titles (like the ones on Apple Arcade) are pretty decent -- though nothing close to the thriving indie scene on Steam/x86 Windows. iOS is more like a console in that they're creating a new market segment, not necessarily competing with traditional PC gaming (which has taken a turn for the worse by adopting mobile lootboxes and such). On the other hand, OSX and Linux both tried the purist gaming route with their own APIs and got nowhere. It took WINE and Proton to really make the Steam Deck a viable platform (and barely that). Do I like this situation? No, I'd rather just have games be properly cross-platform to begin with. I don't really understand how cross-platform works in Unreal and Unity, but if those engines can add native Apple Silicon support and make it easy for publishers to cross-publish, hopefully we'll see Macs on future titles alongside PC/PS/Xbox/Switch. Till then... |
https://www.giffgaff.com/blog/mobile-gaming-overtakes-pc-and...
On top of that, you can carve out the percentage of “PC Gaming” that is “browser based” since you can run those on a Mac. The industry is moving toward browser based streaming games.
https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/game-strea...