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Re: mobile, didn't I address that in my post? Sure, mobile gaming might be bigger by revenue, but it's not really an "overtaking" as much as growing a new market, as far as I can tell. Most of the games are totally different -- casual gambling vs the high-skill or deeply strategic games on PC (and to an extent, console). There's nothing wrong with iOS (and mobile in general) having its own game ecosystem, but it's distinctly different from PC and console games. May I ask whether you're familiar with those ecosystems, like do you actually play on both? It's one thing to look at it from a pure dollars & business standpoint, but from the eyes of actual players, they're pretty different landscapes. Even among cross-platform franchises, there's a pretty big difference between (say) Diablo Immortal and Diablo 2/3. Once in a while there are actual cross-platform titles that are largely the same game (Fortnite, PUBG, etc.) but those aren't super common yet. What I'm trying to say is that there is a huge library of existing and upcoming WinTel/x86 games that depend on Windows (and to a large extent, Steam) -- both because of architectural reasons but also other "cultural" reasons, like preferring mouse + keyboard input vs the touchscreen, or having a large screen for UI real estate (especially for strategy games). Apple does not care about that segment. To be sure, they don't need to, between iOS revenue and their other income streams. It just saddens me because it means I'll have to keep a spare Windows PC lying around just to feed that habit, when the M1/M2 hardware is totally capable of playing those titles IF either they were ported (puts the onus on each game developer, especially hard for small indie studios) OR if Apple had better backward compatibility (some games will work with Rosetta, thankfully, but only if there was an OSX x86 port -- many don't even have that). Otherwise, ironically, that sort of gaming is better on Linux, despite its worse drivers and complex distributions, because of efforts like Proton that make per-game compatibility layers. Because the community took the time to implement backward compatibility with older APIs, choosing to support games rather than aiming for ideological purity. Apple chose the other approach, and that may be fine for them as a business, it just sucks for us as gamers. ------- As for streaming, yes, it's a great technology, but not a surefire fix. I've been using them for more than a decade, from OnLive to PSNow to Shadow to GeForce Now to xCloud, on everything from phones to gigabit fiber. They're wonderful technologies, but suffer many issues: 1) latency & bandwidth issues unless you're on a good and consistent connection, and LTE/5G isn't quite powerful enough to really make it reliable, WiFi is a mixed bag 2) no mods support yet since most services haven't virtualized that part of the filesystem yet, Shadow being the exception 3) graphics are middle of the road. Sure, it might be rendered on a RTX rig, but compression artifacts and jitter will frequently impact your experience 4) this is a big one: for some reason, publishers are constantly pulling their titles OFF of these services, and GeForce Now lost a bunch of AAA titles since it launched. Sometimes they reappear on some other streaming service, but not always. 5) the game streaming landscape is very quickly fragmenting, with games split between Xbox Game Pass, PSNow, GeForce Now, Luna, etc... it looks like they're trying to go for the streaming video model, with a subscription for each publisher (sadly) so you'll end up with a bunch of different subscriptions instead of being able to just rent a virtual rig by the hour/month and play all the games ----- Look, I'm nobody, and I can't force Apple to care about PC gaming. I'm sure somebody there did the math and figured it wasn't worth it... especially because we're an audience that's very demanding in terms of power and customizability, and would probably be a PITA for them to support. Shrug. I just hope Apple Silicon sells enough that publishers will start porting games over on their own accord, and maybe ten years from now nobody will be making WinTel games anymore, and all the titles will seamlessly transition from the laptop to the watch, whatever. We're just not there yet. |
The PC gaming market is a 28.6B a year market for software sells. The actual hardware sales have to be much smaller to the point where it would be even lower than that. Definitely not worth Apple sacrificing being able to move fast.