[ajross]

> Valve should never have shipped a 32-bit application in the first place.

It's literally a 2004 game! That's ridiculous. A handful of opterons existed in the market, but Intel wouldn't get there for years still and it was well over a decade until x86_64 crossed 50% market share in consumer stuff.

Good grief, as it were.

[MrDOS]

In 2004, sure, but Valve didn't (publicly) ship Mac OS X software before 2010.

[ajross]

They didn't develop it from scratch though! The 2010 Mac HL2 binaries are a port of the existing 32 bit Windows product, with all the word size and alignment issues you'd expect for C++ code of that vintage. You don't magically wave a wand and expect high performance code to work when sizeof(void*) changes, and the effort to do that needs to be weighed against the perceived value and the size of the market.

Needless to say, annoying a bunch of HN nerds a quarter century in the future wasn't on Valve's radar. They just wanted some Mac revenue and picked the low hanging fruit.

[hecifato]

I hear what you're saying, but keep in mind that Bethesda shipped Skyrim as 32-bit in 2011. It wasn't until the Special Edition release in 2016 that it was updated to 64. Now, obviously, we could chalk that up to it just being Bethesda.

[throwup238]

That’s because the 64bit upgrade to Creation Engine happened with the Fallout 4 development cycle when 64bit was widespread. Skyrim was also targeting Xbox 360 and PS3 which were still 32bit. FO4 is when the calculus changed for all the target platforms so thats when the engine was upgraded.