Macs Can Game. But Apple Can’t.

I game on my Mac all the time. The closed lid of my Macbook Pro is the purfect surface to plonk my Switch onto.

None of this would’ve been possible without both the Valve and the Linux community.

This is the best breakdown on this subject in a single video. I think you're right, that the management doesn't realize what the issue actually is. It's not about getting game devs to port things at this point. It's proving that the Mac is a stable ecosystem for games. A good first step would be to have some sort of translation layer for 32bit libraries, since a lot of games specifically have that. Libraries having backwards compatibility would go a long way in building trust. I didn't say re-building, because Apple has never had that trust the same way Microsoft did. Not to mention, it would go a long way in making things that are currently - "this will never work again on Mac" - and fixing it. I, and a lot of other developers I know, stay in the Windows environment because it's stable. And I don't mean like, "oh Windows doesn't crash." I mean, Windows doesn't fundmentally change its internals. Shit, we bitch when Microsoft changes a function in .NET slightly. What I appreciate about MacOS is that the desktop doesn't change. I love that it's the same thing it's been since OSX, really, with new things added on. I don't like that Windows' UI has changed. I do like that .NET 3.0 still works on Windows 11. I do like that old sound libraries from 1998 still work on Windows 11, if you tinker enough (granted that's an extreme use case.) My apps don't randomly break from OS to OS version. Microsoft takes great care not to break userspace. With MacOS, the guts have changed so much that I was excited to find out midis still worked natively. 32 bit libraries are gone. Apple's frameworks are far behind everyone else's in some ways. Swift is hidden behind some obscure wall that you have to go somewhere other than Apple to find good documentation on it. Their graphic APIs are not well documented, etc, etc. I remember the PowerPC era. Games came out for Windows and Mac at a pretty even tilt during this era. Anything you could play on Windows, you could play on the PowerPC in MacOS. Now you can't even play shit from the PowerPC era on a modern Mac, and you're probably better off trying to find a source port or running a GOG version through a translation layer. Apple switching architectures didn't initially destroy that trust, but god damn if it didn't add to it. And Apple has fundamentally always been at odds with game devs, because game development as a rule of thumb doesn't really "advance" in the same way other programming disciplines do. Apple loves to leave old stacks behind. Game devs will stick on a specific version of a tool that they're using and never move away from it if they don't have to, most times, because it works for their creative flow. It's the same thing with musicians, but Apple has less control over their toolsets. The best Mac gamers can hope for here is that Apple gets their head out of their ass on this particular subject, and works on a tool to translate these older programs to run on modern MacOS. That alone would incentivize a lot of game developers to take a second look at MacOS. And the best bet there is to create a translation layer that makes it easy for Devs to target. They also need to develop this as a stable framework, that even if it's the 1.0 of the framework, will still work on their OS in 10 years. Which Apple has never guaranteed. And is what is currently shooting them in the foot. I think another way Apple could potentially fix this would be with their universal packaging system, in that, each App is it's own "environment." Therefore the App never breaks as long as a Mac can read the package. As long as the hardware instruction sets are there, it could fix it. Similar to how Flatpaks/AppImages/Snaps run in Linux. There would never be a worry for me, as a dev, that my app is going to randomly break, and I'm going to have people screaming at me and opening tickets. Either way, this was a great video. Thank you. One day, I hope I'll be able to daily drive a Mac and not have to regularly switch to Windows for various things. But. Today is not that day.

This is so true. Apple's commitment to gaming has been extremely halfhearted and spotty. They keep announcing these new "Gaming on Mac" things but then they ignore them for years

I have had a Mac as my main gaming computer from about 2007 to 2017. I have used a Mac since 1997. I think my 2010 Mac Pro, with GTX1080, 32 GB RAM, upgraded X5690 CPU and PCIe SSDs still runs more Mac games than a modern Apple silicon Mac. Nearly my entire Steam Library runs on my 2010 Mac. In OSX. A few more things like GTA5 run in bootcamp. But since Metal, dropping 32bit and moving to ARM Apple gaming has been horrible. I moved to Windows in 2021. After more than a decade, I have given up on Mac gaming.

I was this close to buying the M1 MacBook Pro. Gaming was the reason I changed my mind and never looked back. I wonder how many people felt the same, and whether Apple would ever manage to win us over.

Finally, an awesome take on the whole macOS Gaming marketing gibberish and fiasko!

Valve's effort with proton perfectly shows the level of commitment needed to get a foothold in the gaming space. Steam Deck would have been a flop if Proton was there for developers to implement like the porting toolkit

Apple can't generate money from games unless its from Apple Arcade, that's why they are so passive. They are not the traditional PC vendor that needs to make better components for gamers so they can sale year after year.

They also need to optimize their OS for gaming a little bit, recently in the beta they added the option to disable mouse acceleration (finally) but there's still work to do, for example If you have 2 monitors, the game's cursor goes thru the borders of the main screen and appears for a bit in your secondary screen and gets kinda stuck in the 2nd screen.

love your channel, could you do a "how i setup my mac , the settings and customization and shortcuts' video. keep up the awesome content.

minor thing about the performance data you presented at around the 2 and a half minute mark, it seems that these results would look even worse on the M series chips if you showed data that would more easily show frametime data i.e. stutters. The continuous graphs you showed running ingame seem to be stuttering quite often (according to the graphs)

I certainly agree with the premise that apple needs to figure out a more cohesive business strategy for getting gaming on the Mac to become a real, viable business for developers to get into. That said, that still can’t happen without proper tools to get their titles running on ARM, which they just started providing. It looks like they’ve done a great job of creating tools that highlight the compute performance of their laptops, but they need to have a better performance angle for their desktops and needs a better solution for distributing games on their platform.

All the things you said need to happen and I don't even own a Mac. It would increase the knowledge and experience of developers with ARM based systems, and prove that you can have a balance of upper mid range gaming with the gains in power efficiency. With greater market competition and accessibility everyone wins. Of course, this will never happens because the executives, at best, play one game ever, so I think that is why they continue the cycle of "look, here is a game!"

I remember the good old days when AAA games came to the Mac thanks to the Quake III and Unreal T engines… And also when Tomb Raider II appeared… Hope this times will come back. Thanks for your work!

My M2 Air serves as the main work machine especially since I'm highly mobile on weekdays. Did little gaming on my M2 Air (X-Plane 12 and Subnautica) which runs nowhere near 60 fps but still works very well. The rest games especially AAA titles still play on a dedicated gaming PC.

There already was something like a golden age for Mac gaming, that's from when Steam came to Mac until Apple cut 32bit support. It must be really frustrating for any game dev to work for Mac, not to mention users. On the PC I can still run the same games that would've been through 3 "cuts" by Apple already, nobody's going to update their 10 year old game every time Apple feels the itch to cut out legacy support again. For a short time in the mid 2010s I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened Steam on Mac and saw how many of the games I had bought on the PC side actually were ready to install in a native Mac version - for a short time I even believed one could actually live with just a Mac as a gaming platform. But with 32bit support at least 2/3 of my game library disappeared, that was probably the worse cut than the Apple Silicon switch which just sorted out a few more of the already meager library. You just can't rely on Apple for long time support, nor on game studios to play this stupid game and regulary re-port their games again and again. Also, every other platform than Steam would stand no chance on the Mac, Apple's App Store won't do it - but whether Apple would leave that yummy 30% cut to Valve - doubtful. Although, I doubt Valve's long-term support too under these conditions, I noticed even staples of games on Mac like the Sims aren't available for MacOS on Steam anymore, you have to get that elsewhere. Last but not least there's the issue of the high entry price for adequate gaming hardware, adequate for gaming meaning no base model, and the biggest issue everyone has with Apple is surely their upgrade prices for +8GB RAM or whatever, not to mention SSD space when today's games easily need >100GB.

I keep beating on the Mac gaming drum with a similar take, Apple can’t take a field of dreams approach. The porting toolkit is fascinating as it’s so close yet so far. Not supporting Vulkan native or creating at the very least a hyper optimized translation layer like MoltenVK is just rough.

If you ever make a second version of this video, could you tell us how the Mac Minis do? They look like a possible contender but I don’t know how to measure them.

2:18 lol your slides say "Macbok Air" XD