dismissing mac gaming as something that can become viable does not make sense.

[oali24]

So I have noticed that over the years whenever someone asks about gaming on mac or asks if they can game on mac in pc centric circles they are just dismissed out of hand and treated as if they are stupid for even asking for game devs to develop for mac. Especially now with the apple silicon transition its gotten really bad honestly, like ok, in the intel days, getting a mac for primarily gaming wasn't a good value proposition but the 15 inch macbook pros still had dedicated graphics and if you used bootcamp it could play most games at reasonable frame rates and resolutions, but now with apple silicon that option has gone, and Apple seems to have no interest into attracting game developers when they really need to if they want their customers to game on Mac.

 

When this is brought up lots of people say 2 things, "macs are too small of a niche for game devs to make money from" and "no one wants to game on mac", but I don't agree, macs are around 10% of the pc market , if a game makes $100 million dollars in sales thats like an aditional ~$10 million dollars of possible sales, that's probably enough to look into getting someone to do the porting work if Apple just supported vulcan api and other things that are on pc that they could choose to just support instead of forcing the use of proprietary technologies, I mean I don't have much knowledge in this area so if anyone here knows about this I would love to know, for the second thing, sure because of apple doing so little to support gaming on mac the userbase of macs probably has very few keyboard and mouse gamers but I am sure if they started to really support game devs a decently sized library could be achieved which would encourage more gamers from other platforms like consoles to play on their macs, what I am trying to get at is that people dismissing mac gaming is basically excusing apple of their apathy to gaming, I think that reviews of macs by the press should consider it more prominently like ltt does in their reviews because I think it would be a shame for the mac platform to be underutilised, am I saying that this would force apple to change their ways overnight? no, but I think that if people cared more about this it eventually might lead to apple making it easier to make games for mac. I don't even use a mac, but even to me it has obvious potential as a competitor that could compete with microsoft and lead to better products from both companies.

[trag1c]

This is the biggest reason why devs don't care for Mac (and unfortunately Linux)

 

2nd reason why Mac will probably get even less consideration is the fact that Apple doesn't give two fucks about gaming. The argument for Linux is that you at least have Vulkan so your time and money is not wasted purely for one platform, you can benefit others. MoltenVK does exist but that is a compatibility layer that adds additional complexity over just Vulkan since it will never be a true 1:1 mapping (ABI may be the same but the behaviors will not be.). You're adding a ton of technical debt for 2% of the available market.

 

This gets even more exacerbated by the shift to ARM. You're now into sufficiently unfamiliar territory, most game devs will have excellent knowledge of the inner workings of x86(_64) based platforms but they won't know shit about optimizing for ARM CPU's as its not their target market. Hell, there would probably be more collective knowledge of the old PowerPC based processers used in the PS3 and Xbox 360. 

[Eigenvektor]

26 minutes ago, oali24 said:

macs are around 10% of the pc market , if a game makes $100 million dollars in sales thats like an aditional ~$10 million dollars of possible sales, that's probably enough to look into getting someone to do the porting work if Apple just supported vulcan api and other things that are on pc that they could choose to just support instead of forcing the use of proprietary technologies,

Those $10M in additional sales are only true if you assume both markets have an equivalent amount of people interested in gaming. I would guess the large majority of gamers use PCs, while Mac users are mostly professionals and/or company owned devices. So if 1% of the PC market buys your game, that might translate to only 0.1% of the Mac market buying your game, so $1M in sales rather than $10M.

 

While Apple Silicon Macs are pretty powerful, you need to consider that the price of entry into the Mac market is much higher than the PC market. And GPU wise, price to performance is worse. So if you have $500 to spend on a gaming machine, you'll probably consider Console first, PC second and Mac is out of the question entirely. If you have $1500 to spend, you'll most likely go with a PC and spend the bulk of that money on a good GPU, still ignoring Macs.

 

While MoltenVK can be used to run Vulkan on top of Apple's Metal, how many game engines today even use Vulkan? The large majority are DirectX games, which means additional effort is needed to port that to Vulkan. And if you want the best possible performance ideally you should port to Apple Silicon, rather than relying on Rosetta. That's additional development effort that needs to be offset by the expected sales before you even consider it as a developer.

[oali24]

29 minutes ago, trag1c said:

This is the biggest reason why devs don't care for Mac (and unfortunately Linux)

 

2nd reason why Mac will probably get even less consideration is the fact that Apple doesn't give two fucks about gaming. The argument for Linux is that you at least have Vulkan so your time and money is not wasted purely for one platform, you can benefit others. MoltenVK does exist but that is a compatibility layer that adds additional complexity over just Vulkan since it will never be a true 1:1 mapping (ABI may be the same but the behaviors will not be.). You're adding a ton of technical debt for 2% of the available market.

 

This gets even more exacerbated by the shift to ARM. You're now into sufficiently unfamiliar territory, most game devs will have excellent knowledge of the inner workings of x86(_64) based platforms but they won't know shit about optimizing for ARM CPU's as its not their target market. Hell, there would probably be more collective knowledge of the old PowerPC based processers used in the PS3 and Xbox 360. 

yes but even though linux is so much easier to develop for and there is so much more resources put into it by developers like valve who desperately want to escape MS's ecosystem (steam deck, proton) mac still has twice the steam users because of market share, and steam users are the sort of gamers who put a lot of money into buying games, if apple started taking gaming seriously it would probably be a big success, they wouldn't take over the whole market but it would open up a new segment of customers for them and be profitable.

[rrats]

Good luck on playing anything with Mac's laptop-ass keyboard and their non ergonomical mouse (and even worse stuff when it comes to macbooks)

[trag1c]

6 minutes ago, oali24 said:

yes but even though linux is so much easier to develop for and there is so much more resources put into it by developers like valve who desperately want to escape MS's ecosystem (steam deck, proton) mac still has twice the steam users because of market share, and steam users are the sort of gamers who put a lot of money into buying games, if apple started taking gaming seriously it would probably be a big success, they wouldn't take over the whole market but it would open up a new segment of customers for them and be profitable.

But you're still running into the fundamental problem, it's still a very limited market share of Mac vs Windows and of that market share that I doubt the customer base actually aligns with the PC gaming type. In fact I know it doesn't align with the PC gaming type. MacOS in general has several times (~6x) the market share that desktop Linux does but yet has less than double the reported systems on steam.

 

For these game studios its all about low hanging fruit, Macs present a lot more development challenges for a user base that simply doesn't play video games. Where as with Linux you have a lot more common components lessening your development workload while the user base is far more willing to purchase said games. There's also the awareness of Linux gaming and the advancements that have been made towards that. When was the last time that Apple actually made any advancement for gaming on the platform? 2014 when they released Metal? Before that OpenGL (or even during) was common but Apples OpenGL support was laughable at best since the behavior of the API was significantly different from other platforms since they wrote their own implementation instead of the GPU manufacturer (Commonly used usage patterns ran like total shit under Mac). 

 

Now, assuming as a studio you have the budget to develop with a very low level rendering API, you're probably at the AAA level. Most studios below AAA don't have the time, money, expertise and requirements for a proper Metal, Direct3D12 or Vulkan renderer. That leaves OpenGL as the only cross platform option but that has been completely deprecated on Mac. Even if a smaller studio uses something like Unreal or Unity they still have to modify the engine to suite their game and that will inevitably affect platform specific code. So you're still back to, they cant support the modifications necessary to achieve decent support on Mac for their title.

 

Unless Apple puts some serious effort into their platform for gaming, it will never be a viable platform. But Apple will never put that investment into the OS because they have more than enough analytics to tell that people don't play video games on their platform. Its not like they haven't had the opportunity to do so either, MacOS has been around for a very long time...

[FlappyBoobs]

The issue isn't the why, what or when it's the how. I am a software dev, when I create a game (for example) on windows i just fire up my chosen IDE, grab a few assets, build with my chosen engine and release my new game, with Windows and Linux I'm done, I sit back and wait for the scathing reviews and inevitable bankruptcy from trying to keep the servers up...now with apple, before I release I have to recompile my code for their platform, no biggie but wait I can't use my 100+ core build farm for it....I need a Mac to be part of the build process which slows things down a bit, I also have to pay apple for a licence for permission to have the option to publish to their platform, I have to consistently re-release to avoid being delisted and now apple is directly part of my build schedule because when they change something I have to react as they are constantly deprecating libraries that I may have used, breaking my game.

 

The actual dollar cost of publishing to apple is negligible, but annoying that it is there, however the ongoing maintainance costs for developing for their platform is basically unsustainable for anyone but the biggest dev houses...and at that scale there just aren't enough gamers on mac to justify the cost.

[Stormseeker9]

I can happily game on my M1 MBP. 
 

ETS2; timberborn, WoT; C:S, 

[LogicalDrm]

The problem is, and has always been, Apple. They have had 25 years + to give even nod to gamers. They got another chance with iPhone and mobile games. Still nothing on their desktop/laptop side EVEN WHEN THEIR PHONES ARE BOUGHT FOR MOBILE GAMING!!! You can't fix stupid decisions, and blaming anyone but Apple shows lack of perspective.

[Needfuldoer]

3 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

The problem is, and has always been, Apple. They have had 25 years + to give even nod to gamers. They got another chance with iPhone and mobile games. Still nothing on their desktop/laptop side EVEN WHEN THEIR PHONES ARE BOUGHT FOR MOBILE GAMING!!! You can't fix stupid decisions, and blaming anyone but Apple shows lack of perspective.

Ironically, Mac gaming had something of a renaissance in the iMac / Power Mac G3 days. By the mid 90s the Mac gaming scene was basically just Maxis, Bungie, Freeverse Software, bedroom shareware developers, and whatever MacSoft decided to port. There are some all-time classics in that library, but there were plenty of Wintel exclusives that never got a Mac port (or at least never a particularly good one).

 

The late 90s and early 2000s saw Mac ports of heavy hitters like Unreal Tournament, Quake III, Star Wars Episode 1 Racer, and Halo. The PowerPC G3 traded blows with Pentium IIs at double its clock speed, the G4's AltiVec instructions were faster than the Pentium III's SSE, and G3 Macs came with ATI graphics by default. (The slot loading iMacs and the blue-and-white Power Mac G3 all had variants of the Rage 128.) This is all in spite of Mac OS 9 being a kludgey house of cards that was completely different under the hood from Windows and *nix clones. The floodgates really opened up with Carbon, OS X, and OpenGL.

 

 

Part of the problem was Motorola. They struggled to get the G4 running over 1 ghz through the end of 2001. Remember, this is the era of the Tualatin Pentium III, Willamette Pentium 4, and Thunderbird Athlon on the PC side. (Q1 2002 also saw the release of the 2+ ghz Northwood Pentium 4 and Thoroughbred Athlon, just in time for the 1 ghz G4s).  Power Mac G4s plodding along at 733 or 867 mhz wasn't a great look for marketing, even if they came with Radeon 7000s, GeForce2 MX, and GeForce4 MX graphics.

 

Then, with the architectural switch to Intel CPUs in 2006, the answer to Mac gaming became "just dual boot Windows in Boot Camp".

 

Then Apple had their spat with Nvidia over the Metal API, sunsetting the Geforce based MacBooks and any chance of Mac Pro users getting Nvidia cards to work right in their systems. 

[Motifator]

Seemingly the 2019 Macbook with the 5600M is well capable of it, of course, when you bootcamp it. There are drivers on both bootcamp and even AMD's official site for the AMD GPU.

The cheese grater can do it, too, but I don't speak about that first. It will likely overheat even more than the laptop with the X299 CPU chalked up the the side of the case with no cooling lmao.

[Roswell]

18 hours ago, rrats said:

Good luck on playing anything with Mac's laptop-ass keyboard and their non ergonomical mouse (and even worse stuff when it comes to macbooks)

Yeah, it’s pretty wild how everyone is stuck using the peripherals that come in their computer’s box.

 

If only we had the option to buy third party mice and keyboards…

 

18 hours ago, trag1c said:

Macs present a lot more development challenges for a user base that simply doesn't play video games. Where as with Linux you have a lot more common components lessening your development workload while the user base is far more willing to purchase said games. There's also the awareness of Linux gaming and the advancements that have been made towards that.

This isn’t right. Mac has more native titles available on Steam than Linux/Steamdeck/etc.

 

18 hours ago, trag1c said:

Now, assuming as a studio you have the budget to develop with a very low level rendering API, you're probably at the AAA level. Most studios below AAA don't have the time, money, expertise and requirements for a proper Metal, Direct3D12 or Vulkan renderer. That leaves OpenGL as the only cross platform option but that has been completely deprecated on Mac. Even if a smaller studio uses something like Unreal or Unity they still have to modify the engine to suite their game and that will inevitably affect platform specific code. So you're still back to, they cant support the modifications necessary to achieve decent support on Mac for their title.

None of this is correct. There’s tens of thousands of indie games on Mac because the porting process is super accessible.

 

At least for most indie projects, Vulkan to Metal is straightforward. DirectX or OpenGL to Metal is easily and often achieved with a basic wrapper, just like on Linux.

 

Massive AAA projects with a bunch of proprietary tech are another story. But if you’re coding an indie game, you don’t need to move mountains to keep it compatible with common porting practices.

 

15 hours ago, Motifator said:

Seemingly the 2019 Macbook with the 5600M is well capable of it, of course, when you bootcamp it. There are drivers on both bootcamp and even AMD's official site for the AMD GPU.

The cheese grater can do it, too, but I don't speak about that first. It will likely overheat even more than the laptop with the X299 CPU chalked up the the side of the case with no cooling lmao.

Don’t even need to Bootcamp it most of the time. Crossover or Porting Kit are usually enough. Hell, I can run most stuff in Parallels since it has direct hardware access.

[Guest]

Bootcamp.

 

If you bought a MAC just to game, you are an idiot.

[oali24]

On 10/22/2022 at 1:15 AM, LogicalDrm said:

The problem is, and has always been, Apple. They have had 25 years + to give even nod to gamers. They got another chance with iPhone and mobile games. Still nothing on their desktop/laptop side EVEN WHEN THEIR PHONES ARE BOUGHT FOR MOBILE GAMING!!! You can't fix stupid decisions, and blaming anyone but Apple shows lack of perspective.

I know, my point isn't that people aren't blaming Apple and being harsh on them, my point is that they should be even more harsh on them because they're such an arrogant company that they won't bother to put in the effort when they easily could and people telling mac users that they're stupid for even considering gaming on their devices is stupid because the machines have the hardware to do it, and to me it feels like putting down possible gamers when we should be criticising apple for not facilitating this in demand feature, its like telling people who were upset about the headphone jack removal that they're stupid for even asking for it back when Apple could very well bring it back if they chose to.

[solado]

Also worth pointing out dev's don't have a great view of Linux & Mac. As mentioned previously they make up a smaller % of the market share and much easier to just focus on the alrgest from a business point of view.

 

I remember a tweet made a few years ago about Planetary Annihilation the dev was talking about how Linux made <0.1% of game sales and made >20% of the crash reports. It doesn't make sense for them to really devlop for other platforms. (Ben Golus was the dev if you want to look into it)

 

Quote

So I have noticed that over the years whenever someone asks about gaming on mac or asks if they can game on mac in pc centric circles they are just dismissed out of hand and treated as if they are stupid for even asking for game devs to develop for mac.

 

Elitism in circles has always been a thing, regardless of topic. If most of your noticing over the years comes from platforms like Reddit then that's a bad metric, people on Reddit are incentivised ot be a hive mind and hate what ever is hot in that perticular sub-reddit for updoots. Most of them would sell their own mother out for a few up votes.

 

[LogicalDrm]

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

I know, my point isn't that people aren't blaming Apple and being harsh on them, my point is that they should be even more harsh on them because they're such an arrogant company that they won't bother to put in the effort when they easily could

Lets be honest here. Its not community's job to tell big company how and where to focus. The main problem with Apple is the ecosystem thinking. As noted above, developer needs to make some high priced decisions before they can make something to macOS compatible, and even then, the extent of hardware being made for tasks gamers need is questionable. No, it must 100% come from Apple and not the flies buzzing around.

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

 

and people telling mac users that they're stupid for even considering gaming on their devices is stupid because the machines have the hardware to do it,

That is debatable. And mainly because I view Macs as if they were consoles. No upgrade path, must have either very good port or native made to be good.

 

2 hours ago, oali24 said:

and to me it feels like putting down possible gamers when we should be criticising apple for not facilitating this in demand feature, its like telling people who were upset about the headphone jack removal that they're stupid for even asking for it back when Apple could very well bring it back if they chose to.

Thats bit of Apples and oringes argument. In there, Apple also chose to appeal to certain demographics. As you said, they could have gone with Asus and Xiaomi route where headphone jack still exists and price for flagship product is $400 lower. But Apple has chosen to be the luxury brand.

 

As for the other part of that argument, I do agree. I very much dislike the "PCMR" culture. Gamer culture is much better as true gamers will consider anyone who plays games for the fun of them being games as peer. So consoles, phones, handhelds, even TCGs are counted in.

[Lightwreather]

1 hour ago, solado said:

I remember a tweet made a few years ago about Planetary Annihilation the dev was talking about how Linux made <0.1% of game sales and made >20% of the crash reports. It doesn't make sense for them to really devlop for other platforms. (Ben Golus was the dev if you want to look into it)

Should be noted that he further went on to say that those 20% more crash reports were actually well-written ones and only a few were truly platform specific. And as such it was apparently a pleasure.

Quote

Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

Source: 

 

[Internet_Goblin]

For absolute transparency, I have been using Apple almost exclusively since 2014, but do recognize the shortcomings of the ecosystem I have become entrenched in.

 

For your initial comment of gaming on Apple being dismissed. The major reason for that is just an overall lack of support. Sure I'm not entirely devoid of titles to play, but the support just really hasn't been there for so many years that it has become an almost automatic response to the question. Much like "Git Gud" being a default for Souls players, the Apple gaming response being dismissive has just become the norm at this point.

 

Apple's desktop/laptop marketing has mainly been towards two groups for the better part of a decade or so. The first being professionals (photographers, video editors, musicians, graphic artists, web designers, authors, scientists, etc) and the second being University students. They've done an excellent job of this and have all but conceded the gaming market to Windows. While there are certainly games that run perfectly fine on Mac I won't pretend that I (as an OSX user) have near the selection that a Windows user does.  I believe some of this (if I'm remembering correctly) is due to the kernel based nature of the Mac security system and how it may or may not interact with certain anti-cheat software and the switch up to ARM isn't making it any easier.

 

Apple probably saw the market as something that would have taken far too much R&D and monetary investment on their end to make it a profitable venture and instead decided to laser in on the aforementioned markets to more efficiently carve out their niche and carve it out they have. While OSX might only represent 30% of the worldwide market, their absolute dominance in certain spaces cannot be denied. That or after conducting some research of their own, they determined that people who own Macs really aren't all that interested in gaming, or if they are they already own a console or dedicated Windows machine for the task.

 

Now their support for and offerings of Thunderbolt GPU enclosures and then Metal at WWDC22 certainly made it seem as though they were gearing up for some sort of gaming as a new focus and the absolutely insane performance jumps their silicone chips have made certainly would allow for many modern titles to run from a strictly performance based standpoint. Unfortunately we haven't really seen anything more concrete so my prediction is that Apple is going to either:

 

A. Spin up an Apple version of Steam/Epic Games Store. Given their lawsuit and subsequent fallout with Epic, I wouldn't put it past Apple to go the extra petty route and try to start their own game studio/distribution channel that builds things that run exclusively on Mac or allows large companies to pay to have their game professionally ported to the new ARM system (for a fee of course) and subsequent store strictly to try and sink Epic.

 

B. They don't even bother with the majority of graphically intense AAA games and instead pivot hard in to the "mobile games, but on your desktop" style to try and appeal to the indie game market (and therefore getting all those devs to buy a Mac). They might even go the Nintendo Wii route of making your iPhone or iPad the controller while your game streams over your AppleTV and try to bring back local multiplayer Co-op (dreams, I know) given that selling to children and families has historically been a good move for consoles (the smallest controller always sells the best).

 

C. They continue doing exactly what they're doing while occasionally hinting at some sort of support for gaming just to keep people interested and potentially buying their hardware until a boardroom full of executives making my yearly salary in a month figure out what they want to do next.

 

 

Edited October 23, 2022 by Internet_Goblin
forgot to answer OP's question

[Just that Mario]

On 10/22/2022 at 11:15 AM, LogicalDrm said:

The problem is, and has always been, Apple. They have had 25 years + to give even nod to gamers. They got another chance with iPhone and mobile games. Still nothing on their desktop/laptop side EVEN WHEN THEIR PHONES ARE BOUGHT FOR MOBILE GAMING!!! You can't fix stupid decisions, and blaming anyone but Apple shows lack of perspective.

This comment is just nonsensical apple hate sh*t talk without any examples. There are plenty of games that run just fine on OSX and Macs.

[Sarra]

2 minutes ago, Just that Mario said:

This comment is just nonsensical apple hate sh*t talk without any examples. There are plenty of games that run just fine on OSX and Macs.

Let me fix this for you...

 

2 minutes ago, Just that Mario said:

This comment is just nonsensical apple hate sh*t talk without any examples. There are plenty of games that run just fine on OSX and Macs, despite Apple's repeated attempts to make this impossible, or at least make them a ton of money while still making game dev's lives a nightmare.

There, that's better.

[Just that Mario]

15 minutes ago, Sarra said:

This comment is just nonsensical apple hate sh*t talk without any examples. There are plenty of games that run just fine on OSX and Macs, despite Apple's repeated attempts to make this impossible, or at least make them a ton of money while still making game dev's lives a nightmare.

Ah right, something you just pulled fresh out of your arse.

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, Just that Mario said:

This comment is just nonsensical apple hate sh*t talk without any examples. There are plenty of games that run just fine on OSX and Macs.

You didn't understand my point I see... There's difference between devs making games for a platform and a platform representing themselves as "for gamers".

 

I don't like Apple, I can say that with straight face and with backbone. And most of that comes from the platform trying (and succeeding) in being isolated and not communicating well with others. The "you must be X to be with us". So if I don't have any examples, how about you? Can you give examples of AAA Mac-first or Mac-exclusive titles? Or even AA? Those are usually the ones getting money from platform or hardware manufacturers to make first/exclusive titles.

[Roswell]

3 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

You didn't understand my point I see... There's difference between devs making games for a platform and a platform representing themselves as "for gamers".

 

I don't like Apple, I can say that with straight face and with backbone. And most of that comes from the platform trying (and succeeding) in being isolated and not communicating well with others. The "you must be X to be with us". So if I don't have any examples, how about you? Can you give examples of AAA Mac-first or Mac-exclusive titles? Or even AA? Those are usually the ones getting money from platform or hardware manufacturers to make first/exclusive titles.

I’ve never heard of Microsoft paying for Windows PC exclusivity, though Apple does pay for Apple exclusivity on occasion with some of the bigger Apple Arcade titles.
 

Fantasian remains only available on Apple. The Pathless continues to be withheld from XBox and Nintendo… The new Shovel Knight game is (I assume) a timed exclusive which isn’t appearing on XBox/PS. There’s a few others.
 

There have also been numerous devs over the years that exclusively develop for Apple. A good example would be Bungie, they were exclusive with most of their titles for a long while. Halo was announced and intended to be Mac exclusive, then Microsoft bought them.

[wasab]

gaming on mac is in a very bad state. With things like steam proton, even Linux pulls ahead of mac in the gaming department 

 

On 10/23/2022 at 7:18 AM, Lightwreather JfromN said:

Should be noted that he further went on to say that those 20% more crash reports were actually well-written ones and only a few were truly platform specific. And as such it was apparently a pleasure.

 

I can confirmed, many "native" linux games that i were able to run in the past do not work anymore. shogun totalwar 2 being one, the issues is down to graphics driver bugs. Another game is called star ruler two. issue is a shared library(some xyz .so file) being outdated. I had to hunt down an older version of it and then it runs fine. Developer of the game went bankrupt and abandoned this game and pretty sure shogun totalwar 2 is abandoned by feral interactive as well now. these games are just port of a port. They are no more different than how apple tries to emulate x86 softwares on arm, just multiply 10x worse. 

[LogicalDrm]

6 hours ago, Roswell said:

I’ve never heard of Microsoft paying for Windows PC exclusivity, though Apple does pay for Apple exclusivity on occasion with some of the bigger Apple Arcade titles.
 

Fantasian remains only available on Apple. The Pathless continues to be withheld from XBox and Nintendo… The new Shovel Knight game is (I assume) a timed exclusive which isn’t appearing on XBox/PS. There’s a few others.
 

There have also been numerous devs over the years that exclusively develop for Apple. A good example would be Bungie, they were exclusive with most of their titles for a long while. Halo was announced and intended to be Mac exclusive, then Microsoft bought them.

There are some nitpicking to be made here. Though its funny you bring up Bungie and Halo while dismissing Microsoft paying for exclusiveness. Or being supportive rather which was my original point (blame the ones with money and power). Microsoft Gaming Studios ring any bells? Or Games for Windows Live?

 

Granted, both of those are joint for Xbox. But they still would be in my view in similar position to any game made for iOS (according to Wiki Fantasian) and with macOS as side.