The biggest issues with Mac gaming

[kasdashd]

The Mac platform has seen several AAA ports last year, but the potential of those ports is still to be seen, cause of some severe issues in the Mac gaming ecosystem:

 

1. All these AAA ports are being released through the Apple app store, which is full of technical issues, has very slow download speeds, you can't pause downloads, and the layout of the store is not very gaming oriented.

2. Also, you should technically be able to play all iOS games on Mac, but this is far from the case right now.

3. You also cannot buy a game once on 1 Apple device, and then play them on all your other Apple devices, syncing your progress accross devices.

4. Instead of Apple only releasing these games on the Apple app store, they should release them on as many app stores as possible, until they've fixed their own app store, and Mac gaming has surpassed Windows in terms of gaming marketshare.

 

There are of course many more issues, which I hope you will all mention below. But instead of just mentioning these issues in this closed forum for like minded people, share these issues online, send them as feedback to Apple, and if anybody knows people working at Apple, make sure to give them this information, as just talking about the issues we all know about doesn't change anything.

[KnoT]

Metal is one of the issues, why not just support Vulkan like everybody else ?

[Needfuldoer]

I wish Mac gaming was as good as it is now, back when I used Macs in the late 90s.

[flibberdipper]

I would love to see Valve come out with something Proton-esque so that more Steam games would work on it. I know it probably won't happen but I'm going to keep my hopes up.

[Brian McKee]

2 hours ago, flibberdipper said:

I would love to see Valve come out with something Proton-esque so that more Steam games would work on it. I know it probably won't happen but I'm going to keep my hopes up.

I don't see what incentive valve would have to do this. Mac gaming market is incredibly small to put the effort in, while Proton for Linux directly benefits their ecosystem with the Steamdeck.

[flibberdipper]

16 minutes ago, Brian McKee said:

I don't see what incentive valve would have to do this. Mac gaming market is incredibly small to put the effort in, while Proton for Linux directly benefits their ecosystem with the Steamdeck.

I never said it makes sense for them to do so, I said it would be nice to see. No matter how you split it, modern Macs kinda fuck for gaming (ignoring how hilariously cost prohibitive it is for RAM upgrades), and I know a fair few people in my own personal life that would 100% go Mac-only if our favorite games at least worked on our Macs. Obviously a small sample size, but I'm sure it is a fairly common theme since they're getting reeeeeal good again.

[Brian McKee]

3 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

I never said it makes sense for them to do so, I said it would be nice to see. No matter how you split it, modern Macs kinda fuck for gaming (ignoring how hilariously cost prohibitive it is for RAM upgrades), and I know a fair few people in my own personal life that would 100% go Mac-only if our favorite games at least worked on our Macs. Obviously a small sample size, but I'm sure it is a fairly common theme since they're getting reeeeeal good again.

Apple silicon is cool from a performance per watt perspective I guess, but they're nothing that wild. But then again I'm not one to care about mobile gaming so what do I know. At the end of the day this is Tim Apple's issue and nobody else's. Apple heavily supported Vulkan's creation but doesn't use it?

[indrora]

On 2/10/2024 at 6:24 AM, flibberdipper said:

I would love to see Valve come out with something Proton-esque so that more Steam games would work on it. I know it probably won't happen but I'm going to keep my hopes up.

Apple beat you to the punch. 
 

There's an Apple-made version of Wine/Proton in the Game Porting Kit. One of the devs behind [a switch emulator] has released Whiskey, a wrapper around the Wine environment that Apple built: https://getwhisky.app/

 

It's pretty good. I stopped using the "real" macos install of Steam and just run it on top of the GPK.

[goatedpenguin]

On 2/10/2024 at 6:24 AM, flibberdipper said:

I would love to see Valve come out with something Proton-esque so that more Steam games would work on it. I know it probably won't happen but I'm going to keep my hopes up.

Apple has something like that called the crappy rosetta compatibility layer

On 2/10/2024 at 5:20 AM, kasdashd said:

4. Instead of Apple only releasing these games on the Apple app store,

Close ecosystem, apple being apple...

 

The most viable way to game on MacOs would be to make a windows VM and use a Egpu as the one for the passthrough.