Essentially what Apple Arcade will end-up hosting is ports of run-of-the-mill mobile games. And I'd bet the advertised number of developers will diminish as soon as the agreements they secured for the launch expire. But if this is the kind of gaming you're interested into, you already have your iPhone/iPad.
[1]: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2019/09/sorry-mac-users-a...
[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43k4ww/its-hard-to-use-ap...
No, it isn't. There were never any 32-bit x86 Macs with decent GPUs. Dropping 32-bit support only affects games that were already old enough to be commercially irrelevant or games that rely on unmaintained third-party middleware that never got a 64-bit port. Those don't add up to enough to be a major impact on the Mac gaming market. There are plenty of other factors that are much more important, such as Apple's abandonment of OpenGL and preference for Metal over Vulkan.
It also kills any hope of wine powered support for proton in steam as many many windows games will be still 32 bit for a very long time (mind you, metal already had put a big dent in that).
Interestingly Linux users are indirectly getting affected by this: for many developers supporting Linux was just a byproduct of supporting macOS. As the latter is being dropped, support for the former is getting harder to justify. Luckily Proton seem to be a very viable alternative to native games.
These aren't old games for the most part: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/apps-wont-wo...
They certainly weren't making much money off these particular games even before Apple announced the deadline for going 64-bit. It's unfortunate and disappointing for customers who had already bought those games, but this deprecation didn't shut Aspyr out of much in the way of future sales.
Now, if users become reluctant to buy Mac games for fear that they'll stop working unacceptably soon, that could have a meaningful impact on demand for Mac games. But even if Apple made it official policy that they would break games after four or five years, that wouldn't completely kill the market for Mac games. If Apple made it cost-prohibitive to get a game ported to their platform in the first place, that would pretty much be "game-over for gaming on macOS".
But tbh Mac was hardly a gaming platform to begin with.
The platform has never been "attractive to players" to begin with.
Now we have Arcade though and easy porting to iOS though, which could open a multi-billion market...
Well, let's see. My main 3 purchase locations are Steam, Humble Bundle and GOG.com. I'd guess this is fairly typical, but anyone using other platforms feel free to add yours.
Steam: The Steam client is still stuck on 32bits. I'd bet it will soon be updated to 64bit, but it just goes to show that macOS is pretty low in the priorities of Valve. And if a company with the resources of Valve doesn't care, I can't see much motivation for the individual developers either.
Humble Bundle: I've went through the current and following Humble Bundle Monthly games. Windows Only: Call of Duty WWII, Crash Bandicoot Remastered, Spyro Remastered, Sonic Mania, Planet Alpha, Override-Mech City Brawl. Windows+macOS: Battletech, The Spiral Scouts.
GOG.com: There's already a 64bit DOSBox port—DOS–era games will eventually be supported. Windows–era games are gone—Catalina breaks Wine emulation and no announcement has been made for 64bit support by the Wine Team. For newer games, GOG.com will need new builds from the developers—doubtful if we ever get to see those, especially for indie games where developers don't have the resources to go back and port their released games. Newly released games are often Windows-only.
I don't know how you see this picture, but it looks pretty bleak to me.
Even just recompiling the game might be a challenge for a lot of developers in the "long tail" of the Mac game library.
> the notion that every developer of every app is part of the constant, incessant update loop that Apple encourages is fundamental to the problem. Someone's super personal narrative unity game from 2013 is not getting updated!
[1] https://twitter.com/MammonMachine/status/1181327259057082368
So devs of two year old games will need an old macOS install that can export their game to 64-bit, but also a new enough macOS install that can notarize their app (maybe these can both be Mojave -- but many indies don't own their own macs).
Also, Unity 5 is no longer available for purchase. If they're already using their license on another machine, they'll have to migrate it to these macOS installs.
Devs could upgrade to a more recent Unity and fix all the bugs, but to what benefit and at what cost?
[1]: https://forum.unity.com/threads/installing-unity-on-macos-ca...
But yes, apple is in the wrong here, and should continue to support hardware that they haven't shipped in 10+ years.
I assume you're in the group that believes MS should be required to support XP forever.
Keeping around old code increases the security vulnerability surface. For instance, there are at least a half dozen ways of representing a string in Windows. One of the earliest widespread vulnerabilities in Windows was caused by improper handling of string encoding where anyone could run DOS commands on a web server running IIS just by encoding the commands in the browser.
https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/threats/unicod...
That is slightly different because Apple is designing their own mobile CPU's. And indeed by dropping 32-bit ARM support they can simplify and improve their CPU designs.
OTOH, Intel isn't gonna drop 32-bit x86 support from their chips just because Apple isn't making use of it.
They will face some* backslash now, but if/when they switch Mac to their own arm chips they might achieve a painless transition.
*They announced 32-bit deprecation like a decade ago, will legacy users be pissed of? yes! Is it a excuse for developers that still relied on 32-bit support over the last decade? NO!
(Even in the Linux world, which prides itself in supporting crap used by a handful of people globally, X32 is dead, to the extent it was ever alive.)
- Never needs more than 4 GB RAM (because it's not worth the usability downsides from having two binaries and letting the user choose which to use, just for a small performance boost)
- Is performance critical
- Performance is bound by memory and/or cache bandwidth
- A large share of the program memory usage is due to pointers
The intersection of all the above is just vanishingly small in reality. X32 was never more than a gimmick to score a few extra points in SPECcpu. And thus people rightfully ignored it.
I haven't evaluated the quality of available offerings yet, but they look good in the App Store previews, and I think they're all native Mac apps (not lazy ports), using Metal and everything.
Although yeah, you can't really own any of those games and will always need a subscription, and some may be removed in the future.
And yes, there's this Arcade, but I have no interest in playing for something which is locked down to one platform.
Do you boycott Xbox, Playstation, Switch, DS etc. exclusives too?
What about Windows-only games that aren't on Mac or other systems? There are certainly thousands of those. Do you refuse to play those either?
https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/ken/2019/10/3/crosso...
* 64bit processes usually can't load 32bit modules, only a 64bit OS can (true for Linux and Windows, I'm not sure if it's true for x86 overall). There's a pretty good chance that only a 32bit CrossOver could load 32bit modules.
* Has 32bit support been stripped from the kernel, or has it only been stripped from the installed dynamic libraries? I'd wager that it's stripped from, or partially stripped from, the kernel. Even if Catalina allows 64bit processes to load 32bit modules, the kernel would have to support it.
There's a one in four chance your scenario is supported. CrossOver definitely couldn't magically voodoo a 32bit module into a 64bit one, as it's impossible to determine if a register/address is a 32bit integer or pointer; if it doesn't work today, it will probably never work.
I'm not sure if macOS supports IOMMU, but an external GPU with a VM might be your saving grace here.
I'll hold off too. My macbook pro is 2013 and pretty old it overheat often if I play video. This update will definatedly exacerbate the problem.
And no, it isn't raw LLVM bitcode.
Xamarin among others ran into a snag but it seems they could retool and convert from armv7k to arm64_32 for example https://github.com/xamarin/xamarin-macios/issues/4864
Stick with Windows/Steam/Consoles/etc. if you don't want a bunch of your games that you purchased to become unplayable every year (unless you add multi-boot to run the old, compatible OS, or run them in a VM, which usually works poorly.)
As I have mentioned before, it's a very annoying example of Apple shifting technical debt and maintenance work away from themselves and onto developers, and the overall maintenance burden is greatly increased.
I like how the platform moves forward, but I really wish that there were a way of getting desirable security patches and feature improvements in the OS without breaking all of my apps.