> Apple deprecated OpenGL in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave in favor of Metal, but it is still available as of macOS 11 Big Sur (including Apple silicon devices). The latest version supported for OpenGL is 4.1 from 2011.
OSX accounts for 2.62% of Steam users.
Implementing another graphics backend is prohibitively expensive for small studios whereas you could implement either OpenGL or Vulkan and get the other 97.38%. And that's without factoring in the required investment in single-use hardware, people, and skills.
DirectX is another safe choice but I try to stay away from anything proprietary or Microsoft-related.
Honestly the real issue is you probably wouldn't get many users or make a whole ton of money, really. Unless you target iOS or iPads, but that can add some significant constraints to the game. (But sometimes it's OK; Divinity Original Sin 2 basically works fine on an M1 Mac or an M1 iPad, as long as you have a Xbox controller to go with it.)
I think as programmers we desperately want to believe it's just a matter of programming and that we're in the critical path here, but it really isn't. Most of that stuff is a solved for a lot of cases. And if it was technological constraints, honestly, there's like a whole host of actual technological concerns, all of them really boring and crappy and not "cool" like rendering (like how do you CI and QA the damn thing, what kind of impacts might it have on your build system, do all the 3rd party things you have work here, etc.) Rendering is just "cool" to talk about but it's not actually as important as those; by the same token you never see giant threads on here about like OS-specific sound APIs or whatever...
There just aren't many Mac gamers and the hardware is kind of expensive to buy and test on for most purposes in that case.
I can tell you from long experience-- more than 20 years ago I produced a Mac games with Apple's financing and as recently as five years ago I produced a game that sold over $100m on an Apple device-- Apple has been extremely consistent in their attitude. They are much less supportive of gaming then Microsoft or Sony. Part of it is that they see games as a lesser use of their devices over other use cases. Another part is that they consistently promote the kind of experiences they wish their customers wanted over the experiences their customers choose.
Of course consumer level macs have never had GPUs that could run AAA games. I don't know what an M1 MacBook Air's perf is. If it's able to run AAA games and a reasonable framerate then maybe a market would build? But if you're limiting gamers to M1 Pro/M1 Max/M1 Ultra users only then it's probably a pretty small market?
It's a chicken and egg problem, although Apple Arcade is a good approach to try and bridge that gap.
Apple makes a huge part of its revenue from mobile gaming, while ferociously antagonizing the game makers and the main players of the industry (still remember their beef with Nvidia for instance) which makes it a bad bet to embrance Apple platform outside of the most dominant ones.
But go on, blame directx for being the one API actually moving things forwards. Not Apple's shitty behavior.
You mean if gaming supported Apple more, right? The industry's reliance on DirectX and the frameworks that build on it are largely what keep gaming so PC-centric.
If we saw AAA studios embrace macOS-compatible (or better yet Open Source) graphics architecture, the need to have separate gaming PCs (and the insanely expensive GPUs associated therewith) would evaporate.