100% this, Apple wants complete control over the distribution and tooling used on their platforms. While it does provide advantages for their hardware development I think it just ties back to them wanting 30% of any application or gaming revenue.

I don't see the connection. If Apple unveils a Game Porting Toolkit with Vulkan support, that won't affect the 30%/15% App Store fee.

PC games that could be ported to Mac and published on the App Store are less likely to do so since there's a lack of support from Apple's side. They care more about mobile games it seems.

> them wanting 30% of any application or gaming revenue.

15%. They only charge 30% to people making more than a million dollars a year through the App Store.

So 30% for Valve

To be fair, 30% is what Valve as a distributor charges (glass houses and all that). Valve the game developer is a hobby project subsidised by Valve the distributor.

No, 0% for Valve because they publish through Steam not the Mac App Store.

The answer is pretty simple: Apple doesn't care about gaming.

This goes back to Steve Jobs who didn't like gaming and apparently saw it as a waste of time. John Carmack mentioned this from his time working with Jobs.

Apple is now a leading gaming company -- not because they want to be, but because they're in a billion pockets and lots of those people enjoy gaming.

The reason the tooling and developer experience sucks is because Apple doesn't have an advocate for gaming at the VP or C-suite level.

I've never seen an API get as much hate from big tech as OpenGL got over decades. It started with Microsoft trying to kill it, and now Apple. The proprietary alternatives are not really even that much better. Just vendor lock-in for the sake of vendor lock-in.

It's fine to deprecate OpenGL. What is not fine is not supporting Vulkan.

Why? OpenGL works just fine and there are plenty of resources about OpenGL programming all over the internet, unless you're a triple A studio, you don't need what Vulkan has to offer, it will only slow down your development by adding needless complexity.

It isn't just triple A studios moving to Vulkan. Emulator development, for one, is moving there too. RPCS3, Dolphin, etc all see big time benefits to moving to Vulkan.

OpenGL drivers are well known for being buggy as well. For a very long time, AMD OpenGL drivers on Windows were terrible and saw little love given that DirectX on Windows is where most of their effort went. It seems that Vulkan drivers are more performant, less buggy, and treated more as a first class citizen across both Windows and Linux.

And OFC, Apple deprecated OpenGL and they are stuck at 4.1 from 2011. At least with MoltenVK, you get Vulkan->Metal and a modern-day API to talk to without having to deal with Metal directly.

OpenGL doesn't necessarily vanish, it becomes a higher level abstraction instead of something graphics drivers must natively speak. I think we are all better off if graphics vendors stick with supporting primitives and let higher level tools be built on top.

I think OpenGL is important as a simple, "universal" legacy standard. As long as it's supported (with reasonable performance), through something like Zink it's fine.

As someone who is new to graphics programming, the pervasiveness of OpenGLES3/WebGL2 is really great. It's a single relatively-simple standard that is almost everywhere.

have you looked at the vulkan scenegraph thing?

Deprecate OpenGL i.e. let it be recreated on top of Vulkan in user code.

Desktop OpenGL isn't simple, it's hard to use and even harder to debug, and it doesn't have reasonable performance unless you know which APIs are mysteriously slow.

WebGL is covering up a lot of stuff for you, but it's better to find/create a modern "simple" API on top of a modern rendering API if you want one.

I always thought this was an interesting story on the history of OpenGL and D3D: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055/20932

It's outside my field and before my time, but it seems more complex than "vendor lock-in for the sake of vendor lock-in".

Dota 2 on linux has already stopped using OpenGL. Now Vulkan is the only option.

Just like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

The difference is that these 3 companies already have a market, Apple doesn't even bother trying to convince people to get games on the platform, other than iOS. I don't think they care about gaming on macs at all.

You are just spreading FUD at this point, they do care, devs just don't want to bother, that's different

https://developer.apple.com/games/

I just checked out their forum and I can only wonder why. There seem to be multiple cries for help from devs with no comments.

Making games is already difficult, nobody wants to do extra mile to support a platform, Valve made the right choice with proton, unfortunately, that means less incentives to have a native gaming experience on Linux.. I'd say the tradeoff is worth it

Apple should do something similar, but they'll never do since their users expect quality over anything else, wich is why they market Game Porting Toolkit as a testing platform, as opposed to a shipping platform for Valve's Proton, even thought it's basically the same project, 2 different culture, Valve doesn't care if the experience is worse

Have you checked the developer forums for any product made by a large company? I promise you they're they exact same.

There are plenty of reasons to not support macOS for your game, but this one isn't it.

I just meant, that if the process to get help isn't helpful. A lot of new comers won't try.

> Apple doesn't even bother trying to convince people to get games on the platform…

Don't they? https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/topics/graphics-games/

> …other than iOS.

macOS on Apple Silicon supports iOS apps/games, so many "iOS" games work great on macOS.

That's great if you want to play phone games on your mac.

As well as games that work great on tablets, TVs, and HMDs as well, yes.

Honestly doubt your average touch optimised iPhone game works "great" on TVs.

I bet candy crush looks great on a 27" retina display. /s

I've been deeply coupled to Apple since 2005 and it's safe to say they've made stabbing attempts at getting serious about this a dozen times, real serious ones too, but inevitably it doesn't matter.

The most recent one that comes to mind is Mac x VR marketing push...4 years back? Ended it complete tears, SteamVR isn't even available for Mac anymore. And it was depressingly obvious at the time there was no reason for it to work out, it was clear ARM Macs were coming very soon.

The fact that they view a stabbing attempt as a step toward being serious seems like a big part of the issue. In order to have a successful platform, you need to be dedicated to the idea of being a platform and continue pouring in the resources whether it feels like it's aligned with this quarter's business themes or not.

It allows them avoid being compared to PC's . They don't have worry about someone saying the Mac sucks for playing game X... because nobody will even try.

It bolsters their image that they're not just another PC.

> Apple doesn't even bother trying to convince people to get games on the platform

Presumably why Sonoma introduced a 'gaming mode' for the first time.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT213658

This is also probably why they have built a suite of tools to encourage game developers to the platform:

https://developer.apple.com/games/

Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft either offer direct support of APIs very similar to PC ones, have first-party supported wrappers or otherwise have well supported tooling which supports the platform.

Eg Microsoft's graphics API is also just a DX12 variant, Nintendo Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, and while I'm not informed about Sony's current systems, their APIs were previously fairly close to OpenGL/Vulkan in design. They all also put in a lot more effort to accommodate game developers than Apple's "my way or the highway" approach to everything.

On top of all that, as dedicated gaming devices, they have momentum going for them which results in game dev tooling being ported because, well, they're devices meant primarily for gaming. Plus, they all have many first party studios with very popular IPs. Apple has none of this going for it.

Pretty much no one uses Vulkan on switch, and gl only gets used by small indies that aren't using a major engine and couldn't/wouldn't partner with a porting studio. NVN is just significantly faster than either of those (and the switch needs all the help it can get performance wise)

The Witcher 3 on Switch is a Vulkan title for example. While a lot of titles aren't Vulkan, some heavyweights on the platform are.

Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.

Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.

What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.

> Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.

Steam does run on Mac but the client and the game library are 2 different things. Not sure if you noticed the shrinking library and Apple's attitude towards the Mac games. They don't care about it. 0 support for 32bit games migration, unconventional api support (compare the usual d3d/vulkan land). Unlike ios, Mac does not have a hold on the game market

You're right they don't have a hold on the game market but they do care about gaming, just in an Apple kind of way - they want control of their stack, hence Metal as the only fully supported rendering engine. They're actively looking for developers to produce games or port them with the game porting toolkit.

If their approach is to buy a few notable games occasionally like resident evil, not sure how long that would last. I actually would like Apple to just extend their support of IOS games to let them run seamless on Mac. There are both freemium and premium games on IOS. Just throw in some control api support and let the user install them on Mac. But Apple doesn't even bother with this low hanging fruit

I don't think people play counterstrike because they are cheap. A lot of my money goes to computers, and I still end up playing a lot of counterstrike. It's because it's fun.

I wouldn't say Apple products users are the rich audience, a rich person will just have a dedicated high-end Windows-based gaming PC.

This is a misconception. Apple has something like 90% of the market share of all computer shipments above $1,000 in cost. Those shipments dwarf custom builds. Also, you can visit the Steam hardware survey, expensive ($1,000+) PC builds are quite rare, actually maybe only about 10% of the Steam audience, which neatly matches the expectations for who owns the premium end of the market.

Not sure why I’m being downvoted. Anyone can easily verify what I’m saying by visiting the Steam hardware survey. I know that this does not match the expectations of HN readers!

> Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.

Assuming people who play f2p games don't have to pay their hardware too.

Huh? Free 2 play dominates the app store on your $1300 phone.

This is kind of a complicated story. I'm not really trying to talk about whether you're right or wrong. You're saying something objectively true, it just doesn't mean what you think it means, and it doesn't translate to the role that CS2 plays in Steam, or how the CS2 audience differs from the rest of the audience on Steam.

On the one hand, the top of the app store is free to play experiences - apps like Spotify and Tinder, games like Monopoly Go.

There are places where "nobody" (close to 0%) pay for Spotify subscriptions (representative of all subscriptions), like Japan, even though the iPhone is more popular there than anywhere else in Asia, comparable to the US, so there's some additional cultural elements to software spending that are a long story to tap into.

And, in your life, you might know 1 person who (1) has spent money (2) in Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, or a Supercell title, and (3) is above the age of 25. There's something weirdly idiosyncratic about Roblox; and then, something about the off-brand-studios-you've-never-heard-of games. 11 year olds and Monopoly Go players, they are somehow bringing those titles to the top of the App Store.

If iOS had a similar tiny marketshare relative to Android as macOS does relative to PCs, nobody would maintain free to play games for it. Those games are monetized by whales and advertising, including cross-promo, which are scale plays. There are no "small" free to play games.

It's a totally different audience. iOS has both audiences, but the people who literally monetize in F2P are smaller in size than pay-to-players, even if they produce greater revenue overall. The pay-to-players are the audience I am talking about, because I'm trying to say that that's whose left in small platforms, and macOS has a lot more of them than whales.

An illuminating example would be that the Epic Game Store has Fortnite. And yet. Who cares about the Epic Game Store? Epic has so many incentives - it practically buys all the sales of finished games up front, to give them away to its users for free. But that's actually kind of the opposite of what they should be doing for a healthy ecosystem.

Fortnite monetizes free to play users better than anything else on EGS, so you can't make a huge F2P game on it. And by the way, Valve has CS2, DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2, #1 #2 and #8 on the charts that have only 2 other F2P games on it.

> What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story.

I didn't realize there were so many rich people. Why do I keep hearing stories about an ailing economy?

When you ask people about the "economy" they repeat whatever they heard in the media about the "economy" because they don't want to sound out of touch.

This is why the answers on all the economic surveys are that the responder is personally doing fine but thinks everyone else is doing badly.

It's de facto a pay to play game (you need to buy "Prime Status" to play main game mode since it went free to play), monetization is fair gameplay-wise, only cosmetics.

Macs aren't just for super serious professionals, they're also for their kids. That audience will buy skins.

I think the success of free-to-play games on iOS sort of undermines your position here.

That audience will buy skins, because that's how a lot of the winners in iOS gaming makes money.

The thing is, is that CS2 replaced CSGO (which at one point was pay-to-play, which means people were required to sink money into a title which is now completely upended), removed a lot of content (whole game modes are missing and there's no plan on adding them back into the new version; maps have been removed, and to an extent some of the customization has been removed), and removed Mac support, which was previously very much supported with CSGO.

They've also changed the game mechanics when it comes to determining when gunshots "register", which has very much changed the dynamic of the game and has vastly raised the bar for casual players to win even a single round.

Further, ranked matches are handled differently now. It used to be that even losses contributed to your initial rank after a couple of placement matches. Now, you must win 10 games before you get a rank. Since placement games (games you play before you get a rank) are more or less randomly matchmade, it means that less skilled players are going to be up against impossibly difficult opponents to the point that even a single win is impossible, thus you're trapped in this unranked loop and will never achieve meaningful matchmaking with people of your own skill level.

Further, "Prime" status was originally a barrier for cheaters since you had to buy it, and it made it such that prime status players were only matchmade with other prime status players. Since cheaters run the risk of getting permanently banned, they'd have to buy Prime over and over again - something Valve betted would be a way to filter out a large percentage of cheaters. However, they started to grant Prime status to people who had leveled up enough, which removed the cost barrier. Since cheaters level up quickly, it's become sort of a moot mechanic now.

And no, Steam won't refund Prime status purchases, which are around $15.

Couple the matchmaking differences with the shot registration differences, the removed content, and the dropping of support, and you have what is essentially a completely unique game that Valve replaced CSGO with.

People are rightfully very upset. Many people bought CSGO for e.g. MacOS support. Now that game has been removed from their libraries with little to no recourse. Steam said they're issuing refunds for a few select Mac users but I've yet to see anyone say they've been granted such a refund.

It's a messy situation that Valve has handled in one of the worst ways possible, learning no lessons from the Overwatch 2 debacle that did much the same thing (and was received equally as poorly) or from Ubisoft's repeated similar behavior.

valve should offer a refund to anyone who has predominantly played on macOS over the last year or two.

other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here. maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time, you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested. and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time, hard to take that part seriously...

> other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here.

You don't see an issue paying for a game only to have it forcibly removed from your possession?

> maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time

This isn't the official pool (if you're talking about competitive pools), and no it doesn't happen all the time. Valve never removed a map from CSGO, only added them.

> you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested.

Oh right, community servers. I forgot about that, thanks for reminding me. Community servers are no longer listed publicly in a browser like they used to be. Now you have to google search for servers and connect to them directly via IP and port. They removed that functionality as well.

> and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time

Not really. The only time people complained about it prior to CS2 was when they made it server registration to combat cheaters, which introduced a lot of randomness depending on who you asked (nobody really knows how it works, but people could feel a difference at the time). Now they do sub-tick registration which is an approximation function that is being gamed by non-casuals.

Here's a good video on the subject[0]. Ignore the bit about mouse DPI, dude had no idea what he was talking about with that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eandoX7Jsh4

They're trying to offer 128 tick-like gameplay without having to pay for the increased compute and network costs of doubling the current 64 tick servers by faking hit registration, which is having an adverse effect.

So it's not merely some "git gud" complaint. It's a very valid complaint over a major change of game mechanics from a previously purchased titled that was effectively stolen away from you.

You should be upset by this. This is not how companies should behave.

Clearly someone at Valve saw the overwatch 2 fiasco and thought it looked like a fun idea.

>What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story.

That isn't accurate in this case because the rich gamers have more expensive setups than a macbook/imac. If you are spending 100,000+ on a cs skin you also have a 4090 (ie. not macos). You are thinking in terms of 'pro' software and ios mobile games.

they should make it paid for $80 when on mac os :O

What? The only monetization is skins. You also need to pay for the premier matchmaking. CSGO and CS2 is top of the Steam charts with about 1mil active players, not because its free, but because it is a great game.

Valorant is there, but CS is practically its own genre.

In CoD, Destiny, and CS you all shoot guns, but the difference is stark between them.

For competitive gameplay, and gameplay feel, CS wins.

You saying Macu users are too rich for the game? Have you SEEN skin prices in CS2?

Do you even play?

Saying Valorant is 'there' is dismissive. I would argue a lot of the changes in CS2 were made to stay relevant to Valorant competitively.

CS2 doesn't feel remotely competitive in its current state on 64t. It's a huge problem that Valve thankfully are taking seriously and patching every few days. I am curious where they will go with the networking re: subtick.

I wish Valve would talk more about their decisions to remove several settings and things like lefthand. It feels like it is intended to keep things more similar across clients (IMO more competitive and level), so they don't end up in the config-maxxing hell that is TF2.

How much do you think a gaming rig costs? OG CS was famously cheap to run, but CS2 is not the same thing. Sure, you don't NEED to pay $2k but I'm sure players are paying as much as they possibly can to have the best gaming setup

Who is not rich but is also regularly spending $20,000+ on skins? Reportedly someone offered 1.4 mil for a knife skin and was turned down.

I think it’s more that rich (and plenty of middle class) people are fine buying gaming rigs AND Apple computers.

Dealing with code signing bullshit at work this week. I hate that we support Apple at this point. We have like 5-6 engineers who are even capable of doing this work across a massive organization. It's a total nightmare and I'm never surprised that game devs don't want to deal with the constant headache.

I used to wish for the day that macOS gaming could become a thing. Now I seem wiser or more understanding of larger issues. The mac desktop/os is great. It would be great if many games supported it natively.

However for the game makers where's the payoff? It's been long enough of Apple by their actions making it not a suitable platform as a gaming target. Even if it was today, there's little reassurance that there won't be some tech/policy change that impacts the publishers and gamers in an undesired way.

Today I use Apple hw/sw products in a commodity manner. Most apps/tools I use can or could easily be run elsewhere. I'm not interested in walling myself into anyone's garden.

I have been using a MacBook Air for less than a year and I don't see the greatness. Screen is okay, touchpad is a bit better but a lot bigger than at my HP Elitebook, battery time was twice better but it was degraded faster than elitebook, it is 3 hours vs 5 now for the same regular devops tasks (it was 4/8).

Mac OS... It is horrible. I can't actually describe this, maybe I'm just a linux binded user and gonna prefer Manjaro KDE forever.

While Apple does indeed make things difficult, they're not actually the problem in this case.

The reason mac users are complaining is because Valve released this as an update to CS:GO rather than a separate game.

I don't think mac players would really care that much about CS2 not being mac compatible if Valve hadn't done that. They would've shrugged and said "ok, I'll keep playing CS:GO then". But they can't do that, and that is 100% on Valve.

Valve could have handled it better, but you can still play CS:GO. Right click > Properties > Betas. I've used it to play a mod that hasn't been updated for CS2. There's very little playercount though.

It's forward-looking! The 90% consumer will be able to afford the "Apple Vision Pro" by 2039 adjusted for inflation!

Nobody cares about 3D APIs anymore. If you're serious about publishing a game you use whatever API the vendor gives you, including all the idiosyncratic ones provided by console manufacturers (NONE of which use OpenGL or Vulkan). If you're serious about publishing a game in 2023 you will be using a commercial engine -- either your own (if you're big like Valve) or someone else's -- and that wraps and abstracts away the 3D API details.

Besides which, Metal is a fantastic API, at least as capable as Vulkan and less cumbersome to use.

Apple does seem pretty determined to keep games off their platform.

PSA for all OS vendors: nobody is going to write software for your walled garden anymore. Nobody. The more you try to force this, the more you will simply repel developers from your platform.

The OS graphics/app API wars are over and everyone lost. For GUI people are going to use Electron, Tauri, or maybe Qt. For games they're going to use OpenGL or Vulkan.

Even big companies are avoiding native development. What do Slack and Discord use? Electron.

You sound like a web developer, but that's not how games work. Console games are all developed for proprietary graphics APIs; if you're not touching one, it's because you're using someone else's engine.

More importantly, Vulkan is low level and has to be written for a specific GPU brand for best results, so your code using the same API would not behave the same way.

This does seem so backwards.

Apple is known for the fancy screens, the retina screens, high end graphics.

But then what, falls down in gaming?

It seems like a no-brainer they should have the best ports of games, and people would see them and be "wow, that looks great, I'm going to buy an apple".