How does anyone enjoy playing AAA games these days? Literally feels like a chore. This coming from a previous gaming addict.

What do you mean by these days? Do you think the games are different? Or just you not enjoying the danger type of content any more?

Games are significantly different, shittified, and dumbed down these days

There are still older less dumbed down AAA games to play. AAA does not mean "brand new."

Compared to what time frame? The annual sports games have been terrible for over a decade. Basic open world games have been around for just as long, though they’re more prevalent now.

From my perspective, there’s been a small but steady trickle of good games for decades. Recent AAA games that pushed the boundaries are Elden Ring and Baldurs Gate 3, and they would not have been possible at their scale back in the day.

I don't know. In hitman I can disable all the hints and it's quite a challenge to get a good time.

Also plenty of mil Sims available if you are into multilayer.

I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.

But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.

Depends on the game obviously. e.g. Assassin's Creed N+1 - you've seen the formula like 20+ times already, all the previous games + all of Far Cry from 3 upwards. There's nothing new. And there's Cyberpunk2077 and BG3 which are still huge but unique and carefully designed

I'm playing Assassin's Creed: Origins this month, for the first time playing any of that franchise, and one of the most recent games I've played (it's from 2017) and I'm amazed by:

a) how much effort they obviously put into it, historic details from Egypt 2k years ago, game engine, quests, little details

b) how much it feels like a thin wrapper around Cookie Clicker

Steam tells me 1/3rd of players don't even get out of the Prologue area.

GORILLA.BAS

Mainly console games. I play some games on Mac but maybe only like 10-15% of Steam library is supported on Mac.

I have a soft limit of $35. I generally find that quality decreases (not quality-per-dollar, just quality alone on an absolute scale) once you start going over that. By the time you reach $60 it's in the gutter. Exceptions to the rule obviously exist.

So probably still in line with what you remember.

Sometimes our tastes change as we age, or vice versa: our tastes remain the same and the world has moved along.

Just to say we all have nostalgia and the good old days are never coming back.

There's a whole movie about Golden Age thinking / Golden Age fallacy by Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris." Worth a watch.

maybe you just grew out of it? games are as good as ever, better even

I’d love for games to work on a Mac too. I just can’t justify paying through the nose for a PC when I hate using it for everything else.

Linux is pretty great these days

It still sucks to need another machine to play games that a MBP should easily be able to handle.

Especially give how good recompilation projects are anymore.

Be the change you want to see in the world

The decompilation efforts I've been seeing with 15 year old Xbox 360 games or PS3 games has been absolutely incredible, getting them running natively on macOS with presumably much fewer engineering resources than are allocated to a standard game port.

I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem - people don't game on Macs because there aren't that many great games on Mac (Although Cyberpunk runs amazingly on my M4 Macbook Pro).

I'm very excited for the future.

> I do think the limited macOS gaming market is a chicken-or-the-egg problem

This feels like a re-hash of Valve's original Steam Machine mistake. Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used, and Valve themselves would eventually abandon.

Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm. Porting games like Tomb Raider and Death Stranding won't kickstart the macOS gaming revolution any more than native Left 4 Dead magically made Linux an alternative to Windows for gaming. We know this from experience.

Decomps and emulation is a good solution for 15-year-old games, but Apple can't enjoy day-1 support if they refuse the industry's standards. There is no trust in Metal as a stable API, or macOS as a reliable and backwards-compatible runtime. Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.

>Windows is not only much more profitable, it's easier to support for decades to-come.

"windows is the most stable ABI"

> Apple has stepped in this same cowpie. They depreciated hundreds of "old" macOS games by radically changing their runtime, and then nobody invested into the new Metal-native paradigm

This is the reason. Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility. In fact, I'd cynically say backwards incompatibility is counted as feature at Apple, because you can sell more X. The first time people were bit with a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them bought a game from the App Store.

> Porting modern games to native Linux didn't increase user or developer interest in supporting the platform. It made Valve liable for a lot of investment into systems that no developers ever used

This I can't agree with though. They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton, which had the side effect of making it easy for normal Linux users to run games, which increased developer interest. Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.

  > a game they purchased on the App Store no longer working a year later, was also the last time many of them

(raises hand)

  > Apple couldn't care less about backwards compatibility.

its also the exact opposite of what an os is supposed to do: provide a base and abstraction for applications/programs to run stably; if apps breaks all the time whats the point?

I agree with everything here. Apple has a perverse incentive to create support churn for games and blame developers, but overall the strategy doesn't work on Mac. It only really panned out on mobile, where gambling apps and gacha games take up Apple's mantle in exchange for access to a larger audience. Which is a rich parallel to Apple's story about the App Store "protecting consumers" and the other knee-jerk DSA/DMA apologia.

> They succeeded on their second iteration with the Steam Deck and Proton

> Also, developers love developing on Linux, as far as I know.

Well, Valve steered away from the cowpie this time. Proton is a concession that Windows won, and the equivalent for Linux (Steam Linux Runtime) is still a great idea but goes relatively unused. Valve went to where the gamers were and met them halfway, which is why the Steam Deck became an instant hit despite costing more than an iPad. Proton could be optimized to fix games that were objectively broken on DirectX (see: Elden Ring, Fallout 3/New Vegas) without developers lifting a finger to port anything. It gave customers a real alternative to suffering through Windows and the Windows runtime.

I personally love development on Linux, and I'm making a few hobby games on NixOS right now. The dev experience wasn't the problem for the original Steam Machine or for macOS either, it's the concentration of game devs, modders and players that all treat Win32 and DX11 as the lingua-franca of gaming. Valve threw in the towel on native ports, and it enabled them to focus on curb-cutting efforts that made Linux stick.

I think it's an even smarter move on Valve's part than they get credit for. I've heard "I wish I could stop using Windows, but gaming" so often. Thanks to Proton, people are (slowly) jumping ship now. It'll take a long time, but the more that do, the stronger the case for native Linux games.

Your point about the steam machine was correct at the time, but Linux gaming is flourishing now due to the steam deck. I think it's more accurate to say that the steam machine itself wasn't sufficiently compelling as a platform.

https://fxgl.github.io/steamac/ my friend and partner made this. For the first time I’ve been playing games on Mac without much trouble. For me best feature is automate of vm in background - finally I can play games and pause them arbitrarily