why is there less games for mac

[chickennuggiesforme]

:( explain steam or publishers or watever

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by gavinatorjb:

:( explain steam or publishers or watever

Because it costs money and development time to make it compatible with MAC.

Valve has nothing to do with it.

[Cathulhu]

1. Cost. It requires people who know Mac OS and how to port a game from one system to another.
2. Profit. Due to the low marketshare of Mac OS (2.23% on Steam) only a fraction of the potential customers would be affected by having it available, or not available. That means only a few sales are additionally generated by those users. So, either the port has to be cheap, or it is a net loss.
3. Apple. Let's be honest, they aren't making it easy. By not supporting open standards like VULKAN, neglecting OpenGL for many years now and thus pretty much enfording their propietary METAL API it makes porting a game a lot less easy. Not to mention that games need to be signed, also their updates. Signing costs money and time. Apples current switch from x86-64 to ARM doesn't help either.

[chickennuggiesforme]

thx lol

[Scott, President of Dominos]

Metal predates Vulkan, and Apple was an early supporter of it until it became apparent that Vulkan’s extremely low-level way of programming was not where they wanted to go. Thus Metal is far more high level.

At the time of Metals creation OpenGL was stagnant (hence the Vulkan consortium). And according to posts by the folks at Asahi Linux, apples gpus work entirely differently from the standard fair.

Now, the elephant in the room was always cost. Every game dev I have talked to has pointed out that MacOS ports require more effort, being that many of the tools that they use (even when cross-platform) have bugs or don’t work at all. And the low marketshare of Macs means any profit margins is dubious.

Furthermore, most anti-piracy programs such as Denuvo don’t support Mac or Linux due to their need for low level access (and you can bet your ass that neither Mac or Linux wants to give root access to a userspace program)

[Scott, President of Dominos]

You know what, I feel like ranting. Game engines that have Vulkan support also typically have Metal support. The proprietary engines that don’t support Metal are pretty much DirectX exclusive.

The notion that Apple making native support for Vulkan will somehow make games more compatible or portable to MacOS is stupid. Game companies use ENGINES, they haven’t programmed low level GPU in decades.

The fact that Mac lacks games is entirely marketshare driven. DirectX is king because Microsoft is king, because Windows is dominant on the PC sphere. Making modern games costs ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of money, ever since the Xbox 360 days. Which is why indie titles are typically more supported on Mac than AAA titles.

Talk to developers themselves and they all say this.

[LeviathanWon]

Expensive, user friendly, security minded, polished, with professional standards. It is apple.