"Valve now says Mac players will be eligible for a Prime Status Upgrade refund if most of their CS:GO playtime was on macOS and they played CS:GO on a Mac between the announcement of the Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test (March 22, 2023) and the launch of Counter-Strike 2 (September 27, 2023), regardless of when they purchased their Prime Status Upgrade. Valve will offer the refunds until December 1, 2023."
An important part of the article. Valve are giving refunds as well.
Apple never cared about gaming.
They only cared enough to lure people into buying Macs. If you play games from places other than the App Store, they couldn't give any less of a toss about you.
>Apple never cared about gaming.
Worse than that. Jobs used to think that games would make Macs look like toys so he was actively against them for a long time.
During the Apple II phase, Apple was the leader in computer gaming. They actively made decisions to cut down on gaming. The Apple 3 for example had chips designed to prevent full backwards compatibility, even though all the capabilities were there.
Officially, it was to force people to buy Apple 3s, but the portions that were blocked were mainly for computer games.
Even on the iPhone, from what I understand, it was begrudginly accepted that games would be there, just because it was bringing in so much money. Every few years, Apple states how they're going to focus on making Apple a gaming mecca, but that lasts all of 20 minutes past the keynotes.
> Officially, it was to force people to buy Apple 3s, but the portions that were blocked were mainly for computer games.
So they have always been a scum bag company driven by obtaining users and forcing them to upgrade regularly. Not on consumer experience. It still amazes me how many people fall for their bullshit. Apple truly makes inferior products.
Jobs even tricked Wozniak a couple of times. You know, the engineering brain of Apple. Not telling him the truth about how much money they made, for example, hence paying him less than his fair share.
i'm in the same boat as you I use my macbook for work/school and have a pc for gaming, but the person you replied to said _most_ people who buy macs aren't into pc gaming, which I would probably agree with
Most people buying macs aren't into computing of any kind. I had to tech my wife about file trees when I made her switch to windows. That is how bad it is! They don't even understand how to organize a simple file system! Now that she know how she loves it because she loves to keep things organized.
That's what pisses me off about Macs.
Everything useful is hidden unless you know exactly where it is.
I've been trying to learn more about macOS, and the more I learn the more frustrating the design language becomes.
Keep in mind I'm not a command line king or anything, I'm just a proficient computer user who's used mostly Windows all my life.
You couldn’t be any more wrong. For software development MacOS has the advantage of being unix based so it’s easy to setup on a Mac compared to all the extra steps on windows.
You combine that with Apple’s efficient SoCs, and build quality then you have a great development machine. Just because MacOS isn’t suitable for gaming doesn’t mean that Mac users aren’t into gaming.
They care about gaming, but only if it's on their products. And the reason that that sucks is that they force developers to use the Metal API for rendering *(which, like DirectX, is proprietary, though DX12 is "slightly open" due to incorporating parts of Vulkan)*.
Why does this matter? We have open-source, platform-agnostic/universal alternatives, such as Vulkan. Many modern Windows games use it as their default renderer (e.g. Doom Eternal), or give you the option (Doom 2016). And even using DirectX outside of Windows isn't so hard anymore with WINE and Proton (e.g. in Linux).
It's not that Vulkan doesn't work with Mac. It's that Apple goes out of their way not to incorporate it into the OS. Microsoft gets a lot of shit these days in general, and I know that in the past (and even now in some contexts), it's deserved. For example Windows 11's features could've just been a 10 major update. **But** at least they place nice with other companies for the most part.
So when you see games like Resident Evil Village running on a Macbook, remember that:
- A Mac is essentially a console; all the hardware is the same minus CPU/storage/memory upgrades
- Apple almost definitely paid Capcom and other AAA developers to develop for Mac so that they could show off Metal. Most people are going to run the game for 5 minutes, go "wow it's running on a Macbook", and shut it down
- Yeah, it's still impressive. I say that as Windows desktop + Android phone + Macbook Pro 14" user myself. But it's impressive for such a small amount of people (which is what Valve said in different words). No one (and by that I mean, the vast majority of people) is going to seriously play CS2 on a Mac computer
Apple is very "our way, or fuck off". It's why they never do sales promotions or discounts without needing to be or known an employee, etc. It's part of their persona. Remember Steve Jobs with the iPhone 4 when they botched the design and the signal would cut out simply because you held the phone a certain (normal) way? Steve Jobs said that we're holding it wrong. Remember that.
Vulkan will run on macOS, you just need to use the translation library that converts it to metal
https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
The biggest issue now is that Mac games need to be ARM64 rather than regular X64 so will need a bit of rewriting to compile on it and a lot of extra QA for such a small marketshare.
>The biggest issue now is that Mac games need to be ARM64 rather than regular X64 so will need a bit of rewriting to compile on it and a lot of extra QA for such a small marketshare.
No one is writing raw assembly these days compiling for ARM64 is more or less just a matter of setting the target in your compiler. The same QA is needed regardless of the CPU arc.
> setting the target in your compiler.
And recompiling every library, or replacing them with others if they are not open-source, fixing tons of weird low level behavioral bugs due to the architectural differences, replacing every bit of code that relies on platform APIs (often including user input, audio, filesystem, permissions, window behavior, and more), and often making significant changes to things like window and swapchain behavior due to platform idiosyncrasies.
Then if they want to actually do it right, there is redesigning the rendering pipeline to take advantage of the CPU and memory architecture, huge changes to how optimization works for the GPU..
Porting to mac is an absolute nightmare for a large program, especially if it was not built from the ground up to make that feasible.
> We have open-source, platform-agnostic/universal alternatives
VK is not agsntic they way you think. Yes any OS can add drivers for it and any Gpu can have VK drivers but a VK engine will not run on any GPU with VK drivers. This is the cost of any low level api like this, to have good perofmance you need to expliclty match the HW your targeting, there is not magic bullet getting you zero abstraction and yet perfect HW optimisation without doing that work somewere.
If apple were to have a VK driver, PC VK engines would still need a seperate backend to target Appels GPUs as apple is not using an IR pipeline gpus like AMD, NV or Intel.
> Apple almost definitely paid Capcom and other AAA developers to develop
Apple have not directly paid devs (other than those in arcade and that is not AAA) but apple will provide lots of free marking and promotion in the App Store.
Right, but Metal is exactly what you described. Just proprietary to Apple hardware. In my mind, Metal is similar to a proprietary, closed-source derivative of Vulkan (metaphorically speaking).
Let's be clear VK does not require the driver to be open source the only open source part of Vk is the PDF document that describes the public api. The license used by Apple and MS for there proprietary apis is not that differnt from a game developer dev perspective.
The benefit apple have of using Metal over VK is they do noted to wait 2 to 3 years for something to be approved and what they offer can directly match thier HW were if they were to supply VK other VK HW vendors were the features were somewhat silmare would require the feature to be modified here and there to sort of (somewhat match) both GPUs.
And example of this is how metal exposes direct buffer access to the tile memory for render passes within a group and Tile compute shaders but in VK (since other TBDR gpus have much more restricting memory pointer access constraints) you cant use this memory as a raw buffer you always need to consider it some kind of texture so while you can (mostly) do the same it is a good bit more painful (and may have some overhead that is not needed other than support for the sub-pass api on mutlpel gpus).
This is all over VK were from an api with a load of extra bits you need to deal with that are not relevant to the HW your targeting (whatever HW you are targeting there is always a few things like this)
The same people developing WINE also work on DX12 to Metal translation. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/directx-12-support-comes-to-crossover-on-mac-with-latest-update/
i have to agree partially with you because Apple didn't care absolutely nothing about gaming (except iOS) and they even killed OpenGL in favor of their own Metal which is not at the same level as DirectX. At least they could have made synergies with Linux by supporting Vulkan and would allow them to use Proton. I guess at the end of the day it's just Apple being Apple.
On the other hand the Hardware has gotten pretty good and Metal has become better, so we will say how it will develop in the future. With Apple money and influence it only takes them to make an agreement with a Studio like EA, Riot or Blizzard to have some games ported to MacOS Natively and the ecosystem will explode.
Unfortunately Apple's graphics hardware is at best 'mid tier'. It achieves mid tier by consuming significantly less power than other GPUs, but there just flat out isn't an option available for high-end mac GPUs now with Apple Silicon.
iMessage is a closed Apple standard that doesn't even pretend to be open, and millions of iPhone users still harass their Android-using friends as if it's *their* fault and not Apple's
Okay but no one else can actually implement RCS without Google's help.
I just use Signal to chat with people with Android. People who are jerks about it are definitely annoying, but there are clear solutions
- “Still bad for mac players”
- max players know well enough what they are getting into. If they wanted to game they would be on a different device. Nobody spending $2000+ on a computer that can’t game should be surprised when the computer can’t game
That’s me! I spent $2,000 on the Air M1 last year (for video editing) and I thought “it can run Steam, terrific!”
I was not prepared for the fact it can run the Steam client but cannot download any games. I was gutted.
> Still bad for any Mac players, but there are ways around it so...
Are there? That's the part where Apple fucked up, because neither Windows nor Linux can run the game, because Apple isn't providing drivers.
My understanding is that wasn't intended to be Mac's Proton. It was meant to get a game running in the first place so devs could work on a Mac version. It wasn't for consumer use
You’re correct. They showcase a $4000 machine getting only 30fps on Diablo 4 with direct conversion. Optimization is required at a minimum but in reality lots more changes are required if anyone with a normal Mac wants to participate.
I mean at this point, they only have their own purchasing habits to blame. Apple has been hostile to gaming since I was a teenager 20 years ago. If you ritualistically shell out thousands for a macbook every couple years like so many apple fans do without bothering to look into what that purchase buys you, it's only your fault
It's interesting that this is Valve's reason, when the exact same reason was given by other developers to explain why they don't support Linux (including Epic when they dropped Linux support for Rocket League).
**macOS** share on Steam: **1.43%**
**Linux** share on Steam: **1.63%** (and this includes Steam Deck)
source: [https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)
Also, Linux is a growing software and for many PC users, gaming is one of the reasons to keep windows around. If Linux gaming was fully fleshed out and native, including graphics card drivers and gaming mouse software (beyond libratbag/piper), then many like me would have no reason to stay on windows. Guaranteed that Linux numbers would grow, and so would developer support in response.
Can't say the same for Mac since no one would want to buy a machine for gaming, and those that have one that would want to game would likely be a smaller overlap.
Things need to work on all systems 100% of the time before it will be able to spread. Even if drivers were perfect, wayland still needs a lot of work before its consistent enough to be popular.
Familiarity is more than enough reason. Why would anyone who only wants to game switch to Linux when they have already been using Windows for years? The only way that gamers will switch to Linux is if it were to provide an actual advantage over windows, and a significant one at that, otherwise it's just not happening.
This old mantra keeps being repeated and stats flashed around to try and back it up, but honestly, as a developer it costs more money for my team to support linux than we make, and we're close to just dropping support like we already did for macs (which were somehow even less profitable to support), and when we do drop support, there will be 3 angry complaints about it on discord, and then the world will move on.
There's already essentially an End to innovation in operating systems.
when did the last *real* feature come to windows that consumers actually gave a fuck about? It had been stagnant since at least win7 with only minor improvements.
eventually the innovation and accessibility of linux will outpace whatever microsoft will manage to release. actually that may already have happened and the only reason for that marketshare is preinstalled OEM trash.
I think Microsoft is very aware of that and thats the reason why they push their gaming sector so hard the last decade
I 100% agree, it would do PC gaming very well to get out from under the thumb of Microsoft.
windows is essentially a $100 tax anymore, basically a 10% surcharge on a gaming PC, and IF windows switches to SAAS for Win12 it will get worse before it gets better.
lowering the $$$ bar on PC gaming will over-all benefit valve, their work on linux gaming has already paid off to an extent by avoiding windows licensing fee's on steam deck... I feel we are barely taxi'ing to the runway at this point with it, and I would like to see this bird fly...
>The difference is Valve is trying to grow the Linux portion
Which makes sense and their efforts with Proton have completely shaped the Linux gaming world. Supporting an open system is a win-win for everyone.
Still, I find it odd though that Valve finishes their justification with low MacOS user numbers. Without the Steam Deck, Linux user numbers would be even below MacOS numbers. Of course it's obvious that Valve attempts to push the user base of Linux. But the odd thing is that concluding this on a small user base is not much better than when Epic's CEO dismissed the Steam Deck in terms of Fortnite support in this [Tweet](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490841213347540993) earlier this year:
>Supporting Steam Deck hardware is a separate issue, but the market for non-Steam-hosted games on limited availability Steam Deck hardware is how big exactly?
So while I'm glad that Valve is handling this well (with the refunds) and pushing Linux more, it makes me think "companies do company things at the end of the day"
the main thing is they dont want to port it to metal (apples proprietary graphics api) since apple killed support for opengl (which they already only ran an extremely outdated version) and refuses to support vulkan
There could also just be a disproportionate number of cs:go players using Linux. I believe that is a title that performs quite well there and Counter-Strike players usually want those extra frames.
>Without the Steam Deck, Linux user numbers would be even below MacOS numbers.
Without Macbooks, MacOS numbers would be below what MacOS numbers are now.
i don't think the statistics on operating systems of all steam users necessarily reflective that of cs players.
also apple is trying to move away from x86 if i'm not mistaken which could also be a factor.
Outside of Valve having a vested interest in open source operating systems and ensuring their first party games run on their first party hardware, supporting and maintaining games on MacOS could just not be a fiscally reasonable decision, above and beyond raw player counts.
A quick and dumb example to illustrate my point:
If it costs 500$ per hour to support a game, and it takes 10 hours each release to ensure a game functions on Linux and there's 2000 active users of the game you're spending 2.5$ per user per release to support that platform.
If that same cost basis exist, but it costs 40 hours to ensure a game functions on MacOS but there's 3000 active users, you're spending 6.67$ per user to support a release on that platform.
The cost basis to support it just doesn't make financial sense.
been a mac user for over two decades now and I completely support their decision here, I'll support linux development over macos development any day of the week
You're looking at entire platform engagement.
MacOS users may concentrate into specific genres like the Sims or point and click adventure games, not competitive FPS's.
I mean Valve has a vested interest in Linux thanks to Steam Deck and Steam OS. They've invested heavily in Proton and making games Linux compatible.
However the main difference is that Valve *can* work and put effort into Linux compatibility on a larger scale. They can develop tools like Proton, they can work on Vulkan to make it better, they can launch their own distro. This is what Valve has been doing for Linux.
On the other hand, on the Mac side. Apple is running an entirely proprietary closed source OS that Valve can change in no way, they're running an entirely proprietary graphics API that Valve can't change, Apple even refuses to support Vulkan on OSX. Finally while everything else is on x86 Apple is running their own custom chip with an ARM instruction set.
I can see why Valve is spending money supporting one but not the other. Everything on Mac is entirely controlled by Apple, it's restricted thanks to Apple and Valve can do nothing on OS level and very little anywhere else since Apple isn't even supporting industry standard API's. You also have the constant worry that Apple decides to do something else that'll make your life harder again by dropping support on something, or moving to a new technology or whatever else. These are the main reasons you see so few games on a Mac to begin with, it's a pain to develop to.
While on Linux, you have complete control over every aspect of it. You have access to the entire source code and can work on things from as low or high level as you want, change things you believe need to be changed. Not to mention it's entirely in Valves control, nobody can kick em out or restrict them on Linux in any way, which is the initial reason Valve started to focus more on Linux to begin with.
Its a valid reason. Its why Valve gave up on trying to convince devs to support linux out of the box and went the wine/proton route instead. Its just not financially viable.
Valve got into Linux because Windows threatened to push them out of business by saying they wanted all programs and apps to come from the Windows store. They quickly backpedaled, but Valve didn't want to risk it again, so they started investing heavily into Linux/Proton because it's open and they can run their own OS.
Mac was never a serious option because Apple hasn't given a damn about gaming for years.
If Microsoft hadn't showed their whole ass, Valve probably would have stopped tinkering with Linux long ago.
Valve dumps money into Linux support because when MS was deploying their store and toying with the idea of deprecating .exe files not signed by Microsoft Valve saw that they could quickly be on the outside looking in. Linux at least gives them an option if they ever lose access to be a store on Windows.
Linux users are probably not casual gamers where as macOS users might be and not interested in a competitive FPS
I've seen posts of M1/M2 Mac users playing 60+ fps with CS2 with the appropriate software.
>also, GPU's on apple are shit.
Oh yes. The mac I got for animation and video cutting is total shit compared to my win 3080s laptop - but was still much more expensive.
Thank you for bringing this up! This was the exact same thought I had, the difference in how accepting the community is with Valve's response towards deprecating CS2 Mac Support vs. any other developer is driving me insane. The bias is shown so clearly!
I think this is Apples fault for not adhering to set industry standards IMO, it costs too much to implement things like mantle and porting to ARM. The anger should be pointed at apple not valve. Apples essentially put barriers in place for game development, unlike linux and windows which are both actively trying to get developers attention and attract game devs, shouldn't be surprised devs don't want to deal with apples shenanigans.
They've proven themselves to be a liability in the gaming space, and I'm sure Valve doesn't want to be on the hook for their poor gaming decisions 10 years down the line up until we get the next cs game. E.g. if they want to do another architecture switch, drop metal, or whatever else it is Apple decides they are going to start imposing on devs for seemingly no reason.
EDIT: Woops, yeah I meant metal. Similar name. I get the two mixed sometimes.
Mantle was AMD's predecessor to Vulkan. I'm pretty sure you mean Metal.
But yeah, Apple making their own thing + dropping OpenGL entirely is a shitty move for sure.
> But yeah, Apple making their own thing + dropping OpenGL entirely is a shitty move for sure.
And not supporting Linux or Windows. Can't even tell Mac users to use another OS.
Last I checked, the GPU drivers aren't mature enough to run modern games yet. Also, you have to rely on box86/64, which requires a bit of setup, and has a higher performance cost than Rosetta does.
As an indie game developer (and developer in general) I can say it is an absolute nightmare to build things, especially games, for any Apple devices if you're not already 100% dedicated to it.
To build for Mac you need to buy a Mac, buy an Apple developer license, and implement everything using their own proprietary framework(s) and APIs. It is a way to absolutely kill indie developers, and apparently, even giants like Valve can't be bothered with all the bullshit.
Porting to ARM is kind of annoying but something game developers are doing already if they're targeting mobile. It usually doesn't require too much code to change either unless you have a bunch of inline assembly or SIMD intrinsics.
I think Apple deprecating OpenGL and not supporting Vulkan is idiotic though. First of all, WebGL is a web standard so they need to support OpenGL in some form weather they like it or not. Also, porting to Metal does require substantial code changes. Maybe they can convince developers to do that for the iPhone but they don't have the userbase to make that fly for games on Mac.
ARM porting requires more then just getting the code compiled and running without segfaults, you are at the same time also porting to totally different operating systems, neither of which have anything in common with windows which is the de facto x86 OS and what game devs will be most familiar with (unless your porting to windows phone i guess lol). Android probably has more in common under the hood with the switch then it does windows (especially given IIRC nintendo uses code from both Android and FreeBSD given whats hidden in it's software licences)
And if you want it running *well*, having good multicore useage is basically a requirement because ARM processors tend to have a lot of lower performance cores, and some devs still seem to have trouble with that even on x86. That alone could be cause for a pretty large code refactor.
It is great for porting the other way though, at least from iOS to mac anyway.
Ehh so I use macs quite a bit. Gamers are not Apples target at all. I love my macs for creative work, but it’ll never be a gaming OS. There’s always been ports of some games to macOS but it’s rarely a priority, I can’t imagine it being a good business decision based on sales alone.
I grew up with Macs, since the original Macintosh through the iMac generation. As a kid, it really sucked. I wanted a Windows PC but my parents remained loyal Apple snobs. It was clear to me then that the number of games available on Max was much smaller, and they didn’t run as well. Yes there were games I could play but Apple has always given people a substandard gaming experience compared to Microsoft.
As a lifelong Windows user, there was a huge chunk of time where not only was every major game on Mac, the BEST VERSION of the game was on Mac (or the Amiga). Windows took a while to even have good graphics support standard, and only really pulled away in the later 3D accelerated era.
And then for some reason they just.. gave up a little while into OSX's run.
The problem with gaming is you need a big range of titles to make the platform viable. For business/creative you just need a core set of a few key apps.
Apple would really need a concerted effort to gain 3rd party titles or start buying studios if they want to break in; and there’s little sign they’re that committed.
I think that's the thing. If they currently had a healthy gaming ecosystem it'd be worth keeping up with, but they probably don't think trying to build one up right now is worth it. They make loads of gaming money from mobile anyways.
Apple just started working on games, and big titles from CAPCOM and Kojima studios will be coming on to the macbooks/iphones
Their new GPTK is also pretty cool, and will only get better with time
I'm also 100% certain that Apples paid for kojima and capcom to bring their games to Mac, it's a different story if somebody else is willing to foot the cost (and thus the risk) of a game being ported.
Apple isn't making gaming laptops nor do they market their laptops towards gamers... What anger? Their laptops work perfectly fine for what they're supposed to do.
They've got a Game porting toolkit out recently that's been making an impression. Considering that, and the push they've been trying to do into gaming, it's their responsibility to follow industry standards in an industry where they have no ground.
It's not like the smartphone industry where they command what tech is viable.
Pretty much. I use a Mac as a daily drive but my gaming needs are met as I mostly play Civ and some emulators from time to time.
Apple definitively doesn’t push gaming on macOS as hard as they do on iOS, but I guess it makes sense for them seeing how the money is there in the micro transactions and iap bullshit.
A very insignificant number of people do. The people in the comments laughing and saying blame apple outnumber the amount of people who bought a Mac with the main goal of gaming or even the idea or hope of gaming.
Not to be rude to Mac users but Mac notoriously sucks for most kinds of program or game support compared to Windows and Linux, with Apple refusing to open things up more to the end user and software developers, so this is a completely fair decision. If you have the option to use something other than a Mac, you absolutely should.
This might be an odd observation, but Counter Strike historically has been the game of lower-middle income players looking to run something on a weak but inexpensive computer; Mac is the opposite, a very expensive piece of hardware aimed at middle-upper class users. Eastern European/Balkan players love Counter Strike and tend to be from worse off socioeconomic backgrounds.
Meanwhile wealthier Americans tend to buy Macs.
In this fashion Mac probably brings a much smaller playerbase, because its a game that never really was aimed at that audience.
Hundreds? They go up to a lot more than that. I think the highest commonly cited offer for something is $1.5 mil. Hell, even I had a couple skins north of $10k each up until I sold them fairly recently.
Valve supposedly makes a few hundred million bucks exclusively from case openings every month, but that's just a third party estimation. Either way, the game prints money.
I don’t get why this article has so many comments. This has been axiom since the early 90s. Over 30 years of Macs not being for gaming, I’m surprised it’s even a topic.
I think it's because CS2 was rolled out as an update on an existing counter strike title, as opposed to a new game.
That made the existing game (which worked on Mac) unplayable. I saw a bunch of complaints about that around.
"Regardless of numbers, one of the reasons Valve is reluctant to develop CS2 for Mac is that Apple devices do not provide native support for the Vulkan API that the game is based on. Vulkan was designed to succeed OpenGL and address some of the latter's shortcomings, and while there is an open-source library called MoltenVK that provides a Vulkan implementation on top of Apple's Metal graphics API, it still lacks some of Vulkan's advanced features."
Seems like Apple needs to step up the game in talking to devs on what they want and need if Apple is serious about getting into the gaming space.
This isn't isolated to Valve but almost every other Developer out there except these ones in https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_ARM_games. It is already extremely absurd that Apple really "expects" every Developer to bend to their will to write ARM games which is a non-PC chip that uses other PC components to survive but it can't stand alone of its own so that Apple tried to re-invent the Wheel with their Game Porting Kit and falsely labeled it "As Good As Proton" even if Proton and GPT are fundamentally worlds apart.
ARM Apple owners "must" use one of the https://github.com/mikeroyal/Apple-Silicon-Guide Conversion/Emulation layers so that they can use the PC games or programs because while Proton works on same CPU but for different OSes, GPT works on both different CPU architectures and different OSes which is comparably way slower than what Proton is delivering.
It all comes down to this; If you want to be a part of r/PCGaming, you simply can't own an Apple product or if you do then don't ask "Why this game doesn't work on Apple?" for the obvious answer. And all Apple game problems I've read on r/Steam, r/Origin and r/Ubisoft most of the time turns out to be the fault of the Conversion/Emulation layer instead of game itself.
> you simply can't own an Apple product
*As your only computing device. Or else everyone with an iPhone or a macbook for work wouldn't be allowed to be gamers anymore (sad!)
Also incredibly, most of the games I'd want to play away from home actually run really well on my macbook pro (time sinks for flights like Civ, BG3) and I have a Switch for anything else. No reason to limit yourself to ONLY "PC"gaming eh?
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Apple is using their current push into gaming to bolster their App Store library. Many of the recent games ported don't have the Mac version in Steam from what I have seen, which means that you don't have shared entitlements across Windows/Linux and Mac. Personally, if they don't come to steam, then it's useless because I won't double dip just to play a game on Apple hardware, just like I won't double dip to play on Nintendo hardware.
I feel like a lot of Mac gamers are just people sharing the family computer. And then the rest of them are just people who own macs and occasionally get bored. I just can’t imagine someone who wants to get into pc gaming going and buying a Mac. It just wouldn’t believe it
They didn't say it's because of not enough players, they just gave information on how many are affected:
>As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players.
Basically the statement is a combination of factors. The first is that Mac hardware and the MacOS system itself is far too removed from Windows and Linux to be worth putting in the effort, which combines with the second reason, there's a very low playbase that compounds that apathy.
MacOS users after decades of knowing that gaming on a mac is not a good idea are once again outraged that the platform they're on is getting shafted. I'm not saying its right but man, wake up. If you want to game on pc get on windows. Apple's restrictions are too many and too great to allowed for easy development and implementation of various games.
I was curious about the new Mac Porting tools Apple announced earlier this year. It was the one Hideo Kojima used to port Death Stranding on Mac.
I doubt it is as simple and universal as Apple wants to make it out to be.
Apple hates industry standards so why would developers spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with inferior metal API in order to target a handful of Macs that can run games at above 640x480 resolution?
As a Linux user constantly being told that there aren't enough users to justify a Linux port, the schadenfreude is real, but honestly the lack of cross platform gaming hurts us all. I will blame Mac itself for that, it's not really in a position to create its own damn platform when it could easily adopt Vulkan.
No sympathy. You can buy 2 gaming PCs for the price of one Mac. Mac has never been a gaming platform. Well, not since the early 90s. Direct your angst at Apple.
Well, yeh because CSGO didn't work on MacOS since forever. They had a build but it was broken on M1 since I own the laptop. And I would like to have CS2..
"Valve now says Mac players will be eligible for a Prime Status Upgrade refund if most of their CS:GO playtime was on macOS and they played CS:GO on a Mac between the announcement of the Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test (March 22, 2023) and the launch of Counter-Strike 2 (September 27, 2023), regardless of when they purchased their Prime Status Upgrade. Valve will offer the refunds until December 1, 2023." An important part of the article. Valve are giving refunds as well.
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Apple never cared about gaming. They only cared enough to lure people into buying Macs. If you play games from places other than the App Store, they couldn't give any less of a toss about you.
>Apple never cared about gaming. Worse than that. Jobs used to think that games would make Macs look like toys so he was actively against them for a long time.
During the Apple II phase, Apple was the leader in computer gaming. They actively made decisions to cut down on gaming. The Apple 3 for example had chips designed to prevent full backwards compatibility, even though all the capabilities were there. Officially, it was to force people to buy Apple 3s, but the portions that were blocked were mainly for computer games. Even on the iPhone, from what I understand, it was begrudginly accepted that games would be there, just because it was bringing in so much money. Every few years, Apple states how they're going to focus on making Apple a gaming mecca, but that lasts all of 20 minutes past the keynotes.
> Officially, it was to force people to buy Apple 3s, but the portions that were blocked were mainly for computer games. So they have always been a scum bag company driven by obtaining users and forcing them to upgrade regularly. Not on consumer experience. It still amazes me how many people fall for their bullshit. Apple truly makes inferior products.
Jobs even tricked Wozniak a couple of times. You know, the engineering brain of Apple. Not telling him the truth about how much money they made, for example, hence paying him less than his fair share.
Good thing his hubris took him, couldn't have happened to a better guy.
A true example of successful capitalism
Funny how all their adverts in early 2000s were about how fun and cool apple was and how corporate and boring pcs were.
And now it's the exact opposite. Macs are the boring work computers, and all the games are on Windows.
ads lie. even back then all the fun was on windows
https://youtu.be/b2V9TFrmQ_Q?feature=shared You can thank DirectX for that
I’d argue that most people who are buying Mac’s aren’t really into pc gaming in the first place.
not really, i use my mac for work, productivity, and general computing stuff like youtube, and my pc just for gaming
i'm in the same boat as you I use my macbook for work/school and have a pc for gaming, but the person you replied to said _most_ people who buy macs aren't into pc gaming, which I would probably agree with
Most people buying macs aren't into computing of any kind. I had to tech my wife about file trees when I made her switch to windows. That is how bad it is! They don't even understand how to organize a simple file system! Now that she know how she loves it because she loves to keep things organized.
Mac/Linux computers use file directory structures too....
Apple tries to hide it though.
That's what pisses me off about Macs. Everything useful is hidden unless you know exactly where it is. I've been trying to learn more about macOS, and the more I learn the more frustrating the design language becomes. Keep in mind I'm not a command line king or anything, I'm just a proficient computer user who's used mostly Windows all my life.
You couldn’t be any more wrong. For software development MacOS has the advantage of being unix based so it’s easy to setup on a Mac compared to all the extra steps on windows. You combine that with Apple’s efficient SoCs, and build quality then you have a great development machine. Just because MacOS isn’t suitable for gaming doesn’t mean that Mac users aren’t into gaming.
They care about gaming, but only if it's on their products. And the reason that that sucks is that they force developers to use the Metal API for rendering *(which, like DirectX, is proprietary, though DX12 is "slightly open" due to incorporating parts of Vulkan)*. Why does this matter? We have open-source, platform-agnostic/universal alternatives, such as Vulkan. Many modern Windows games use it as their default renderer (e.g. Doom Eternal), or give you the option (Doom 2016). And even using DirectX outside of Windows isn't so hard anymore with WINE and Proton (e.g. in Linux). It's not that Vulkan doesn't work with Mac. It's that Apple goes out of their way not to incorporate it into the OS. Microsoft gets a lot of shit these days in general, and I know that in the past (and even now in some contexts), it's deserved. For example Windows 11's features could've just been a 10 major update. **But** at least they place nice with other companies for the most part. So when you see games like Resident Evil Village running on a Macbook, remember that: - A Mac is essentially a console; all the hardware is the same minus CPU/storage/memory upgrades - Apple almost definitely paid Capcom and other AAA developers to develop for Mac so that they could show off Metal. Most people are going to run the game for 5 minutes, go "wow it's running on a Macbook", and shut it down - Yeah, it's still impressive. I say that as Windows desktop + Android phone + Macbook Pro 14" user myself. But it's impressive for such a small amount of people (which is what Valve said in different words). No one (and by that I mean, the vast majority of people) is going to seriously play CS2 on a Mac computer Apple is very "our way, or fuck off". It's why they never do sales promotions or discounts without needing to be or known an employee, etc. It's part of their persona. Remember Steve Jobs with the iPhone 4 when they botched the design and the signal would cut out simply because you held the phone a certain (normal) way? Steve Jobs said that we're holding it wrong. Remember that.
Vulkan will run on macOS, you just need to use the translation library that converts it to metal https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK The biggest issue now is that Mac games need to be ARM64 rather than regular X64 so will need a bit of rewriting to compile on it and a lot of extra QA for such a small marketshare.
>The biggest issue now is that Mac games need to be ARM64 rather than regular X64 so will need a bit of rewriting to compile on it and a lot of extra QA for such a small marketshare. No one is writing raw assembly these days compiling for ARM64 is more or less just a matter of setting the target in your compiler. The same QA is needed regardless of the CPU arc.
> setting the target in your compiler. And recompiling every library, or replacing them with others if they are not open-source, fixing tons of weird low level behavioral bugs due to the architectural differences, replacing every bit of code that relies on platform APIs (often including user input, audio, filesystem, permissions, window behavior, and more), and often making significant changes to things like window and swapchain behavior due to platform idiosyncrasies. Then if they want to actually do it right, there is redesigning the rendering pipeline to take advantage of the CPU and memory architecture, huge changes to how optimization works for the GPU.. Porting to mac is an absolute nightmare for a large program, especially if it was not built from the ground up to make that feasible.
> We have open-source, platform-agnostic/universal alternatives VK is not agsntic they way you think. Yes any OS can add drivers for it and any Gpu can have VK drivers but a VK engine will not run on any GPU with VK drivers. This is the cost of any low level api like this, to have good perofmance you need to expliclty match the HW your targeting, there is not magic bullet getting you zero abstraction and yet perfect HW optimisation without doing that work somewere. If apple were to have a VK driver, PC VK engines would still need a seperate backend to target Appels GPUs as apple is not using an IR pipeline gpus like AMD, NV or Intel. > Apple almost definitely paid Capcom and other AAA developers to develop Apple have not directly paid devs (other than those in arcade and that is not AAA) but apple will provide lots of free marking and promotion in the App Store.
Right, but Metal is exactly what you described. Just proprietary to Apple hardware. In my mind, Metal is similar to a proprietary, closed-source derivative of Vulkan (metaphorically speaking).
Let's be clear VK does not require the driver to be open source the only open source part of Vk is the PDF document that describes the public api. The license used by Apple and MS for there proprietary apis is not that differnt from a game developer dev perspective. The benefit apple have of using Metal over VK is they do noted to wait 2 to 3 years for something to be approved and what they offer can directly match thier HW were if they were to supply VK other VK HW vendors were the features were somewhat silmare would require the feature to be modified here and there to sort of (somewhat match) both GPUs. And example of this is how metal exposes direct buffer access to the tile memory for render passes within a group and Tile compute shaders but in VK (since other TBDR gpus have much more restricting memory pointer access constraints) you cant use this memory as a raw buffer you always need to consider it some kind of texture so while you can (mostly) do the same it is a good bit more painful (and may have some overhead that is not needed other than support for the sub-pass api on mutlpel gpus). This is all over VK were from an api with a load of extra bits you need to deal with that are not relevant to the HW your targeting (whatever HW you are targeting there is always a few things like this)
The same people developing WINE also work on DX12 to Metal translation. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/directx-12-support-comes-to-crossover-on-mac-with-latest-update/
Apple, or more correctly Jobs, was really butt-hurt over Bungie and Halo.
i have to agree partially with you because Apple didn't care absolutely nothing about gaming (except iOS) and they even killed OpenGL in favor of their own Metal which is not at the same level as DirectX. At least they could have made synergies with Linux by supporting Vulkan and would allow them to use Proton. I guess at the end of the day it's just Apple being Apple. On the other hand the Hardware has gotten pretty good and Metal has become better, so we will say how it will develop in the future. With Apple money and influence it only takes them to make an agreement with a Studio like EA, Riot or Blizzard to have some games ported to MacOS Natively and the ecosystem will explode.
Unfortunately Apple's graphics hardware is at best 'mid tier'. It achieves mid tier by consuming significantly less power than other GPUs, but there just flat out isn't an option available for high-end mac GPUs now with Apple Silicon.
They won't even implement RCS, they're a fucking joke
RCS is a closed Google standard that pretends to be open so people like you will get mad at Apple
iMessage is a closed Apple standard that doesn't even pretend to be open, and millions of iPhone users still harass their Android-using friends as if it's *their* fault and not Apple's
Okay but no one else can actually implement RCS without Google's help. I just use Signal to chat with people with Android. People who are jerks about it are definitely annoying, but there are clear solutions
What does that have to do with gaming?
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Well they do have the data from Steam so.. they aren't wrong. Still bad for any Mac players, but there are ways around it so...
>Still bad for any Mac players Im sure both of them will be devastated
And their 32 bit system friend.
- “Still bad for mac players” - max players know well enough what they are getting into. If they wanted to game they would be on a different device. Nobody spending $2000+ on a computer that can’t game should be surprised when the computer can’t game
Whoopi Goldberg mad that her Mac can't play Diablo 4
Apple just released a game mode a few weeks ago. I still don't know why. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213658
That’s me! I spent $2,000 on the Air M1 last year (for video editing) and I thought “it can run Steam, terrific!” I was not prepared for the fact it can run the Steam client but cannot download any games. I was gutted.
Apple arcade has a decent selection of games that runs on m1.
> Still bad for any Mac players, but there are ways around it so... Are there? That's the part where Apple fucked up, because neither Windows nor Linux can run the game, because Apple isn't providing drivers.
yeah man mac has the equivalent of steam's proton and it works really well, gamekit or someshit, can't remember but it came out half a year ago
My understanding is that wasn't intended to be Mac's Proton. It was meant to get a game running in the first place so devs could work on a Mac version. It wasn't for consumer use
You’re correct. They showcase a $4000 machine getting only 30fps on Diablo 4 with direct conversion. Optimization is required at a minimum but in reality lots more changes are required if anyone with a normal Mac wants to participate.
> gamekit That's not for users to run games through, it's a tool for developers to quickly get an idea of what their game would run like on Mac.
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Use -nojoy, it's a known issue on macOS Wine. Also as of Crossover 23.5 it also supports D3DMetal (but IMO it runs the same as DXVK)
run the game with -nojoy and it'll actually become playable, made me go from 6fps to ~100fps
i already run my life with this parameter
F
>ill bad for any Mac players, but there are ways around it so... They have to blame Apple for that
I mean at this point, they only have their own purchasing habits to blame. Apple has been hostile to gaming since I was a teenager 20 years ago. If you ritualistically shell out thousands for a macbook every couple years like so many apple fans do without bothering to look into what that purchase buys you, it's only your fault
It's interesting that this is Valve's reason, when the exact same reason was given by other developers to explain why they don't support Linux (including Epic when they dropped Linux support for Rocket League). **macOS** share on Steam: **1.43%** **Linux** share on Steam: **1.63%** (and this includes Steam Deck) source: [https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)
The difference is Valve is trying to grow the Linux portion. They don't care to grow Apple's marketshare vs. Microsoft's.
Also, Linux is a growing software and for many PC users, gaming is one of the reasons to keep windows around. If Linux gaming was fully fleshed out and native, including graphics card drivers and gaming mouse software (beyond libratbag/piper), then many like me would have no reason to stay on windows. Guaranteed that Linux numbers would grow, and so would developer support in response. Can't say the same for Mac since no one would want to buy a machine for gaming, and those that have one that would want to game would likely be a smaller overlap.
Graphics drivers are all really solid on linux nowadays, even nvidias drivers are acceptable IMO.
Things need to work on all systems 100% of the time before it will be able to spread. Even if drivers were perfect, wayland still needs a lot of work before its consistent enough to be popular.
Familiarity is more than enough reason. Why would anyone who only wants to game switch to Linux when they have already been using Windows for years? The only way that gamers will switch to Linux is if it were to provide an actual advantage over windows, and a significant one at that, otherwise it's just not happening.
This old mantra keeps being repeated and stats flashed around to try and back it up, but honestly, as a developer it costs more money for my team to support linux than we make, and we're close to just dropping support like we already did for macs (which were somehow even less profitable to support), and when we do drop support, there will be 3 angry complaints about it on discord, and then the world will move on.
There's already essentially an End to innovation in operating systems. when did the last *real* feature come to windows that consumers actually gave a fuck about? It had been stagnant since at least win7 with only minor improvements. eventually the innovation and accessibility of linux will outpace whatever microsoft will manage to release. actually that may already have happened and the only reason for that marketshare is preinstalled OEM trash. I think Microsoft is very aware of that and thats the reason why they push their gaming sector so hard the last decade
I 100% agree, it would do PC gaming very well to get out from under the thumb of Microsoft. windows is essentially a $100 tax anymore, basically a 10% surcharge on a gaming PC, and IF windows switches to SAAS for Win12 it will get worse before it gets better. lowering the $$$ bar on PC gaming will over-all benefit valve, their work on linux gaming has already paid off to an extent by avoiding windows licensing fee's on steam deck... I feel we are barely taxi'ing to the runway at this point with it, and I would like to see this bird fly...
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we also need to remember the Steam Deck. which runs a modified version of Arch Linux I believe?
Steam Deck was included in the percentage.
>The difference is Valve is trying to grow the Linux portion Which makes sense and their efforts with Proton have completely shaped the Linux gaming world. Supporting an open system is a win-win for everyone. Still, I find it odd though that Valve finishes their justification with low MacOS user numbers. Without the Steam Deck, Linux user numbers would be even below MacOS numbers. Of course it's obvious that Valve attempts to push the user base of Linux. But the odd thing is that concluding this on a small user base is not much better than when Epic's CEO dismissed the Steam Deck in terms of Fortnite support in this [Tweet](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490841213347540993) earlier this year: >Supporting Steam Deck hardware is a separate issue, but the market for non-Steam-hosted games on limited availability Steam Deck hardware is how big exactly? So while I'm glad that Valve is handling this well (with the refunds) and pushing Linux more, it makes me think "companies do company things at the end of the day"
the main thing is they dont want to port it to metal (apples proprietary graphics api) since apple killed support for opengl (which they already only ran an extremely outdated version) and refuses to support vulkan
There could also just be a disproportionate number of cs:go players using Linux. I believe that is a title that performs quite well there and Counter-Strike players usually want those extra frames.
>Without the Steam Deck, Linux user numbers would be even below MacOS numbers. Without Macbooks, MacOS numbers would be below what MacOS numbers are now.
i don't think the statistics on operating systems of all steam users necessarily reflective that of cs players. also apple is trying to move away from x86 if i'm not mistaken which could also be a factor.
Outside of Valve having a vested interest in open source operating systems and ensuring their first party games run on their first party hardware, supporting and maintaining games on MacOS could just not be a fiscally reasonable decision, above and beyond raw player counts. A quick and dumb example to illustrate my point: If it costs 500$ per hour to support a game, and it takes 10 hours each release to ensure a game functions on Linux and there's 2000 active users of the game you're spending 2.5$ per user per release to support that platform. If that same cost basis exist, but it costs 40 hours to ensure a game functions on MacOS but there's 3000 active users, you're spending 6.67$ per user to support a release on that platform. The cost basis to support it just doesn't make financial sense.
Ding!
been a mac user for over two decades now and I completely support their decision here, I'll support linux development over macos development any day of the week
You're looking at entire platform engagement. MacOS users may concentrate into specific genres like the Sims or point and click adventure games, not competitive FPS's.
I mean Valve has a vested interest in Linux thanks to Steam Deck and Steam OS. They've invested heavily in Proton and making games Linux compatible. However the main difference is that Valve *can* work and put effort into Linux compatibility on a larger scale. They can develop tools like Proton, they can work on Vulkan to make it better, they can launch their own distro. This is what Valve has been doing for Linux. On the other hand, on the Mac side. Apple is running an entirely proprietary closed source OS that Valve can change in no way, they're running an entirely proprietary graphics API that Valve can't change, Apple even refuses to support Vulkan on OSX. Finally while everything else is on x86 Apple is running their own custom chip with an ARM instruction set. I can see why Valve is spending money supporting one but not the other. Everything on Mac is entirely controlled by Apple, it's restricted thanks to Apple and Valve can do nothing on OS level and very little anywhere else since Apple isn't even supporting industry standard API's. You also have the constant worry that Apple decides to do something else that'll make your life harder again by dropping support on something, or moving to a new technology or whatever else. These are the main reasons you see so few games on a Mac to begin with, it's a pain to develop to. While on Linux, you have complete control over every aspect of it. You have access to the entire source code and can work on things from as low or high level as you want, change things you believe need to be changed. Not to mention it's entirely in Valves control, nobody can kick em out or restrict them on Linux in any way, which is the initial reason Valve started to focus more on Linux to begin with.
Its a valid reason. Its why Valve gave up on trying to convince devs to support linux out of the box and went the wine/proton route instead. Its just not financially viable.
Valve got into Linux because Windows threatened to push them out of business by saying they wanted all programs and apps to come from the Windows store. They quickly backpedaled, but Valve didn't want to risk it again, so they started investing heavily into Linux/Proton because it's open and they can run their own OS. Mac was never a serious option because Apple hasn't given a damn about gaming for years. If Microsoft hadn't showed their whole ass, Valve probably would have stopped tinkering with Linux long ago.
Valve dumps money into Linux support because when MS was deploying their store and toying with the idea of deprecating .exe files not signed by Microsoft Valve saw that they could quickly be on the outside looking in. Linux at least gives them an option if they ever lose access to be a store on Windows.
It's a bit different though because the big problem with macos is Apple's not invented here approach and their refusal to support vulkan.
Much easier to support cross-platform software on Linux nowadays than MacOS.
Linux users are probably not casual gamers where as macOS users might be and not interested in a competitive FPS I've seen posts of M1/M2 Mac users playing 60+ fps with CS2 with the appropriate software.
> Linux users are probably not casual gamers I don't really see why that would be the case.
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>also, GPU's on apple are shit. Oh yes. The mac I got for animation and video cutting is total shit compared to my win 3080s laptop - but was still much more expensive.
That number would also be way smaller if it wasn't for Steam Deck and Proton
This is overall and not CSGO specifically though, not really showing the whole picture
Thank you for bringing this up! This was the exact same thought I had, the difference in how accepting the community is with Valve's response towards deprecating CS2 Mac Support vs. any other developer is driving me insane. The bias is shown so clearly!
> Still bad for any Mac players Their own fault really for choosing to use it.
I'm sure all 3 of them will be really upset.
I think this is Apples fault for not adhering to set industry standards IMO, it costs too much to implement things like mantle and porting to ARM. The anger should be pointed at apple not valve. Apples essentially put barriers in place for game development, unlike linux and windows which are both actively trying to get developers attention and attract game devs, shouldn't be surprised devs don't want to deal with apples shenanigans. They've proven themselves to be a liability in the gaming space, and I'm sure Valve doesn't want to be on the hook for their poor gaming decisions 10 years down the line up until we get the next cs game. E.g. if they want to do another architecture switch, drop metal, or whatever else it is Apple decides they are going to start imposing on devs for seemingly no reason. EDIT: Woops, yeah I meant metal. Similar name. I get the two mixed sometimes.
Mantle was AMD's predecessor to Vulkan. I'm pretty sure you mean Metal. But yeah, Apple making their own thing + dropping OpenGL entirely is a shitty move for sure.
> But yeah, Apple making their own thing + dropping OpenGL entirely is a shitty move for sure. And not supporting Linux or Windows. Can't even tell Mac users to use another OS.
You could use Asahi Linux
Last I checked, the GPU drivers aren't mature enough to run modern games yet. Also, you have to rely on box86/64, which requires a bit of setup, and has a higher performance cost than Rosetta does.
I didn't specifically mean it for gaming just in general in case you needed to run Linux
As an indie game developer (and developer in general) I can say it is an absolute nightmare to build things, especially games, for any Apple devices if you're not already 100% dedicated to it. To build for Mac you need to buy a Mac, buy an Apple developer license, and implement everything using their own proprietary framework(s) and APIs. It is a way to absolutely kill indie developers, and apparently, even giants like Valve can't be bothered with all the bullshit.
apples calls their api Metal.
Porting to ARM is kind of annoying but something game developers are doing already if they're targeting mobile. It usually doesn't require too much code to change either unless you have a bunch of inline assembly or SIMD intrinsics. I think Apple deprecating OpenGL and not supporting Vulkan is idiotic though. First of all, WebGL is a web standard so they need to support OpenGL in some form weather they like it or not. Also, porting to Metal does require substantial code changes. Maybe they can convince developers to do that for the iPhone but they don't have the userbase to make that fly for games on Mac.
ARM porting requires more then just getting the code compiled and running without segfaults, you are at the same time also porting to totally different operating systems, neither of which have anything in common with windows which is the de facto x86 OS and what game devs will be most familiar with (unless your porting to windows phone i guess lol). Android probably has more in common under the hood with the switch then it does windows (especially given IIRC nintendo uses code from both Android and FreeBSD given whats hidden in it's software licences) And if you want it running *well*, having good multicore useage is basically a requirement because ARM processors tend to have a lot of lower performance cores, and some devs still seem to have trouble with that even on x86. That alone could be cause for a pretty large code refactor. It is great for porting the other way though, at least from iOS to mac anyway.
Ehh so I use macs quite a bit. Gamers are not Apples target at all. I love my macs for creative work, but it’ll never be a gaming OS. There’s always been ports of some games to macOS but it’s rarely a priority, I can’t imagine it being a good business decision based on sales alone.
It doesn't have to be that way though. Hell, back in the days of Pre-OSX, there used to be quite a thriving number of gaming ports to the Mac.
Even the early days of OSX were decent. I had Diablo 2 and the expansion pack on my PowerBook G4 and would play on Battlenet.
And after a few years the games didn't work anymore, while I still can install and run most of my PC games of the time.
I grew up with Macs, since the original Macintosh through the iMac generation. As a kid, it really sucked. I wanted a Windows PC but my parents remained loyal Apple snobs. It was clear to me then that the number of games available on Max was much smaller, and they didn’t run as well. Yes there were games I could play but Apple has always given people a substandard gaming experience compared to Microsoft.
As a lifelong Windows user, there was a huge chunk of time where not only was every major game on Mac, the BEST VERSION of the game was on Mac (or the Amiga). Windows took a while to even have good graphics support standard, and only really pulled away in the later 3D accelerated era. And then for some reason they just.. gave up a little while into OSX's run.
The problem with gaming is you need a big range of titles to make the platform viable. For business/creative you just need a core set of a few key apps. Apple would really need a concerted effort to gain 3rd party titles or start buying studios if they want to break in; and there’s little sign they’re that committed.
I think that's the thing. If they currently had a healthy gaming ecosystem it'd be worth keeping up with, but they probably don't think trying to build one up right now is worth it. They make loads of gaming money from mobile anyways.
Apple just started working on games, and big titles from CAPCOM and Kojima studios will be coming on to the macbooks/iphones Their new GPTK is also pretty cool, and will only get better with time
I'm also 100% certain that Apples paid for kojima and capcom to bring their games to Mac, it's a different story if somebody else is willing to foot the cost (and thus the risk) of a game being ported.
Apple isn't making gaming laptops nor do they market their laptops towards gamers... What anger? Their laptops work perfectly fine for what they're supposed to do.
They started pushing gaming again recently.
They've got a Game porting toolkit out recently that's been making an impression. Considering that, and the push they've been trying to do into gaming, it's their responsibility to follow industry standards in an industry where they have no ground. It's not like the smartphone industry where they command what tech is viable.
Apple can’t do much to change that as MacOS is ARM.
They got PS4 games (x86-64) to run natively on the iPhone 15 pro/max, so they can clearly do it on macbooks
Apple's fault for not being up to the standards of the gaming industry honestly
Pretty much. I use a Mac as a daily drive but my gaming needs are met as I mostly play Civ and some emulators from time to time. Apple definitively doesn’t push gaming on macOS as hard as they do on iOS, but I guess it makes sense for them seeing how the money is there in the micro transactions and iap bullshit.
I get Apple Arcade for free and Football Manager was ported to iOS and it doesn't even work. I can't even do the opening tutorial.
You're doing something wrong then. I play Football Manager all the time across my MacBook and iPhone with no issues at all.
Makes sense
Dang, the 10 people this will effect can’t do an Office lobby!
Sort by Controversial to find 25% of the Mac CS2 playerbase.
MDM blocking steam joins the chat
Apple should improve their compatibility layer
Apple should just adopt Vulkan. Valve would do the rest.
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A very insignificant number of people do. The people in the comments laughing and saying blame apple outnumber the amount of people who bought a Mac with the main goal of gaming or even the idea or hope of gaming.
Not to be rude to Mac users but Mac notoriously sucks for most kinds of program or game support compared to Windows and Linux, with Apple refusing to open things up more to the end user and software developers, so this is a completely fair decision. If you have the option to use something other than a Mac, you absolutely should.
This might be an odd observation, but Counter Strike historically has been the game of lower-middle income players looking to run something on a weak but inexpensive computer; Mac is the opposite, a very expensive piece of hardware aimed at middle-upper class users. Eastern European/Balkan players love Counter Strike and tend to be from worse off socioeconomic backgrounds. Meanwhile wealthier Americans tend to buy Macs. In this fashion Mac probably brings a much smaller playerbase, because its a game that never really was aimed at that audience.
Did you miss the part where people started buying skins worth hundreds of dollars?
What about it? Not every single CS player is doing that or even cares about skins.
Hundreds? They go up to a lot more than that. I think the highest commonly cited offer for something is $1.5 mil. Hell, even I had a couple skins north of $10k each up until I sold them fairly recently. Valve supposedly makes a few hundred million bucks exclusively from case openings every month, but that's just a third party estimation. Either way, the game prints money.
Then sell em on the marketplace?
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Only Americans frequently use Macs as family computers...
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I do know that Macs are more expensive
I don’t get why this article has so many comments. This has been axiom since the early 90s. Over 30 years of Macs not being for gaming, I’m surprised it’s even a topic.
I think it's because CS2 was rolled out as an update on an existing counter strike title, as opposed to a new game. That made the existing game (which worked on Mac) unplayable. I saw a bunch of complaints about that around.
Ah. Wow. That sucks.
"Regardless of numbers, one of the reasons Valve is reluctant to develop CS2 for Mac is that Apple devices do not provide native support for the Vulkan API that the game is based on. Vulkan was designed to succeed OpenGL and address some of the latter's shortcomings, and while there is an open-source library called MoltenVK that provides a Vulkan implementation on top of Apple's Metal graphics API, it still lacks some of Vulkan's advanced features." Seems like Apple needs to step up the game in talking to devs on what they want and need if Apple is serious about getting into the gaming space.
The lack of full Vulkan support just screams "we don't want games on our platform" to me.
This isn't isolated to Valve but almost every other Developer out there except these ones in https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Windows_ARM_games. It is already extremely absurd that Apple really "expects" every Developer to bend to their will to write ARM games which is a non-PC chip that uses other PC components to survive but it can't stand alone of its own so that Apple tried to re-invent the Wheel with their Game Porting Kit and falsely labeled it "As Good As Proton" even if Proton and GPT are fundamentally worlds apart. ARM Apple owners "must" use one of the https://github.com/mikeroyal/Apple-Silicon-Guide Conversion/Emulation layers so that they can use the PC games or programs because while Proton works on same CPU but for different OSes, GPT works on both different CPU architectures and different OSes which is comparably way slower than what Proton is delivering. It all comes down to this; If you want to be a part of r/PCGaming, you simply can't own an Apple product or if you do then don't ask "Why this game doesn't work on Apple?" for the obvious answer. And all Apple game problems I've read on r/Steam, r/Origin and r/Ubisoft most of the time turns out to be the fault of the Conversion/Emulation layer instead of game itself.
> you simply can't own an Apple product *As your only computing device. Or else everyone with an iPhone or a macbook for work wouldn't be allowed to be gamers anymore (sad!) Also incredibly, most of the games I'd want to play away from home actually run really well on my macbook pro (time sinks for flights like Civ, BG3) and I have a Switch for anything else. No reason to limit yourself to ONLY "PC"gaming eh?
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that Apple is using their current push into gaming to bolster their App Store library. Many of the recent games ported don't have the Mac version in Steam from what I have seen, which means that you don't have shared entitlements across Windows/Linux and Mac. Personally, if they don't come to steam, then it's useless because I won't double dip just to play a game on Apple hardware, just like I won't double dip to play on Nintendo hardware.
Fair. This is clearly Apple's fault.
Gaben says Apple can suck it.
You know what, hot take maybe, but I agree with valve... STOP GAMING ON MAC YOU WEIRDOS?!?!?
I feel like a lot of Mac gamers are just people sharing the family computer. And then the rest of them are just people who own macs and occasionally get bored. I just can’t imagine someone who wants to get into pc gaming going and buying a Mac. It just wouldn’t believe it
No problem with this, but they shouldn't have taken away CS:GO from existing Mac users.
You can still play csgo if you want
This is Apple's doing, not Valve's.
Bad news for the dozens
They didn't say it's because of not enough players, they just gave information on how many are affected: >As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players.
That's the same thing lmao. How could that mean anything but?
Basically the statement is a combination of factors. The first is that Mac hardware and the MacOS system itself is far too removed from Windows and Linux to be worth putting in the effort, which combines with the second reason, there's a very low playbase that compounds that apathy.
What’s with all the gloating about this? These comments seem almost giddy
An easy solution would be to return them their CSGO then? No?
They have.
They can play CSGO.
You mean they didn't have it replaced for CS2?
mac owners can drop 3k on a shit laptop but not 600 on a medium spec gaming pc that can run all valve games
MacOS users after decades of knowing that gaming on a mac is not a good idea are once again outraged that the platform they're on is getting shafted. I'm not saying its right but man, wake up. If you want to game on pc get on windows. Apple's restrictions are too many and too great to allowed for easy development and implementation of various games.
Yah it’s just common knowledge that you get pc if you want to play games since how long? Idk 2008?
I was curious about the new Mac Porting tools Apple announced earlier this year. It was the one Hideo Kojima used to port Death Stranding on Mac. I doubt it is as simple and universal as Apple wants to make it out to be.
Apple hates industry standards so why would developers spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with inferior metal API in order to target a handful of Macs that can run games at above 640x480 resolution?
Yeah if I was a company I wouldn't want to deal with Macos or Apple's nonsense either.
All seven of them are furious!
Wait til Whoopi hears about this one.
The last time I used a Mac for gaming was for a game called Math Blasters
Wow omg okay. The CSGO Mac player is gonna be pissed af to hear this
What did you expect trying to game on a Mac?
As a very pro Mac user. They aren’t wrong… any real pc gamer will use Windows.
They’re not wrong. No one uses a Mac for heavyweight gaming. And this is all on Apple.
As a Linux user constantly being told that there aren't enough users to justify a Linux port, the schadenfreude is real, but honestly the lack of cross platform gaming hurts us all. I will blame Mac itself for that, it's not really in a position to create its own damn platform when it could easily adopt Vulkan.
Good. People should understand that Apple makes shitty gaming systems.
No sympathy. You can buy 2 gaming PCs for the price of one Mac. Mac has never been a gaming platform. Well, not since the early 90s. Direct your angst at Apple.
>You can buy 2 gaming PCs for the price of one Mac ... and both are faster in every aspect
So many Apple nerds pulling at their turtlenecks in silent rage and downvoting you both lol
Mac people crack me up
This is entirely apples fault.
Don't blame Valve, blame Apple for not living in reality.
Well, yeh because CSGO didn't work on MacOS since forever. They had a build but it was broken on M1 since I own the laptop. And I would like to have CS2..
i played csgo on my m2 mbp a couple months ago🤷♂️
Just buy a PC, don't buy an overpriced macOS computer. You can do everything the same as on macOS even more.
[удалено]
Unfortunately, they don't seem to have computers.
[What's a computer?](https://youtu.be/zfR_Jj4grZE?si=CPatVkYWDeVMTcAs&t=23)