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[Victor Omega]

mod edit: this really didn't need splitting out from the original topic it was posted in:

INSIDE APPLE'S MASSIVE PUSH TO TRANSFORM THE MAC INTO A GAMING PARADISE

Great article on Apple's history with gaming, and their recent slow/stealth approach to taking market share and brining gamers into the Apple ecosystem. For those of you who haven't been paying attention: this is Microsoft's real competition. Apple is attempting to give consumers yet another...

www.neogaf.com

UltimaKilo brought up an interesting thread about an article stating Apple's organic(meaning without intent, due to their new silicon) move towards AAA PC gaming.

Inside Apple's Massive Push to Transform the Mac Into a Gaming Paradise

In an interview with Apple product marketing managers Leland Martin, Doug Brooks, and Gordon Keppel, we go deep on how Apple is transforming the Mac into a respectable AAA video games platform that can compete with PCs and consoles.

www.inverse.com

I keep emphasize how much exclusive games are worth now more than ever.

Like a open wound I apply pressure on this topic but many of you are numb to it.

Apple is a victim of it own success.

(Take the gaming fanboy hat off for one sec)

What you must understand is Apple is not pursuing gaming like PlayStation or Nintendo, them being more pure to the industry. Apple is pursuing power: Proprietary, self sustainable, exclusive, power. Apple sees gaming as a opportunity for power. That power is software.

Apple finding power in gaming DOES NOT lead to Apple themselves pursuing exclusive games, it leads to the industry, developers, and publishers wanting to be exclusive to them!

(Hover the brand loyalty hat over your head, quickly discard it)

This isn't an assumption, we see this play out on the mobile market, apps exclusive to iOS over android, iOS apps being the mainly supported over it's andriod or Microsoft store equivalent.

Apply that to AAA PC games and you have Apple App store competing with Steam.

PC gaming has the freedom of not worrying. We can play everything. But an Apple Mac with capable power could cause developers to favor Mac over PC.

(Prediction) A Power move from Apple would be a Gaming engine to rival Unreal for high end fidelity. Power. Software. Exclusive.

This is what Microsoft fails to see with Xbox. PlayStation and Nintendo are not bothered by this. In fact, Apple would make a better 3rd gaming platform than Xbox because they understand how important exclusive content is.

Not an if, when.

 

[Fafalada]

(Prediction) A Power move from Apple would be a Gaming engine to rival Unreal for high end fidelity. Power. Software. Exclusive.

Ppl grossly underestimate what such software costs to make, let alone upkeep. Its far worse than your game budgets, when you're positioning it as middleware, and basically no hope of recouping costs, as evidenced by loss making in past 15 years among all of the big players.

Sure Apple can afford it, but big tech isn't exactly known for burning money on purpose, especially Apple.

 

[cartman414]

iOS is more dev friendly than Android and its morass of kernel/screen size variations. Bit of a non-example there.

 

[IFireflyl]

 

[balls of snow]

Good. We need a shakeup thats not cloud based competitors. If Apple is bringing their silicon to the table, everyone will need to react.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

INSIDE APPLE'S MASSIVE PUSH TO TRANSFORM THE MAC INTO A GAMING PARADISE

Great article on Apple's history with gaming, and their recent slow/stealth approach to taking market share and brining gamers into the Apple ecosystem. For those of you who haven't been paying attention: this is Microsoft's real competition. Apple is attempting to give consumers yet another...

www.neogaf.com

Why did you create a new thread instead of just posting your reply in the existing one?

 

[twilo99]

Good. We need a shakeup thats not cloud based competitors. If Apple is bringing their silicon to the table, everyone will need to react.

There is nothing to react with.. their silicon is a few generation ahead of the competition

 

[YuLY]

Dude, I'm from non-western Europe. I dont know a single person irl that has a Mac device. Windows based PC gaming will be fine, lol.

 

[Ribi]

If people think pc gaming is expensive I can't wait to see how they'll afford Mac gaming. But knowing apple sheep they'll do mental gymnastics to make the purchase

 

[tommib]

I wish we could see a shakeup in dismantling Windows as the gamer OS and leave DirectX in the past. Will probably come from Valve quicker than Apple. SteamOS and the Deck is a minor shift.

 

[YuLY]

I wish we could see a shakeup in dismantling Windows as the gamer OS and leave DirectX in the past. Will probably come from Valve quicker than Apple. SteamOS and the Deck is a minor shift.

Why, so the past 30 years of gaming library to become unplayable? with the way things are looking with the woke shit push I'd rather depend on older games be playable than some new trash like insomniac's spider-cuck 3. There is no going back, PC gaming is Windows based.

 

[Topher]

Like a open wound I apply pressure on this topic but many of you are numb to it.

I like my open wounds to be numb, thank you very much.

 

[tommib]

Why, so the past 30 years of gaming library to become unplayable? with the way things are looking with the woke shit push I'd rather depend on older games be playable than some new trash like insomniac's spider-cuck 3. There is no going back, PC gaming is Windows based.

Isn’t Proton and the Game Porting Toolkit the future for non-Windows hardware to be able to run those games? Why would you want them closed to one system?

It’s refreshing to see other players in the PC gaming space.

 

[Topher]

Isn’t Proton and the Game Porting Toolkit the future for non-Windows hardware to be able to run those games? Why would you want them closed to one system?

It’s refreshing to see other players in the PC gaming space.

Exactly. I've got three systems in the PC gaming realm and only one of them is Windows. The other two are Linux. Windows based games becoming viable options on other operating systems has been a dream for many for decades. Personally I'm all for Microsoft's desktop monopoly being challenged whether it comes from Apple, Steam Deck, Linux, whatever.

 

[pauljeremiah]

If Apple wants to transform the Mac into a gaming paradise, let me play all the old games I have on Steam. There is nothing worse than looking at a Steam library of about 600 games and then clicking on the Apple icon to see which ones work on my Mac, and it's about 35. I want to play Portal and Team Fortress 2 on my MacBook Air M1, but I can't >_<

 

[Torrent of Pork]

Apple can keep it's overpriced garbage where it belongs, in the hands of people who have more money than sense.

 

[Krappadizzle]

Organic Push to triple A gaming. With no A, AA, or AAA games under the belt.....


Astroturf much?

 

[IllegalLemon]

Apple can afford it, so it ain't really a problem to them. They have the software and api's with Metal & the hardware with the Apple Silicon. At least they are not that lazy to take a Qualcomm reference design, mess with the clocks and call it a semi custom design like Microsoft does with the surface line and their socs. Apple has a fully custom piece of silicon they've already began putting it to good use. They have the tools, they have the tech, they have the funds... Now all they is need are devs willing to get familiar with their api's and they've basically completed the cycle. They possess the both the means and the knowledge to make it happen.

 

[T4keD0wN]

Apple finding power in gaming DOES NOT lead to Apple themselves pursuing exclusive games, it leads to the industry, developers, and publishers wanting to be exclusive to them!

(Prediction) A Power move from Apple would be a Gaming engine to rival Unreal for high end fidelity. Power. Software. Exclusive.

But an Apple Mac with capable power could cause developers to favor Mac over PC.

We had very capable Macs for a long time, there are like 2 AAA studios that bothered to support it.

PlayStation and Nintendo are not bothered by this.

Yeah, they shouldnt be bothered by a Stadia level threat that will at best outlive it by 5 weeks.

 

[Topher]

Organic Push to triple A gaming. With no A, AA, or AAA games under the belt.....


Astroturf much?

Why do they need games "under the belt"? They can do the same thing Steam Deck is doing with Proton.

 

[Krappadizzle]

Why do they need games "under the belt"? They can do the same thing Steam Deck is doing with Proton.

You mean Steam.. Created by Valve with a bunch of AAA games under their belt they made organically over a number of years and then leveraged that into a platform?

It's not even in the same ballpark. Both are at different ends of the pendulum.

edit: I should say, they don't need anything under the belt to be a player in the market, they certainly have the resources. But the title and the article are coming across way more as astroturfing than actually trying to discuss something.

 

[Astray]

The big challenge for apple isn't making porting easy, it's to build a gaming audience that would buy AAA games on their platform ahead of a competitors'.

It's not an easy task, but it's also not impossible, Apple can also take a much longer road to it than Microsoft can because they have trained their audience to expect premium pricing. So they don't have to lose money on devices to grow that market.

 

[Topher]

You mean Steam.. With a bunch of AAA games under their belt they made organically over a number of years and then leveraged that into a platform?

It's not even in the same ballpark. Both are at different ends of the pendulum.

No, I mean Proton. It translates DirectX into Vulcan so Windows games will run on Linux with very little effort on the part of developers.

Steam Deck has a massive library of Windows games running on Linux because of Proton. This is what tommib was referring to with the Game Porting Toolkit.

 

[Topher]

The big challenge for apple isn't making porting easy, it's to build a gaming audience that would buy AAA games on their platform ahead of a competitors'.

It's not an easy task, but it's also not impossible, Apple can also take a much longer road to it than Microsoft can because they have trained their audience to expect premium pricing. So they don't have to lose money on devices to grow that market.

Yeah, they have a massive power/price disadvantage currently. Very few are going to pay Apple's prices to get lower performance in games. That's where they are now.

 

[NickFire]

If Apple bought an existing console platform or created its own they would have an immediate and significant audience.

 

[Thaedolus]

Let’s just say as a PC gamer for 34+ years and as an iOS fan, I’m not really worried about or interested in what Apple is doing in the gaming space.

 

[darrylgorn]

With Apple silicon, Macs finally have the performance to compete with PCs. Now, they just need the AAA games.

 

[tommib]

The big challenge for apple isn't making porting easy, it's to build a gaming audience that would buy AAA games on their platform ahead of a competitors'.

It's not an easy task, but it's also not impossible, Apple can also take a much longer road to it than Microsoft can because they have trained their audience to expect premium pricing. So they don't have to lose money on devices to grow that market.

There’s some high profile games this year running natively on M chips. We just have no idea how much they’re selling:

‎Resident Evil 4

‎Survival is just the beginning. Six years have passed since the biological disaster in Raccoon City. Agent Leon S. Kennedy, one of the survivors of the incident, has been sent to rescue the president's kidnapped daughter. He tracks her to a secluded European village, where there is something...

apps.apple.com

‎Lies of P

‎You are a puppet created by Geppetto who’s caught in a web of lies with unimaginable monsters and untrustworthy figures standing between you and the events that have befallen the world of Lies of P. You are awakened by a mysterious voice that guides you through the plagued city of Krat - a...

apps.apple.com

Baldur's Gate 3 Now Available on Mac

Popular new roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 3 is available to play on the Mac starting today. The title can be downloaded through the Steam...

www.macrumors.com

 

[bitbydeath]

If people think pc gaming is expensive I can't wait to see how they'll afford Mac gaming. But knowing apple sheep they'll do mental gymnastics to make the purchase

Quality vs Cost, the new war, coming soon!

 

[KungFucius]

If people think pc gaming is expensive I can't wait to see how they'll afford Mac gaming. But knowing apple sheep they'll do mental gymnastics to make the purchase

No shit. It is moronic to think people will migrate to Apple for gaming. Many, if not most, of high end PC gamers enjoy building their rigs as part of their gaming hobby. Apple doesn't do that. They just sell $65,000 workstations, $1000 monitor stands and started the horribly anti consumer trend of not putting in an SD slot so they could force people to pay 100s of dollars for a useful amount of storage. You have to be an extreme fanboy to get past that bullshit and worship them. They are worse than anything Microsoft could ever be because they were founded by and run by the worst cunt executives. FFS they lock a video chat app to their fucking phones so their customers cannot use it with half of their friends and family. You can't be any shittier to your fans than that.

 

[ChuckeRearmed]

But Apple hasn't done much yet no?

A Power move from Apple would be a Gaming engine to rival Unreal for high end fidelity. Power. Software. Exclusive.

And the developers for it will just...grow on the trees or something? The power of Unreal is not the graphics or software. But the sheer amount of developers who work with it or learn it.

 

[Astray]

Yeah, they have a massive power/price disadvantage currently. Very few are going to pay Apple's prices to get lower performance in games. That's where they are now.

It's the opposite imo.

They can afford to grow users over a much longer timespan without loss-leading strategies (which Sony and Microsoft are forced to do atm), and they can do it without compromising power (which Nintendo does), they have a spread of capable devices that Microsoft has to be envying. Their chips drive an insane power draw vs computation capability ratio (delivering capable AAA gaming performances on an iPhone is fucking insane and creates a value proposition that consoles/PC might actually struggle against).

All they really have to do is start taking concrete steps!

There’s some high profile games this year running natively on M chips. We just have no idea how much they’re selling:

‎Resident Evil 4

‎Survival is just the beginning. Six years have passed since the biological disaster in Raccoon City. Agent Leon S. Kennedy, one of the survivors of the incident, has been sent to rescue the president's kidnapped daughter. He tracks her to a secluded European village, where there is something...

apps.apple.com

‎Lies of P

‎You are a puppet created by Geppetto who’s caught in a web of lies with unimaginable monsters and untrustworthy figures standing between you and the events that have befallen the world of Lies of P. You are awakened by a mysterious voice that guides you through the plagued city of Krat - a...

apps.apple.com

Baldur's Gate 3 Now Available on Mac

Popular new roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 3 is available to play on the Mac starting today. The title can be downloaded through the Steam...

www.macrumors.com

This is what I'm talking about, they need to build an audience so publishers start supporting them more with more intent, but that can be surprisingly easy for them, look how much attention they managed to get AppleTV+ in such a short time. Not to mention the extremely high-quality productions they already launched by now (Severance is amazing and a must-watch).

 

[RoboFu]

Apple doesn’t do anything to pc gaming. It just gved another option.

What kind take is this?

 

[RickMasters]

between their pricing and planned limited shelf life of their products…… I don’t think it would be the best of roses some of you think it would be. Apple would have you buy a new console every three years and they would tell you to forget about backwards compatible games as they push you to buy the next iteration…… anybody who has ever done creative work in a mac and invested in hardware for a max will know what I mean. I have a few max specific audio interfaces that became bricks when I got my new Mac Pro….. they can all still wok on any of my PCs though.


If apple makes a console, look forward to paying that apple tax on it… my mac pro costs me just over 11k….. but I use mine for work alongside my PCs. Who’s gonna pay half that for a decent gaming rig? I don’t see it…… but then again they got tablets and phones….. maybe that’s where apples gaming fortunes ultimately will be.



So that’s your options for gaming with apple in a nutshell…… high priced towers, portless laptops, and tablets…… are Enthusiast PC gamers who build their own…. Or console gamers interested in this options? I doubt it.

Unless apple make a games console and buy a tonne of studios I don’t see them attracting console gamers. If they do that then it’s basically a war between apple and MS which sees Sony priced out of the game and outbid by two competing giants… they will struggle if ms and Apple engage in acquisition wars. and Nintendo, probably struggling with two giants on the field….how much more niche can they make their hardware experiences?


And if apple don’t make cheaper towers they are not gonna attract PC gamers anyway. Maybe the laptop guys…. But the price of a MacBook versus a ROG or a razer laptop? Who’s gonna bite? And how much of your steam library or your emulators will work on a mac?

 

[StereoVsn]

iOS is more dev friendly than Android and its morass of kernel/screen size variations. Bit of a non-example there.

It also has less piracy vs Android. However considering the types of games are on iOS App Store (and Android) I don’t see AAA games coming to the the platform unless they get converted to F2P crap.

 

[Topher]

It's the opposite imo.

They can afford to grow users over a much longer timespan without loss-leading strategies (which Sony and Microsoft are forced to do atm), and they can do it without compromising power (which Nintendo does), they have a spread of capable devices that Microsoft has to be envying. Their chips drive an insane power draw vs computation capability ratio (delivering capable AAA gaming performances on an iPhone is fucking insane and creates a value proposition that consoles/PC might actually struggle against).

All they really have to do is start taking concrete steps!

Eh....if we were doing a price/frame analysis then that's where the problems really start to surface for Apple. The concrete steps would require to find ways to make that ratio more palatable for gamers whose expectations currently are low cost consoles/PCs or higher performing gaming rigs. Apple currently doesn't have an answer for either.

 

[StereoVsn]

There’s some high profile games this year running natively on M chips. We just have no idea how much they’re selling:

‎Resident Evil 4

‎Survival is just the beginning. Six years have passed since the biological disaster in Raccoon City. Agent Leon S. Kennedy, one of the survivors of the incident, has been sent to rescue the president's kidnapped daughter. He tracks her to a secluded European village, where there is something...

apps.apple.com

‎Lies of P

‎You are a puppet created by Geppetto who’s caught in a web of lies with unimaginable monsters and untrustworthy figures standing between you and the events that have befallen the world of Lies of P. You are awakened by a mysterious voice that guides you through the plagued city of Krat - a...

apps.apple.com

Baldur's Gate 3 Now Available on Mac

Popular new roleplaying game Baldur's Gate 3 is available to play on the Mac starting today. The title can be downloaded through the Steam...

www.macrumors.com

I could run BG3 better on a $1500 Windows Desktop (or maybe even laptop) vs $2,500 MBPro. Source - me with a desktop and MBPro.

Unless Apple decides to drop some cheaper M3 based hardware wide adoption is not happening.

And good luck running BG3 on fanless MBAir with 8GB of RAM (most common configuration), not to mention its 8CPU/10GPU cores.

15” version of that with 16GB/1TB storage still runs $1800, 12/18 MBPro will run $2300 + depending on screen size.

Great hardware overall but not so much for gaming. Apple would need to release a decent gaming style Mac Mini with proper cooling and M3 12-14 CPU and higher GPU core count for under 2K.

Oh, and don’t forget that unless you go for M3 Max memory bandwidth is gimped to 100gb/150gb. Even “base” Max is at 300gb/s bandwidth.

 

[Fbh]

Apple benefited from being a major player in the smartphone marked basically from the beginning, which means they've always had a substantial market share which they've managed to grow into a position of dominance (specially in the US).
If iOS gets exclusive games without there being some sort of financial agreement with the devs, I can only image it's because they've decided that the revenue they get from Android isn't worth having to develop and support a version for it.

Windows isn't Android though, and in terms of gaming it has always been the dominant OS with hundreds of millions of active users.
I don't see a scenario where any major AAA developers decided to forgo Windows to make MAC exclusive games without there being some sort of financial incentive from Apple. It would requiere Apple to make Mac such a dominant OS in the gaming space that devs decided that focusing all their effort on MAC is worth passing on potentially millions of sales on PC.

 

[Astray]

Eh....if we were doing a price/frame analysis then that's where the problems really start to surface for Apple. The concrete steps would require to find ways to make that ratio more palatable for gamers whose expectations currently are low cost consoles/PCs or higher performing gaming rigs. Apple currently doesn't have an answer for either.

That's what I'm saying tho.

Apple has no reason to NEED to price its machines @ $500, they already have an existing audience that is already paying $700-800 for their devices, so if they turn those people into more avid gamers, they can just keep making them pay the regular Apple fees, still come out in profit, and give their machines some serious marketing as gaming machines (same as how they market their hardware as productivity or media consumption devices).

They are already a very prolific seller of hardware on their terms, you likely won't need to buy a dedicated Apple console because their games will simply run on your iPhone 16 or Mac Mini or whatever. All they really need is some exclusives and peripherals to facilitate gaming on their devices without giving away revenue to be taken by Microsoft or Sony.

Apple is poised to be an extremely powerful player in the hardcore gaming market because they did the hardware spread beforehand! I guarantee you that Sony/Nintendo etc won't know what hit them. Hell, if things go their way, even Steam might have to sweat.

 

[Topher]

That's what I'm saying tho.

Apple has no reason to NEED to price its machines @ $500, they already have an existing audience that is already paying $700-800 for their devices, so if they turn those people into more avid gamers, they can just keep making them pay the regular Apple fees, still come out in profit, and give their machines some serious marketing as gaming machines (same as how they market their hardware as productivity or media consumption devices).

They are already a very prolific seller of hardware on their terms, you likely won't need to buy a dedicated Apple console because their games will simply run on your iPhone 16 or Mac Mini or whatever. All they really need is some exclusives and peripherals to facilitate gaming on their devices without giving away revenue to be taken by Microsoft or Sony.

Apple is poised to be an extremely powerful player in the hardcore gaming market because they did the hardware spread beforehand! I guarantee you that Sony/Nintendo etc won't know what hit them. Hell, if things go their way, even Steam might have to sweat.

That's quite a prediction. I don't agree with it, but......we will see.

 

[Hudo]

Maybe, in a motherfucking big twist of irony, it will be Apple causing Nvidia to stop being retards with their pricing...

 

[Panajev2001a]

Ppl grossly underestimate what such software costs to make, let alone upkeep. Its far worse than your game budgets, when you're positioning it as middleware, and basically no hope of recouping costs, as evidenced by loss making in past 15 years among all of the big players.

Sure Apple can afford it, but big tech isn't exactly known for burning money on purpose, especially Apple.

Very true, but think about the satisfaction of removing control from developers . That is worth a lot of Apple (wink wink VisionOS rendering wink wink… joking, but eeeeh… not joking ).

 

[ReBurn]

I don't get the hand-wringing over Apple. They're never going to make a push to be the top player in gaming or try to push out purpose-built gaming PC's. At best they're going to stick to the "and our devices are also good at games" positioning their showcases have highlighted.

 

[Panajev2001a]

That's what I'm saying tho.

Apple has no reason to NEED to price its machines @ $500, they already have an existing audience that is already paying $700-800 for their devices, so if they turn those people into more avid gamers, they can just keep making them pay the regular Apple fees, still come out in profit, and give their machines some serious marketing as gaming machines (same as how they market their hardware as productivity or media consumption devices).

They are already a very prolific seller of hardware on their terms, you likely won't need to buy a dedicated Apple console because their games will simply run on your iPhone 16 or Mac Mini or whatever. All they really need is some exclusives and peripherals to facilitate gaming on their devices without giving away revenue to be taken by Microsoft or Sony.

Apple is poised to be an extremely powerful player in the hardcore gaming market because they did the hardware spread beforehand! I guarantee you that Sony/Nintendo etc won't know what hit them. Hell, if things go their way, even Steam might have to sweat.

Still not sure why people have a hard on for Apple in the gaming sector. They do not have affordable strong HW like PlayStation and Xbox consoles (and to an extent Nintendo ones too), they do not enjoy supporting software modding (PC and Steam Deck) and modular hardware is just not a thing (all of you, pick up a Mac and try to change the base specs in the shop, see how much they charge for stuff haha)…

If there is a company that would deploy something like a system wide Denuvo-like solution that is Apple…

 

[TGO]

I find it funny the OP told people to take their fanboy hat off.

 

[diffusionx]

If Apple bought an existing console platform or created its own they would have an immediate and significant audience.

their console platform is AppleTV, and the advantage of that is that many of the games you can play on iPad, iPhone, Mac, all seamlessly.

 

[yurinka]

Apple is a victim of it own success.

(Take the gaming fanboy hat off for one sec)

What you must understand is Apple is not pursuing gaming like PlayStation or Nintendo, them being more pure to the industry. Apple is pursuing power: Proprietary, self sustainable, exclusive, power. Apple sees gaming as a opportunity for power. That power is software.

You are the one who needs to remove the fanboy hat. Apple's phones and computers are underpowered and overpriced compared to their competition.

Their gaming efforts in consoles and computers always were a big failure. One of the reasons being the lack of exclusive games and 3P support.

Apple finding power in gaming DOES NOT lead to Apple themselves pursuing exclusive games, it leads to the industry, developers, and publishers wanting to be exclusive to them!

(Hover the brand loyalty hat over your head, quickly discard it)

The gaming industry won't make exclusive games unless they are paid for them by the platform holder. Unless the platform offers them a way bigger userbase than the competition (case of PC or in consoles PS).

This isn't an assumption, we see this play out on the mobile market, apps exclusive to iOS over android, iOS apps being the mainly supported over it's andriod or Microsoft store equivalent.

Apple pays the 3rd parties who are in Apple Arcade and kept as timed exclusive. They don't do it for free.

Apply that to AAA PC games and you have Apple App store competing with Steam.

Apple doesn't have the gamer userbase, game catalog or 3P support of the AAA industry. So can't compete against Steam.

What Apple could do would be to consider their mobile gaming and AAA gaming as a single crossbuy and crossplay single PC+mobile platform.

To release these AAA games both in Mac, iPhone and iPad being seamless for both players and devs and to release some kind of splittable gamepad to use it joycons but with decent button size, analogs and ergonomy to be attached to the side of any phone or tablet. And to make some seamless way to connect ipads and iphones to a tv or monitor, maybe wirelessly or with a dock.

Plus adapt their store to make a dedicated store for games that use gamepads.

(Prediction) A Power move from Apple would be a Gaming engine to rival Unreal for high end fidelity. Power. Software. Exclusive.

Apple doesn't have the time, knowledge, manpower or interest to make an engine to rival Unreal Engine or Unity. Instead they should ease Unreal, Unity, Godot, Game Maker etc. engines and devs to develop, test and release games for their devices minimizing the related efforts, headaches and costs.

Devs want to continue using the engines they use, won't leave them just to use an Apple one that only will work on Apple devices.

This is what Microsoft fails to see with Xbox. PlayStation and Nintendo are not bothered by this.

I'd say the main reason MS fails is because the lack of enough very appealing exclusives. And because you don't need their console to play their first party games, which you can get day one on PC and without even buying them because they are included day one in a game sub.

 

[Magic Carpet]

If apple makes a console, look forward to paying that apple tax on it… my mac pro costs me just over 11k….. but I use mine for work alongside my PCs. Who’s gonna pay half that for a decent gaming rig? I don’t see it…… but then again they got tablets and phones….. maybe that’s where apples gaming fortunes ultimately will be.

Honest questing but how long does apple support your Mac Pro? Even if a new mac comes out next year how long till your mac is no longer supported?
I don't have a mac but I do have an iphone and an Ipad and they are supported for many years. Longer than anything android supports.

I don't think constant yearly hardware refreshes would pose and issue in the apple 'ecosystem'. Assuming apple dosn't abandon older macs.

 

[Del_X]

I have both a 2023 MBP (36GB RAM, M3 Max) and a 4090 gaming PC. My Mac is for business when I travel and a handful of compatible steam games. Apple has to release a $500-700 "Apple TV" with M3 level hardware to get an install base wide enough to see a serious inflow of AAA.

I could see MSFT adding game pass to mac since they're putting work into ARM for windows, though.

 

[SNG32]

I feel it’s a little too late for apple in terms of triple AAA gaming with there products. PC gaming has too many variables and you can always cut price and performance in comparison to apple products. Apple would have to invest in its own gaming studios for that to happen and it’s too late for that. Playstation and Nintendo along with Steam dominate that landscape especially when you consider third party developers. Basically Apple would have to moneyhat like a muthafucker snatching up third party exclusive content especially for triple A. Best they can do at this point is exclusive content for there mobile division since it wouldn’t be as costly.