Macs Can Game. But Apple Can’t. 

I game on my Mac all the time. The closed lid of my Macbook Pro is the purfect surface to plonk my Switch onto.

None of this would’ve been possible without both the Valve and the Linux community.

This is the best breakdown on this subject in a single video. I think you're right, that the management doesn't realize what the issue actually is. It's not about getting game devs to port things at this point. It's proving that the Mac is a stable ecosystem for games. A good first step would be to have some sort of translation layer for 32bit libraries, since a lot of games specifically have that. Libraries having backwards compatibility would go a long way in building trust. I didn't say re-building, because Apple has never had that trust the same way Microsoft did. Not to mention, it would go a long way in making things that are currently - "this will never work again on Mac" - and fixing it. I, and a lot of other developers I know, stay in the Windows environment because it's stable. And I don't mean like, "oh Windows doesn't crash." I mean, Windows doesn't fundmentally *change* its internals. Shit, we bitch when Microsoft changes a function in .NET *slightly.* What I appreciate about MacOS is that the desktop doesn't change. I love that it's the same thing it's been since OSX, really, with new things added on. I don't like that Windows' UI has changed. I *do* like that .NET 3.0 still works on Windows 11. I *do* like that old sound libraries from 1998 still work on Windows 11, if you tinker enough (granted that's an extreme use case.) My apps don't randomly break from OS to OS version. Microsoft takes great care not to break userspace. With MacOS, the guts have changed so much that I was excited to find out midis still worked natively. 32 bit libraries are gone. Apple's frameworks are far behind everyone else's in some ways. Swift is hidden behind some obscure wall that you have to go somewhere other than Apple to find good documentation on it. Their graphic APIs are not well documented, etc, etc. I *remember* the PowerPC era. Games came out for Windows and Mac at a pretty even tilt during this era. Anything you could play on Windows, you could play on the PowerPC in MacOS. Now you can't even play shit from the PowerPC era on a modern Mac, and you're probably better off trying to find a source port or running a GOG version through a translation layer. Apple switching architectures didn't initially destroy that trust, but god damn if it didn't add to it. And Apple has fundamentally always been at odds with game devs, because game development as a rule of thumb doesn't really "advance" in the same way other programming disciplines do. Apple loves to leave old stacks behind. Game devs will stick on a specific version of a tool that they're using and never move away from it if they don't have to, most times, because it works for their creative flow. It's the same thing with musicians, but Apple has less control over their toolsets. The best Mac gamers can hope for here is that Apple gets their head out of their ass on this particular subject, and works on a tool to translate these older programs to run on modern MacOS. That alone would incentivize a lot of game developers to take a second look at MacOS. And the best bet there is to create a translation layer that makes it easy for Devs to target. They also need to develop this as a *stable* framework, that even if it's the 1.0 of the framework, will still work on their OS in 10 years. Which Apple has *never* guaranteed. And is what is currently shooting them in the foot. I think another way Apple could potentially fix this would be with their universal packaging system, in that, each App is it's own "environment." Therefore the App never breaks as long as a Mac can read the package. As long as the hardware instruction sets are there, it could fix it. Similar to how Flatpaks/AppImages/Snaps run in Linux. There would never be a worry for me, as a dev, that my app is going to randomly break, and I'm going to have people screaming at me and opening tickets. Either way, this was a great video. Thank you. One day, I hope I'll be able to daily drive a Mac and *not* have to regularly switch to Windows for various things. But. Today is not that day.

I have had a Mac as my main gaming computer from about 2007 to 2017. I have used a Mac since 1997. I think my 2010 Mac Pro, with GTX1080, 32 GB RAM, upgraded X5690 CPU and PCIe SSDs still runs more Mac games than a modern Apple silicon Mac. Nearly my entire Steam Library runs on my 2010 Mac. In OSX. A few more things like GTA5 run in bootcamp. But since Metal, dropping 32bit and moving to ARM Apple gaming has been horrible. I moved to Windows in 2021. After more than a decade, I have given up on Mac gaming.

This is so true. Apple's commitment to gaming has been extremely halfhearted and spotty. They keep announcing these new "Gaming on Mac" things but then they ignore them for years

I was this close to buying the M1 MacBook Pro. Gaming was the reason I changed my mind and never looked back. I wonder how many people felt the same, and whether Apple would ever manage to win us over.

Valve's effort with proton perfectly shows the level of commitment needed to get a foothold in the gaming space. Steam Deck would have been a flop if Proton was there for developers to implement like the porting toolkit

Finally, an awesome take on the whole macOS Gaming marketing gibberish and fiasko!

They also need to optimize their OS for gaming a little bit, recently in the beta they added the option to disable mouse acceleration (finally) but there's still work to do, for example If you have 2 monitors, the game's cursor goes thru the borders of the main screen and appears for a bit in your secondary screen and gets kinda stuck in the 2nd screen.

minor thing about the performance data you presented at around the 2 and a half minute mark, it seems that these results would look even worse on the M series chips if you showed data that would more easily show frametime data i.e. stutters. The continuous graphs you showed running ingame seem to be stuttering quite often (according to the graphs)

I certainly agree with the premise that apple needs to figure out a more cohesive business strategy for getting gaming on the Mac to become a real, viable business for developers to get into. That said, that still can’t happen without proper tools to get their titles running on ARM, which they just started providing. It looks like they’ve done a great job of creating tools that highlight the compute performance of their laptops, but they need to have a better performance angle for their desktops and needs a better solution for distributing games on their platform.

I was gaming on a mac. In fact, paradoxically, because when I was gaming on a mac, I haven't played the best games worth playing yet, I had an absolute blast gaming on a mac as some of those games did work on it, mostly but not exclusively in windows over bootcamp. Now I have a vastly superior as a gaming machine PC (inferior in every other way), and I have only comparable quality of an experience overall, simply because the games left to play aren't as good in departments other than graphics, resolutions, and frames per second. It's a pure coincidence created by the timing of the events, however. Point being, one, there are amazing games out there for everyone, whether they value competition and the game game part of the game, or they value experiences, stories, character development, world building, role playing, escapes from reality, playing with friends and social and/or para-social relationships, whether they are fast or slow, have a couch and a TV, or a laptop, or a desk with a computer on it - everyone will find something deeply enjoyable in gaming space, if they try. And two, games just working is far more important, than anything else like ultra-high FPS extravaganza (albeit it is nice), or retina resolutions (for text - YES, for games - not as important), etc. Apple needs to bring games to the mac. Macs make very good computers. They are being handicapped by being unable to deliver soon to be leading form of entertainment. And that's a damn shame.

I remember the good old days when AAA games came to the Mac thanks to the Quake III and Unreal T engines… And also when Tomb Raider II appeared… Hope this times will come back. Thanks for your work!

There already was something like a golden age for Mac gaming, that's from when Steam came to Mac until Apple cut 32bit support. It must be really frustrating for any game dev to work for Mac, not to mention users. On the PC I can still run the same games that would've been through 3 "cuts" by Apple already, nobody's going to update their 10 year old game every time Apple feels the itch to cut out legacy support again. For a short time in the mid 2010s I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened Steam on Mac and saw how many of the games I had bought on the PC side actually were ready to install in a native Mac version - for a short time I even believed one could actually live with just a Mac as a gaming platform. But with 32bit support at least 2/3 of my game library disappeared, that was probably the worse cut than the Apple Silicon switch which just sorted out a few more of the already meager library. You just can't rely on Apple for long time support, nor on game studios to play this stupid game and regulary re-port their games again and again. Also, every other platform than Steam would stand no chance on the Mac, Apple's App Store won't do it - but whether Apple would leave that yummy 30% cut to Valve - doubtful. Although, I doubt Valve's long-term support too under these conditions, I noticed even staples of games on Mac like the Sims aren't available for MacOS on Steam anymore, you have to get that elsewhere. Last but not least there's the issue of the high entry price for adequate gaming hardware, adequate for gaming meaning no base model, and the biggest issue everyone has with Apple is surely their upgrade prices for +8GB RAM or whatever, not to mention SSD space when today's games easily need >100GB.

My M2 Air serves as the main work machine especially since I'm highly mobile on weekdays. Did little gaming on my M2 Air (X-Plane 12 and Subnautica) which runs nowhere near 60 fps but still works very well. The rest games especially AAA titles still play on a dedicated gaming PC.

It does't help that Apple tends to refuse to support cross-platform APIs like Vulkan to make development easier and insist on everyone using only their own APIs and tools. (Microsoft isn't super great in that regard either with e.g directx but they have the marked share for it)

All the things you said need to happen and I don't even own a Mac. It would increase the knowledge and experience of developers with ARM based systems, and prove that you can have a balance of upper mid range gaming with the gains in power efficiency. With greater market competition and accessibility everyone wins. Of course, this will never happens because the executives, at best, play one game ever, so I think that is why they continue the cycle of "look, here is a game!"

Apple can't generate money from games unless its from Apple Arcade, that's why they are so passive. They are not the traditional PC vendor that needs to make better components for gamers so they can sale year after year.

love your channel, could you do a "how i setup my mac , the settings and customization and shortcuts' video. keep up the awesome content.

Imagine Apple adding Vulkan API support besides their Metal..

One of the worlds most popular games; Minecraft, works incredibly well on Mac and I’ve made a name for myself testing and proving that. Buts a crying shame so much on the Macs new potential is not being capitalised. I really hope they build a dedicated department will stuffed with cash to make this a different story

I keep beating on the Mac gaming drum with a similar take, Apple can’t take a field of dreams approach. The porting toolkit is fascinating as it’s so close yet so far. Not supporting Vulkan native or creating at the very least a hyper optimized translation layer like MoltenVK is just rough.

If you ever make a second version of this video, could you tell us how the Mac Minis do? They look like a possible contender but I don’t know how to measure them.

I actually first really started to (mentally) shift to being a PC gamer after playing games on my MacBook Pro back in 2010 and on. Which is wild because it wasn't good at gaming and the game I played most was TF2. Which I used the trackpad for for an embarrassingly long time. But it happened to be a perfect storm of other factors that got me to start changing my thinking when it came to having. Which ended up being very frustrating because of how limited Macs were and are when it comes to gaming. But I still ran with it for a decade because that's what I had to work with. I do think there's a bit of an issue with Mac gaming as well where the current state of AAA games is to release half-baked and buggy, which I'm sure Apple doesn't like to see on their platform, as well as being horribly unoptimized and inefficient with regards to storage requirements, which is an area that Macs fall down in (in that it's not user upgradable outside of external storage and buying more on the first purchase is extra expensive.) So we'll see if Macs every truly catch up without something like cloud gaming becoming the norm

Valve tried the "If you build it they will follow it" approach with the Steam Machines running Linux and it flopped hard so they made Proton to get the games working on Linux.

Game devs must also be looking at the loyalty of Mac Users and seeing that as a good thing. If you create a game as a service for a Mac you'll have a very long lasting user base because Apple's customers are so so loyal and keep buying their products.

This is exactly why I love my 2019 Mac Pro which I purchased in 2022 seeing I only wanted Intel which goes along with it just like a normal PC. I did the same with my 2012 Mac Pro holding out for the announcement of trash can and the day of the announcement I bought the 2012 Mac Pro knowing it was the older version at that point. Call me old school but I needed and still do PCIe and back then had TBs of 10K rpm spinning rust which is now converted into solid state. Not to mention my CPU was the 8 core on the 2019 which is now a 16 core plus ram I keep adding when I see fit. I like macs but with a PC style approach. Prob why I’ve gravitated to the Mac Pro. Main use is music creation, also photo and video editor of the family. Hence the big library of photos, videos, documents of at least 12 people other then me. Then there’s my music samples, plug-ins, programs and the rest. That’s the macOS side of my needs. I also either have PC just for gaming (currently do) but with my 5,1 I used a SSD using the second sata port for another DVD drive which was my boot camp drive. Back then nvidia and apple played ball so I always had either the current x80 or last gens x80. My last one that I used in the 5,1 was a GTX980. Plus I would flash the firmware to support boot screen support and nvidia used to release drivers fairly regularly. First AMD card I ever owned was a RX580 when I decided to upgrade to Mojave as it was a better option then the GTX680 that was supported. Haven’t done bootcamp yet on the 7,1 yet as my PC still plenty full. Plus I prefer nvidia. Though would like to run a bunch of test on it with the W5700x Pro I have and my RTX4090. Haven’t been able to find anyone who has tried it yet. I will prob get rid of 4090 and use AMDs latest so it will at lease boot if installed into macOS Anyway I do believe this new model is a stop gap, they must of ran out of time or something similar.

This is the biggest reason I miss being able to install windows via bootcamp on my new M2 Max MBP. I have a gaming desktop, but I did like to go to friends places and play games together without lugging my big desktop around, bootcamp allowed me to do that. Sure I had to dial back settings and whatnot but I could get the game to run comfortably and have a fun time. I would really like for gaming to be taken seriously on the mac especially now that Apple Silicon has the much much better graphics than the intel integrated that preceded it on many macs prior.

So true! Max need a coherent strategy for gaming. A decent launcher or shop would be a great place to start.

the m2 air lets you game whenever wherever without care, and that's a pretty strong niche to hold. you're right on with the strategy criticisms, and it'd be a shame for this kind of product to exist but ignore that potential. and it's entirely silent while it does it, some might not care, but the lower the ambient noise floor, the more I'm gonna enjoy anything I'm trying to focus on

I actually play CS-GO on my MacBook and love how smoothly it works. I wish there could be more games, but I think time will tell what might happen.

i used to play rome total war and KOTOR on mac and the fact they could be played on laptop used for work was the best thing ever

They also need to create partnerships with the lead engine developers, such as Epic and Unity. Integrate the porting tool kit into these engines and get the ball rolling.

It brings me great pain to watch you use the built in keyboard and track pad on the Macbooks. I really hope developers get in on this because as much as I love my gaming PC, I hate windows so much. I used a 2012 21" iMac to play games for over 5 years before I switched to PC. I miss macOS so much.

I am playing NMS on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro. After figuring out a “rumble” controller bug, it is awesome. And battery life is still great while gaming.

I was a Mac gamer for many years. I remember in college playing counter strike, global offensive, guild wars 2, and League of Legends. The 2012 15-in MacBook pro was my go-to until the computer died.

If apple invested in gaming I would probably sell my PC next day I'm not even joking. Apple just needs to actually take it serious.

I've been playing Diablo IV with max settings and 30-60fps on my M1X MBP. Works perfectly, I thought there was no way I could get it to work after Apple Silicon. Really hope people get their act together and change the culture so gamers who happen to have a Mac have real options.

At least they go in the right directions with the game porting tool and a lot of games are already fairly playable, but you are right , they need to invest more in partnership , but I would not underestimate the fact that they can make it .

Gamed on my Intel MacBook Air for the approximately 20 minutes that eGPUs were supported/championed. Also played a decent amount of older Valve games on Steam on the Mac before 32-bit software support was kicked to the curb.

A while back, Apple had a serious hardware failure. While creating the new graphics engine for the M2, they hit a thermal dead end. So, Apple released a whole bunch of engineers to go do something else at another company, then they joined Blender and sent the remaining engineers to "go and help" get metal working with Blender. Eventually, they did fix the heat problem, but by that time the 3nm line at TSMC was busy making things that go boom. So, Apple pushed forward with their half step M2 (M2 processor + M1 graphics) for this year. If things work out and there is a TSMC next year, the M3 should be the gaming platform we have always wanted. Of course, TSMC sending engineers to the Arizona desert to "help" build their plant does not make one feel optimistic.

In your frame rate per dollar, to compare apples to, well, Apples, you should be comparing the $500 M2 Mac Mini (which should perform better than the Air) or better yet, the M2 Pro Mac Mini.

2:18 lol your slides say "Macbok Air" XD

Funny how RU-vid videos always have good timing to relatable events, just started trying out PCSX2 and AetherSX2 on my Mac yesterday, and it runs very well!

I’ve recently gotten into playing games on my Intel Mac, but only really old games (Portal, Half Life, The Witcher), and that’s all I would want out of a proper gaming on Mac experience. Anything new and AAA, I would only want to play on my console.

I always spent most of my free time programming, not gaming. So I bought a Mac like I always did. And then I started playing a couple of games on the Switch, and now I’m suuuper-jealous of all the emulators and modding tools on Windows. Because modding combines programming-ish and games. But no. Never thought I’d regret not getting a Windows machine.

Does Apple have a VP of gaming? Perhaps that would be a role to create to tie all the things together and make Apple Arcade a Steam-competitor. I'd love to game on my Mac, but gaming on my PC is just such a more smooth experience.

7:40. Made me 😂. Really great video, man. Everyone at Apple should see it. Did not realize the gaming performance gap was as bad as that. Wow. And this is the year 2023?? Crazy.

Supporting Vulkan and having better first party support for C++ would be a HUGE boost for Apple gaming. Having to port your code from C++ to Swift and even Vulkan games to Metal is a major hurdle to serious gaming. The other alternative is to encourage iOS games grow up and incentivize making them platform compatible with the Mac on launch. Ultimately I think the base model macs, and iOS/iPadOS, need to be powerful enough to play games at 1080p 60Hz for any major gaming support. Because the base models, and iOS devices, are going to be what the average college student or normie user buys. The best strategy probably will be to leverage iOS development to bring more games to the Mac. But Apple has to stop getting in pissing contests with companies like Epic, the most cutting edge game engine developer on the planet! Dropping Fortnite before the release of unreal engine 5 support was just dumb. You can’t claim to be interested in gaming and alienate Epic Games on your platform.

If Apple embraced gaming, they'd probably have 40% of the market, instead of around 15% of it.

I do game on my M2 MacBook Pro via a mix of native Apple Silicon games, Rosetta 2 (which is surprisingly good), Parallels desktop / Windows 11 arm VM and Crossover (... Elite Dangerous). I am even dual booting Mac OS Ventura and Sonoma developer beta (later via an external TB3 SSD as games and VMs consume a lot of space on my internal 2TB SSD storage), so I can play around with the Game Porting Tool. The TB3 SSD is as fast as my internal SSD! Having done all this, it is still much more straightforward to install and run games on my Steam Deck!

Baldur’s Gate 3 on an M1 Pro plays very decently and it’s an awesome game with 100’s of hours of content - I highly recommend the early access and the full release is coming within a few months.

Just watched the first 27 seconds so far. Resident Evil Village IS NOT a old game. Its actually a top of the line AAA game released just 1 year after its PC/Console release which is pretty amazing :D

Apple has no chance in the modern gaming ecosystem, their walled garden approach practically forces game devs to use unfamiliar tools, and APIs, if they want games, they need a partnership with unity or unreal, and they need to bring back openGL, as well as adding vulcan support, then, and only then will they have a chance.

Good video. Its crazy to think that there is an even more powerful GPU for the 2019 Mac Pro and someone used it to game at 6k.

The combined chip would of never worked to provide more performance because it is hard to highly parallelize task. The M1 Ultra just needed to be overclocked and sacrifice efficiency. Great video explaining the system problem.

The Mac of gaming already exists, it's called a PlayStation. It does precisely what Apple does for PCs. It's highly integrated, very easy to use, just works and has a bunch of desirable exclusives. As a bonus it just costs $500.

Omg I can finally play Minecraft at 60fps on a Mac 😂

I do recall setting up a network for playing Unreal Tournament on several different spec'd Macs back in the day. I did game a lot more on my iMac, but I haven't really bothered playing anything other than Starcraft II on my "newer" Apple kit.

I'm quite confused by the idea that the Bose QC45 (last updated in 2017) is still your gold standard in noise cancellation. There have been plenty of advances in ANC capabilities since then.

My first real exposure to the CoD franchise was playing the hell out of CoD 2 on my 2006 20” Intel iMac. Anything else was later played via boot camp and it’s been at least a decade since I even did that for many of the reasons mentioned in this video and finding that XBOX (One at the time) provided a much better experience.

this!!! i've been having this thought about how apple is half assed about their mac gaming but keep bringing top game developers to speak at their conference each year. the only reason i still use windows for my home pc is bc i game on my spare time

I tend to cast from consoles to my Mac (where possible, for Xboxes it's kinda jumping through hoops as they only seem to make it easy for iPad users), but if more games were available I'd probably use it for gaming on the go for a handful of games.

Use my maxed out 2020 27” iMac for gaming with bootcamp. It’s not the best experience, as a lot of the drivers are half baked, but it does the job well enough. It’s nice to have a single system that can fit both my needs. Though, even with potential future game support on macOS, once my iMac hits retirement I think I’m going to have to get a separate windows system for gaming. Many of my favorite legacy titles that were previously mac compatible still haven’t been updated for 64bit compatibility. Highly doubt they’ll be updated for apple silicon.

I bought my first Mac a couple f years ago (MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16 gb etc) after being a dedicated Windows guy for decades. I love the device and the OS. I am a gamer and have a MSI gaming laptop and a SteamDeck. Love them all. I would love to game better on my Mac. I use CrossOver when I can for those games that do not run under Rosetta with mostly good results, for those games that run under Crossover. I can use Parsec (hosted on my MSI laptop) on my MacOS to run games not supported with Crossover or able to run in Crossover and that don't display well on my SteamDeck (tiny text) when needed and if on a great wifi. When No Man's Sky came out running under Apple Silicon I downloaded it to my Mac on Steam (already owned the game for a couple of years) and it runs great. Now I can run it on my Mac and SteamDeck with the cross saves and I do it all the time. So the Mac has the ability to do wonderful things. Real games, not those in the App Store that want to keep selling you coins or what ever to pay and play but real games. But I may have a decision coming up very soon. Starfield releases next month. I suspect it will not run or not well on the SteamDeck initially if at all. My MSI gaming laptop I suspect will run it but I am not real confident it will be as great as I want. And I would bet real money it will not run under crossover at all. So, when it comes out I will buy it day one and install it on my MSI and we will see what we see. If it runs terrible, then I will pull the trigger on a new laptop. I would love to buy a new MacBook Pro with M2 Max with 32gb of memory and be done with it. But I suspect Starfield will not run under Rosetta and of course it will not be an Apple Silicon native game. So I may end up buying another PC gaming laptop for half the price of the Macbook I would want. Sad really, I would love the latest high end MacBook Pro as mentioned for all the other benefits it would give me but if I can't game on it with newer titles I just can't do it. If my existing MSI gamer runs it great then I can still wait things out and enjoy Starfield on my Mac via Parsec which maybe would be the best outcome for me at least. Just a few more weeks and I will know...

You also have things like DX/Vulkan APIs that are more mature than Metal API. Plus for PC you typically have access to DLSS or FSR or even XeSS that has a huge advantage over Apple's offerings.

I loved my MacBook Pro 14". Great enclosure, (seriously) great trackpad, fast internals, battery life was brilliant, silent, cool to the touch. Sadly, I had to replace it with a PC laptop for 3 reasons - it wasn't fit for my professional workloads (software engineering), had issues with external displays, and it couldn't play games. While MacOS is serviceable for development (about as good as Windows), I was faced with the prospect of needing to carry two computers while travelling. One for work, one for play. I looked at buying a SteamDeck or ROG Ally but instead decided to replace my MBP with a Dell Precision laptop that could do both. The Dell is not as nice as the MBP but it's 90% the way there. The trackpad feels 80% as good, the screen is 60hz which is noticeably choppy and the battery isn't as long lasting - but I now just need to carry the one computer. I can also run Linux to get the optimal software development experience and Steam for gaming (dual boot for a backup). I held out for the Asahi project, hoping that I could eventually use Linux on the MBP where Proton/FEX would enable gaming - but that's years away from being a reality. The games porting toolkit is just further proof that Apple aren't serious about gaming on MacOS. Apple is prioritising vendor lock in over the experience of their customers and the utility of their platform. I hope they change their attitude one day, but until then, I had to jump ship

Needed to hear this!

I did game a lot on my Macs… The 2012 15“ retina worked quite well in bootcamp and with the 2016 15“ I paired an eGPU (GTX 1080) that was great until 2021. Now I use a M1 Pro for work and have a 7950X + 4080 Workstation for CAD/FEM and gaming… I would love to game on my M-series macs, the hardware could do well….

How did you explain it so fluently? That's so good

I actually do game from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook. Running Cities Skylines at max. resolution with Anti Aliasing enabled running smoothly at highest settings is quite impressive to me especially given it's only an Intel binary running through Rosetta.

I agree with your overall argument - it really isn't a hardware or software issue. I expected to see a gaming oriented WWDC this year. That didn't happen. Not sure why? The AR/VR headset would have been a perfect opportunity. It may have something to do with the operation of the headset that or that Apple is betting that individual programers will come up with case uses for the headset. I think the developer program (which surprised me and may be a part of Apple's gaming plan) will help with a later event in the year. I am hypothesizing that we will see a gaming focus with either the iPhone event in September or a more broadly gaming event in October with a new M3 Mac or two. The iPhone/gaming event (whichever it is???) will come with Apple demonstrating new games, new ties to the gaming world (they may have bought a gaming company or two??) and an Apple TV ultra - with new type of chip with more memory and GPU processing - meant specifically for casual/more serious gamers. I believe this will have lidar gaming like the Microsoft Kinect allowing us to get off the couch and work out (fitness+) and game. Imagine being able to move your arms on the couch to raise the volume or change the channels. It will probably use the iPhone and/or iPad lidar camera to do this. If the TV ultra has its own camera, it will have a physical shutter to protect everyone's privacy. It will be a huge grab for the living room. Additionally, gamers will be able to do this with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Macs. It will contest with or possibly replace the Switch and be a grab for casual gamers and move partway into the Switch, Xbox, and PS world. Timing pre-Christmas holidays (could be good)!

Yeah Marathon and the Apple Logo puzzle were great gaming experiences on my 603e Mac. Literally the last time I gamed on a Mac.

I want something like an iPad mini and switch hybrid - thin, light and power efficient to play proper games - controller could be detachable or not - and you could then dock it with your tv for an Apple Tv experience with games

really great video well done, this rant has substance. Packed with fantastic insights with both research on past success and future speculation for success. both informative to viewers and a call to action for apple execs. Well done keep up the great work.

I sometimes wish apple pushed the compatibility of external gpus on the arm based macs, specially with the new 2023 mac pro having pcix16 slots. It also became a long standing issue that nvidia never did drivers for new gpus for apple and macs have to always stick to amd gpus

I do game on a Mac. Hell I am even "old enough user" to remember glorious days when Valve announced Steam for Mac at the Apple Keynote. However I am still skeptical about Mac gaming though I am trying to support it. Maybe, one day. We will see.

I do game on my MacBook Air m1, however only fairly simple and undemanding games like game dev tycoon or papers, please. It's a good experience, barring some problems with scaling on the 16:10 display in gdt. I also do like playing civ VI on my m2 Mac mini, which can get somewhat laggy in the end phase, but that's because I have a base model with 8 gb ram. Overall, not something I'd play AAA games on (I managed to play through the whole batman Arkham city), but for casual games it's fine

With the new iPhone 15 Pro and it’s A17 Pro chip, allowing for AAA games, it might open up to more games on the App Store for both the iPhone, Macs and even IPads

I love gaming on my MacBook Pro and it doesn’t bother me that that it’s all the older games because I just started getting into gaming

I finished Vampire Survivors on the M1 Mac Mini. Granted that is barely a game, but I loved that thing every second.

I own a gaming PC but I see the potential. With so few hardware configurations beyond RAM/Storage, developers can reach console level optimization in apple silicone.

I play FF14 on my M1 iMac. I used to play at 30 fps on Medium graphics until SE improved their official launcher and the fps shot up to 60 on high settings! So like you said the hardware performance is there!

The game porting toolkit was the best DOA announcement at WWDC.

I have the base M1 macbook pro 2020 13” and it runs shadow of the tomb raider fine at medium-high settings 900p solid 30 fps. Which on a 13” screen is super playable

My m1 pro 14 inch Mac is super cool and powerful work machine. I game on it. I played metro exodus, hitman 2016, terraria, no man's sky, modded Minecraft, morowind and some iOS games. Everything worked great.

thank you for bringing this into people's scope. I honestly wish apple and developers invest resources into mac gaming, as I've had enough with microsoft's bs OS and nvidia/AMD are going stupid on specs/prices right now. just bought my first mac as I stopped gaming and just develop stuff and watch movies, but i'd love to game on it.

When I was in college I played a few games on my MacBook Pro. Portal/Portal2, MW2, and most impressively Tomb Raider 2013. But this was just because that was the computer I had. The PS4 I got a little bit later did better.

So true, I completely agree with what you're saying, also when it comes to the low-priced Mac Mini M1 that I own. It runs games very well, which makes me believe there is definitely a market for it. It's puzzling that Apple can showcase other game companies promoting their games at WWDC but fail to provide a robust infrastructure platform that supports other titles as well. They are clearly missing the mark here, and it's evident to everyone

I kind of agree with you. When Steam came out for the Mac it was a amazing but time after time Mac OS would break some parts of it like getting rid of 32bit. I have at the time won’t work anymore with because of Mac OS only supporting 64bit.

I am debating getting a new Macbook to replace my older laptop. If a good library of games comes to Mac and works well, that gets me more use out of the computer and will make Apple even more money. Hopefully, they get their act together and start competing with Linux/Steam OS and Windows. Gaming is still growing and making tons of money that Apple would love to be making.

I play Guild Wars 2 on my M1 MacBook Air (8 GB) via CrossOver. Since DX12 it lags but anythings else... I LOVE my Mac. and GW2.

For non-PC steam gaming I play mix of cod mobile & AAA/indie via geforce now on a 2021 2TB iPad Pro 12.9” with RS1X grado’s with beautifulaudio mods, a magic keyboard & an x-box elite series 2 controller lol. I also assume ‘real’ will never happen but I’m not concerned. Granted I also have a PC mainly for my larger screen (32” curved) for tv & steam so I realize I’m not really the main focus. But as someone who did a bit of gaming on my mackbook in the late 2000s I really wish they would.

the trackpad gaming though😳

World of Warcraft has a native Apple silicon version. And the "porting kit" will probably create few Windows on ARM game versions so they can package it for Apple Silicon without penalty of Rosetta.

Bought an M1 MacBook Pro, rather than an Air, 20 months ago in the vain hope that I’d be able to make use of those extra graphics cores to play some of my games library in the future. I was kind of hoping that Microsoft would allow the ARM version of Windows 11 to be installed on Apple Silicon and Bootcamp would be a thing again, but it looks like that will never happen. As it is it, most of the best native Apple silicon ports are of older games that have had their source code released. I’m really glad that there’s a way to get Half-Life 2 and episodes running natively on Apple silicon through homebrew (whatever that is, I just followed the video tutorial to get it installed). In 4K on the MacBook screen, it looks amazing. There are native source ports of Doom 3, Jedi Outcast & Jedi Academy. The intel Mac version of Torchlight 2 seems to work pretty well on the M1 too. I’d definitely buy more games for Mac if there were native ports though. If I could run modern games on my laptop at reasonable frame rates, I’d stop considering getting a SteamDeck.

I've been playing Life is Strange 2 on my M1 Macbook 13". I thought I'd be able to run it at high settings but had to bump it down. I've been attempting games on my mac as a side hobby. You can tell it is breaking all of the sweat where my PC wouldn't at all. And it's the same with Hitman (2016) as well. The settings need to be bumped way down for it to handle it, but even then it struggled. Just from that it seemed to me that it's such a long way for them to go to being able to game comfortably like a PC.

I did game on my dad’s Macbook from 2008. I loved Call of Duty 2 and Modern Warfare; though MW played much better on his 2010 iMac. The graphics were incredible for the size and thickness of laptop. Back then i didn’t appreciate that, but now I can see how they’ve always been great machines for gaming, just lacking in games.

The funny thing is that if they were to just make porting most of these to Apple Arcade, and do a discounted price of the games they’re offering instead of msrp, they’d easily gain the market share they need for proper footing.

Kinda funny that on the phone side, their apps are the the ones get updated the quickest yet on the PC side, their gaming is so behind.