Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are:
1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine.
2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. So a 7 year period of support after inital build machine setup is expected, anything less is going to get your platform side lined.
3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan. Platforms with such low sales, like Stadia, might be support provided the platform owner pays porting costs.
4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
5. Horrible hardware. Supposing you've decided to ignore all the downsides, and the small upside still appeals to you. Now you have to tune your game to run on hardware which would put cheap Wal-Mart machines to the test. Apple's install base is almost all integrated older intel GPUs. If you do not support Metal, then you are forced to support these old intel integrated GPUs with bonus hacked up OpenGL drivers.
All points are ones I am speaking from experience on. We shipped TINY METAL on MacOS, the lack of cross build delayed the release. The horrible sales numbers meant carrying forward support was a net drag on the game. All further games I work on do not get MacOS ports for these reasons.
This is SO annoying. I can cross compile to Windows from GNU/Linux quite easily. In fact with Wine I can even get MSVC running. But Apple, even though they employ many of the Clang/LLVM developers, believes that you must use their OS to target any Apple product.
Your only reprieve outside of buying their extremely expensive hardware is using CI services like Travis or Github actions.
Even if you DO buy a lot of expensive hardware, it’s a giant pain in the ass. There are no good rackmount solutions and so we ended up with a room full of expensive “trashcan” macs and they were STILL the biggest drag on our build infra.
This has been an issue for decades. Twenty years ago I was doing grid/HPC computing at Sun and there were a lot of bioinformatics firms that used macs and wanted compute clusters of them. It was a huge problem even then.
> 4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
IMO their lack of support has less to do with hate and more that they just didn't find value in that demographic. No one is making money off gaming hardware. On the other hand Apple has put in a LOT of effort into iOS gaming. Steve Jobs himself had multiple games showcased in his keynotes.
Huh? I mean, surely nobody is making Apple-money from gaming hardware. But plenty of companies of various sizes are decently profitable and making money in this space.
Where does this nonesense come from? There's a whole market segment just catering to PC non-console games with companies manufacturing RGB lighted RAM, specialized motherboards and plenty of gaming periphelias. Even gaming laptop market is booming.
And that's even ignoring "tiny" companies like nVidia.
Jobs’ view always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they were a hardware company back when he made these decisions, but software sells the hardware in the market he was in.
This is the type of bullshit comment that makes me login and bother replying. Anyone in the industry that has needed to work with Apple knows their stance on games is inane. This is in spite of the fact that games make the lion’s share of revenue on their app store and they know it. This in spite of the fact that the majority of games on their iOS platform suck. Games is really not in their dna and boy does it show.
> everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories
Linux is very backwards compatible. I've run an OpenGL application I wrote 10+ years ago without any trouble and have run non 3D applications that were over 20 years old without a need to recompile. This is because the Linux kernel has a very stable ABI.
Unfortunatly, this isn't the case if you ship with dependencies on dynamic libraries but that's pretty easy to avoid. Static link everything and only dynamically depend on SDL or something.
You could also go the windows route and ship all the DLLs. This is what steam does under Linux, they ship their own Ubuntu 14.04
> Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories.
Out of curiosity, what exactly were your struggles with Linux/Android backwards compatibility? Considering how many apps I run still on my phone still use Gingerbread-era UIs, and how Linux executables from as far back as the mid-90's are supposed to be able to run on even the absolute latest kernel (Linus Torvalds having publicly chewed people out on the LKML for breaking said backwards-compatibility), it's surprising that these would somehow be classified as not having solid backwards compatibility.
The main thing that comes to mind with non-Android Linux is library versions, since those do occasionally break backwards compatibility, but this shouldn't matter too much if you're compiling static executables, or using some isolated runtime like the one Steam (IIRC) provides.
As a point of comparison here, World of Goo's Linux version came out in 2009, and it still works on my system (Slackware64-current) which - while not at the absolute most bleeding edge - is still using library and driver and kernel versions substantially more recent than most "LTS" distro releases.
* 3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan*
As a Mac user, I buy other hardware to play games on! Probably the only real Apple game platform is iOS. And even then I’m a bit more careful of what games I buy.
The only Mac gaming I do is with emulators like DOS Box. The market must be really tiny.
On the flip side, I have and maintain a Windows computer for the sole purpose of gaming. I hate it to the point where I can’t understand why anyone would voluntarily subject themselves to Windows other than sheer ignorance.
You can’t swap sound outputs while an application is running. Fullscreen Direct3D games can freeze in a way that obscures all other windows, including the Task Manager, preventing you from ever killing them. USB device power management is abysmal, and devices often just won’t wake up after sleep. The OS itself is a complete clusterfuck of half-new, half-old, half-ancient things like the Control Panel. Everything prompts constantly—usually with modal windows—for absolutely pointless decisions (and no I’m not talking about UAC).
This is before I even get to what awful citizens of the platform their developers are. Everyone wants to hijack the right-click menu. For all the complaints about the Mac App Store, the Windows Store is—as best I can tell—bordering 100% crapware with no way to find anything of reasonable quality. Everything’s UI seems to have been built with entirely custom components designed by a color-blind child who’s seen too many sci-fi movies.
To top it all off, I am continually just floored whenever I read Raymond Chen’s blog. He often has posts explaining why $thing works some unexpected way or has some sharp edge, and the answer is always because thirty years ago a team at Microsoft built something insane and convoluted (admittedly through the lens of someone watching today), it’s now baked in at the lowest levels of Windows, and it can’t be touched, changed, or removed because of their commitment to backward compatibility.
I struggle to find any redeeming qualities of Windows as a user.
I get that the Mac is a poor platform for gaming development. I really do. But goddamn would I kill for that to change, and for me to be able to run games on my Mac some day.
If Apple ever changes their mind, they could own this market though.
I have a 6 year old imac 5K. I don't game a lot but I always had a weak spot for x-plane. X-plane 11 came out shortly after I got this machine and I've been running it throughout. It has improved a lot over the years and they just released a beta with metal support. It's quite amazing that I can get decent performance with this version in 2020 that is better than what I got in 2015 with the same hardware. I run it with number of objects maxed out at a low resolution and mostly can keep the fps above 25-30, which is the minimum for an acceptable experience in a flightsim. The GPU is a still pretty decent AMD R9 M295X with 4GB ram.
However, my Steam library looks pretty depressing. As of Catalina, only a handful of games actually still work. I wasn't really playing most of them but I did spend money on this stuff at some point. I've actually been considering switching to Linux recently specifically because of Steam and having access to a bit wider selection of games. Apparently a lot of stuff works pretty well these days; certainly much more than what works on macs.
IMHO if Apple ever does a move on the gaming front, they have a good shot at domininating this market. If they can manage to mass market a good enough product, the numbers start adding up. That's why the IOS store is such a money maker. I've always been puzzled why they never made more of an effort to position the Apple TV as a gaming console. They tried, a little, but it never added up to much.
Apple making their now widely rumored move to their own CPU/GPU could unlock this. IMHO any VR/AR plans they may have are probably dependent on that. I doubt they'll make life easy for the likes of Steam to run in such an environment though. Apple has never liked middlemen.
Unfortunately due to the mobile architecture you can’t sync frames. This is true on the windows side too but there you can get a “gamer” laptop which has a desktop cpu and video architecture. We could only demo castar for example On a gamer laptop or a desktop. Even a cheap desktop worked great.
I’m a Mac user and develop on the Mac so you might think I’d bend over backwards to make an excuse, but...not possible in this area. Those gpus do render beautiful pictures and can do some cool gpgpu crunching, but aren’t appropriate for gaming.
It’s not necessarily about the hardware, but (for me at least) more to do with the OpenGL hacks I have to do to get reasonable cross platform support rolling.
Took about 2 days to take a win project to linux, that same win project took about 3 weeks to port to mac.
That was the first time I’d done it of course (to either mac or linux), but I just found the mac documentation to be severely lacking.
Also all macs are now stuck on OpenGL 4.1 forever, it may not matter much now, but it will show in future.
And yes I know Vulkan is a thing but I think that’ll take a while to fully be adopted by the games community.
But "decent" isn't really good enough for VR, where high refresh rates matter quite a bit.
Another factor in play might be that, if rumors are to be believed, future Macbooks will be shipping with ARM chips, with yet-to-be-determined CPU and Graphics performance. That might be a bridge too far for crossplatform projects who are already frustrated about having to maintain a Metal backend just for Mac.
Those GPUs are horribly underpowered for the screen they're driving. They would be fine on a 1920x1080 display, but on a Mac display the GPU barely squeezes stable 30fps on modern games... even in lowest settings.
Updates are planned, and more and more games get longer support periods. Still majority of games stop getting updates within a year.
Every game is different, but for every Subnautica with 5+ years of active development post initial sale you'll get a bunch of successful games and only marginal updates for 2 months.
For my next game, Railgrade, I am planning a couple years of updates, but even that will be dwarfed by the long tail years of continued sales after updates are done. I expect Railgrade to be on the market for 5+ years. For consoles it should be purchase-able for at least a decade until Nintendo shuts down the eShop. Then it should continue being playable for decades more.
At some point emulators will take over and my effort can keep bringing players joy for eons more. I am not interested in Apple's "expiring" model of art.
Games eventually stop getting updates. They're proprietaty software so they're always in danger of becoming incompatible with newer systems. This is true even on Windows: older games regularly fail to work on Windows 10 in my experience and many didn't recover after hunting down the missing DirectX stuff. It's gonna be ironic if Wine becomes the best way to play these games one day.
In a way, this is the whole point of the emulation community. Proprietary software was developed for really old systems and they don't work on modern computers. The old systems had to be emulated as virtual machines on top of which the old software could run.
Maybe for the first year or two, but many many games are pretty much untouched after that, even though there is a long tail of players still buying and playing them.
And yes, many expansions and additional content are usually data-driven, so it might not require a recompile.
Games are different, though. They don’t play as part of the ecosystem; they run full-screen and do their own input processing and use no system widgets or controls. They essentially take over the lowest level of hardware they can get access to, and in many ways once launched would be indistinguishable between the various platforms (quirks and rendering idiosyncrasies aside).
What things have have Macs had in terms on non-backwards compatibility? Genuinely curious here - don’t say 32 bit, they released the last desktop Mac OS that ran on 32bit hardware more than a decade ago.
(I’m not saying that I disagree with some of the other issues)
I started developing an iOS client for an API we use at work recently. Downloaded Xcode again, built a small POC Mac app and ran it. It wouldn't run because I am still on Mojave and the default settings are to build for 10.15. I was a little shocked/not surprised to get a "This application is not compatible with your software" type dialog from my own brand new code!
I really like a lot of the ideas that Apple implements, but the upgrade treadmill is notorious and not one of them.
How is using something like unreal engine not able to compile to all operating systems. I'm not a game developer so pardon my ignorance but can you not just run macOS on a VM from Windows to compile?
Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS and the complete build quality that has been slipping over the years. All Apple users know we're paying more for the hardware than machines preinstalled with windows.
Did Steve Jobs really dislike games? I assume he might have viewed them naively as a waste of time. Most people consider that assumption true and unless you consider them some type of therapy to unwind from the world but even then it can be argued there are healthier options for the majority of people that play games.
edit: ah yes, I get downvoted for writing an honest comment because that's HN crowd.
You cannot run macOS virtualized on anything but Apple hardware. It's against the Apple Terms of Service. Is it technically possible to do? Yes. However most companies will not do so because that's ground for getting sued, or having your developer licenses revoked.
For the same reason as macOS games must be build on Apple machines, iPhone and iPad applications must also be build on Apple hardware. There is an entire market of companies that rent out "server farms" of MacMini's in datacenters for this exact reason. It massively raises the cost and complexity of a modern development/integration system to have "special snowflakes".
As it comes to hardware, the problem is you can't get something "reasonable". You can build a $500 Windows compatible PC that's not half bad. You can stick a low in Nvidia RTX card in that (for a few hundred more) and get some really reasonable gaming performance out of it. However to get an RTX level gaming performance out of a mac... you're out however much it cost to buy the new MacPro... so let's call that $10k. Most normal people are not going to pay that.
Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent:
> Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of their own which was going to be a bad idea, then I'll personally port the Quake 3 stuff rather than working with a partner company on that. And we went through all that. All of our Apple ports have been successful - they've all made money - but it's marginal money, and we have worked with Aspyr usually on all the other ones after that, but I do think it kind of comes from the top.
> The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his shithead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer. It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it.
> There are people at Apple who want to support all this - and there's no roadblocks for us right now, we're going to support the Mac on Rage, we hope to get a version of Quake Live going up on the Mac there - but it's just that's not what the Mac platform's about, and I don't really expect that to change because it's a tough equation now that you've got everybody dual-booting their Macs and everything: why would you want to go to the extra trouble of [developing games for Mac]?
As far as I know it is against the terms of service to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, so you can't just run a macOS VM.
> Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS.
Is that not the same thing, effectively? For a given buying power, a player that chooses mac will have objectively poorer hardware.
Yes, there are a few capable rigs for Apple systems, but they are ludicrously expensive and thus provide a minuscule install base for your game, so it's basically not worth the effort for a triple-A studio. Less demanding games might be more viable, but it's still a lot of costs in porting, build infrastructure and publishing for very little return.
MacOS Vm's on any other platform other than Macs are disallowed by the EULA. And while you might or might not believe in EULA's, Apple's legal department certainly does and will prosecute commercial entities (for example, if you are trying to build and sell a game)
Re Steve Jobs on games, you can believe in your own skepticism, or you can hear it directly from John Carmack, the creator of DOOM, who tried to work with Steve Jobs to get a proper foundation for gaming on the Mac. He did not succeed.
Everyone's talking about the slower hardware. IMO the biggest hurdle to gaming is Mac OS's baked in mouse acceleration and whatever else makes 100% of mice feel absolutely terrible on a Mac. Even the magic mouse feels janky.
I followed a bunch of online guides to do everything I can to disable the acceleration and everything else, but for some reason when I try to play a game it still feels terrible. Even when the game has a high framerate the mouse never feels smooth.
Tried multiple MBPs. Multiple gaming mice from multiple manufacturers, etc.
Has anyone ever had any luck making a mouse feel as smooth as it does on Windows? If so, what did you do?
Downside is it's a one-shot sensitivity which can't be adjusted, owing to the hacky nature of it, which was semi-found-by-chance to boot. After lots of searching on threads, seems this is one of the only hacks that works, so doesn't seem to be much support from macOS on this stuff.
Used to have an app format of this so I didn't have to run the console command every time at login, but need to find an updated solution for Catalina.
That's disappointing - I've never used a Mac but the first thing I do on new Windows PCs is turn off "enhance pointer precision" (mouse acceleration) in control panel. It's awful for anything where you have to aim, I can't imagine gaming on a system with mouse acceleration that can't be disabled.
FPS games typically use raw input, which bypasses any acceleration settings in the OS. This works on both Windows and macOS, assuming the game is properly written. This is why I insist on keeping mouse acceleration enabled since it helps with everyday computing tasks and has no effect on at least the games I normally play.
Regarding the comment above, it is definitely possible there are subtle configuration differences that cause the described behavior (different acceleration curves, polling rate/DPI settings, display refresh rates, etc). FWIW, my “gaming” mouse works fine with my MBP, but it takes a moment to readjust to the different sensitivity and acceleration behavior.
Weird, I use a gaming mouse on macOS and never noticed any problem or jankiness, running at 1000 Hz polling rate. Sure, the acceleration curve is different that Windows' and I only game on Boot Camp, but it's never felt "wrong" to me for day to day usage.
What's sad is that once upon a time (back when macOS was called OS X, and when iMacs used PowerPC CPUs) the mouse acceleration was great, and the cursor buttery smooth, at least so I thought.
I really like a lot about MacOS but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to ever use it until 2014 so I wasn't able to experience that.
I'd get rid of my Windows computer in an instant if it wasn't for the poor support Mac has for gaming. Windows is fine but I enjoy the Mac workflow more.
This is definitely subjective. While you find mouse acceleration on Macs miserable, I find mouse acceleration on anything _but_ Macs miserable (looking at you especially, Linux/Mutter).
I'm mostly commenting on acceleration in gaming. The acceleration alone doesn't bother me for productivity. However, for gaming it doesn't matter what platform you are on acceleration sucks. Technically a subjective opinion but its pretty close to a consensus for anyone that plays 3d action games where you control the camera and/or your crosshairs with a mouse.
I remain skeptical of the long term viability of VR; I’m old enough to remember when 3D TVs and monitors were going to change the face of both TV and video games, and yet here we are.
I priced out VR recently and I was unimpressed with the price per value available, with most systems adding $500-$1,000 to my gaming system’s cost, and some requiring that I modify my room to work properly. And that’s not even accounting for the high cost of a VR capable gaming rig, if you don’t own one. This is a pretty steep financial and logistical hill to climb given the current set of titles available.
I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.
I have tried Beat Saber. I rented an Oculus Quest for a couple of weeks over Christmas. Several things, Beat Saber included, were really impressive at first, but the thrill quickly wore off. The kids quickly went back to playing their PS4 and Switch games, and never even mentioned the Quest after it was gone.
My basic take is that the technology is really impressive; I agree with proponents that the Quest finally nails it technically. However, I don't think it's enough better than other options to make it worth the significant drawbacks. Something being immersive is ultimately a function of the player experience, not the hardware. And as is demonstrated to me whenever I try to get the kids to turn off almost any game, non-VR hardware is definitely immersive.
If anything, facehugger VR seems less immersive, because the stuff is way less comfortable than other gaming hardware. The kid who loved rhythm games would play Beat Saber less than non-VR games because of neck discomfort and face irritation. Battery life was also lower than the Switch, and of course infinitely lower than the Playstation. Which also cut into immersion.
I did really appreciate the new 6-axis controllers; they were very cool, and gave a great sense of spatial freedom. But unfortunately, that freedom is a lie; my sense of immersion quickly ended every time I hit a virtual boundary. To successfully play Superhot, I found I had to continuously maintain two spatial frames of reference: VR and reality. So it ultimately felt less immersive to me than a console game, where I could just plop down on the couch and forget my body entirely.
I haven't played Beat Saber, but I remember Avatar. As beautiful as it was, it remained unique. All new films for the past decade have been released as 3D, but I cannot think of a single one other than Avatar that I would prefer watching in 3D over 2D. Is there reason to believe Beat Saber would not become VR's Avatar?
Since everyone's really going on about Beat Saber, I have to say out of all the games I've played on my Vive, the one that I had the most fun with and kept coming back to was SUPERHOT.
The entire concept of the game (time only progresses while you're moving) fits _so well_ with VR. It makes you feel like a complete badass as you're able to perform ninja-like feats of dexterity and dodge bullets all the while being a just challenging-enough puzzle and providing a decent workout.
Everything else I've played was either basically a tech demo or felt like our old games built within the limitations of VR (what really differentiates Beat Saber from DDR, Guitar Hero, etc?). SUPERHOT was one of the few games I played that really felt like a proper VR game.
I will proselytize Beat Saber until the day I die. I have played hundreds of hours of video games in 2020, which reflects the time spent since I was 8 playing Donkey Kong on the Super Nintendo. After writing this, I'm probably going to jump into some FF7R. In the morning, I'm going to log into Animal Crossing and do some chores around the island.
Beat Saber is the most fun game I have ever played. No qualifiers. No shifty language. Nothing else is even in the same order of magnitude as Beat Saber. I dare to even call it a video game, because very few other games even possess the language to compete with it. The combat in FF7R is visceral, but you're not actually swinging Cloud's sword. The loop in Animal Crossing is entrancing, but it doesn't become your entire world like when you put a headset on. Even other VR games, which have that language they can use to tell their gameplay, often feel like the VR experience is bolted onto something which could, and maybe should, be non-VR. You often fight with the game; the game transplants you into a world, not just on a screen, but every degree surrounding you, yet you're limited in how you move, you're limited in how the game allows you to interact, nothing feels natural, and you soon adapt your actions with what the game wants.
I am solidly in the camp that, honestly, VR will not become a household item like a game console is. Even with headsets priced about at the level of a game console, like the Rift, the platform has too many downfalls.
Startlingly few games work well in VR. Even an experience like Half Life Alyx, the pinnacle of VR technology, feels like a shell of a game like Half Life 2. Its different. It can't tell a strong story, because players don't generally spend more than 30-90 minutes in VR at a time. It can't really innovate in puzzle design, because movement and viewport control is so heavy that it becomes tiring if you ask the player to do too much. The mechanics feel incredible. No one enters HL:A for the first time, loads that pistol, and doesn't have this HUGE GRIN on their face. But, its also a novelty; it wears off far too quickly once you begin realizing how many fundamentally core things Valve had to sacrifice to make the game work at all.
Nearly every game in VR is, bluntly, a tech demo. The platform is still figuring out if it is viable. Of the top selling VR games on Steam, #7 is a sim game which models a hyper-realistic anime girl, allowing you to mess with her clothes in a predictable anime way, and #10 is Skyrim. Of course, HL:A and Beat Saber are #1 and #2, but roughly this state is where VR was six years ago. It hasn't really evolved, and I'm not convinced HL:A was the catalyst I think Valve is hoping it is.
But, maybe I'm wrong. I will say this: There is no price you can pay for a VR headset that does not make Beat Saber worth it (within your means, of course). It is that good. I have an Index ($1000); beyond spending an hour or two in as many games as I can, 100% of my time is spent in Beat Saber, and I do not regret the purchase. Everything else VR has to offer is just icing. But this, a platform, does not make.
Obviously I have not tried beat saber. If it’s that amazing, I wouldn’t be posting cynical takes on VR.
I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward ratio for that is just insane, and not in a good way.
Heck, even $500 for an entry level setup is a pretty dicey proposition, assuming my PC can lift it. $500 can buy me a lot of non-VR gaming satisfaction with effectively 0 risk.
I never heard anyone really passionately speak about the 3D experience. It was always marketing speech with movie-goers sometimes buying into the expectation. But after experiencing it, no one ever was really passionate about it. At most they would slightly prefer, and even so I think it was because the confounding factor that 3D sessions are also played in the largest screens and the best sound system.
But for VR? It is a niche, for sure, but I know a few people really enjoy it.
It can be a niche forever (like high end sound equipment) or it can grow into mainstream (like TV), I have no idea, but I doubt it will fade away.
Unfortunately, I don't think it can be a niche forever, assuming it's a gaming platform. As we see from game developers in this thread, a platform with a too-small audience is uneconomical. That's true even when the platforms are as similar as Windows and Mac. It'll be way more true given that VR is a very different experience.
Apparently Quest sales figures aren't public, but I see estimates that they sold a million units last year. Nintendo sold that many Switches last month. And the month before that. And the month before that. (And in December it was something like 5 million/month.)
However much niche users enjoy it, I have a hard time seeing how they'll sustain enough of a developer ecosystem to keep them entertained. High end sound equipment can draft off of every music player in the world for content. But good VR is very much VR-specific.
Have you tried the Quest? It's a gamechanger in my opinion for ease-of-use. Hardware isn't top of the line, but it's good enough for a great experience, and they are doing all sorts of fancy things with the existing headset via software that is wringing more mileage out of it (Oculus Link, Virtual Desktop, Hand Tracking, pass-through, etc).
Quite bullish that the next generation will be absolutely incredible. I bought an upgraded dev machine to try out VR dev because of the Quest -- it seems like it will be the next mass-computing interface.
I've been owning a VR headset (a htc vive) for more than a year, now, and I concur with other comments : it's something else, and I think the only reason it's not taking over is the high price tag for a setup.
That being said, I use my VR headset probably even less than my 3d printer. As mindblowing as it is when I put the headset on (and truly, it never gets old), I realized it's just not for me.
I usually play games on my sofa, with a steam controller and the screen on my wall through a projector. I always play turn by turn or low intensity games rather than fast-paced action games. I have my laptop on front of me on my coffee table, and constantly check my mailbox, rss feeds and many sources of news, on the laptop between playing two turns in the games or message with friends on my phone.
This is a funny thing, because I didn't realized that before I bought a VR headset : basically, I'm always multitasking during my leisure time, and you just can't do that in VR. Each time I think "hey, let's chill in No Man's Sky", my immediate reaction is "oh wait, but if I do that, I can do _only_ that", and I play a classic game instead.
Now, this is a very personal experience, maybe that won't be a problem for anyone else. But as far as I'm concerned, VR fullfills all its promises, and yet it's not for me.
EDIT : fun fact, the time when VR is really useful for me is during week-end during the day when I don't feel like working on a side project or learning a new thing. I can't use the projector with daylight, so in those cases I'll just put the VR headset on rather than closing shutters.
I think VR is for everyone, like any medium, it's just that you haven't found a game/app that makes you come back.
For me it's the multiplayer games that I like, more of my friends are getting VR headsets right now and I suspect that as more of them get into it the more we'll end up playing VR together.
The peak of 3D TVs was like 5-7 years ago, so you hardly need to be "old enough" to have experienced that. Pricing is the easiest hurdle for a new technology to get over. As long as there is a market fit and steady demand, VR will get affordable.
As the article alludes, lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option seems to be a pretty deadly aspect.
Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have.
Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.
lack of a build your own, flexible yet affordable desktop option
From Apple's perspective, that's a machine with razor-thin margins. Why would they want to sell that when all of their other products have enviable margins?
Moreover, such a machine would cannibalize their high-end Mac Pro sales. After all the money they spent to develop it, having your pro customers scoop up the thin margin gaming machines seems like a poor strategy.
As a gamer with a macbook pro. I just use shadow to play games over the cloud. Otherwise I would invest in a eGPU. So it's not like apple gamers are missing out if they want to game with good graphics.
The main reason is that Apple's pushing their own graphics API (Metal) rather than supporting the cross-platform Vulkan API. Apple also doesn't make any machines targeted for gaming use, and they haven't used NVidia graphics chips for quite a while and don't ship drivers for recent NVidia chips, so even Hackintosh users have trouble building a great Mac gaming system.
TBF, Apple’s Metal was developed before Bulkan while tackling the same problem, and for the NVidia chips, the reason on the bad relationship of NVidia/Apple is mostly on NVidia, right?
Metal is one hurdle, Apple has a weird habit of putting many small ones up in front of you for whatever reason it gets old after awhile and the sales aren't there to justify jumping over them most mac users who want to game don't seem to have issues just buying a console either so it's not like a large group of customers isn't being reached
iOS is an exception due to it's position in the market but I've been seeing less and less interest in mobile overtime too
Since after High Sierra (Mojave I think?), Apple eliminated the ability to use non-metal drivers on macOS wholesale. Nvidia’s drivers weren’t developed in Metal and there’s zero reason for them to do so (only way to use Nvidia is intentionally either as an addon to a Mac Pro or as an eGPU, which they don’t see a large market for it) and Apple has a long history of killing off support of something on their platforms, users be damned.
I just upgraded to Catalina and now almost none of my steam games work. Turns out they were compiled for 32 bit support, and 32bit support was removed in Catalina, basically destroying my gaming rig.
Sure there is: Design your game for the systems the majority of the users who will want to play it—after you’ve marketed it to them to them—will have.
Don’t start with system requirements first and make a game targeting that because you want to show everyone how elite a hacker you are.
If Sony didn’t require games achieve 60FPS at 1080p on PlayStation 4 before they’d allow them on the platform, most of the developers would be targeting PS 4 Pro because they want to show off. I expect that’s mostly the case anyway, and these developers have to be dragged by their corporate masters kicking and screaming back to baseline PS 4 support.
Readit News
1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine.
2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. So a 7 year period of support after inital build machine setup is expected, anything less is going to get your platform side lined.
3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. "What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!", nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan. Platforms with such low sales, like Stadia, might be support provided the platform owner pays porting costs.
4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
5. Horrible hardware. Supposing you've decided to ignore all the downsides, and the small upside still appeals to you. Now you have to tune your game to run on hardware which would put cheap Wal-Mart machines to the test. Apple's install base is almost all integrated older intel GPUs. If you do not support Metal, then you are forced to support these old intel integrated GPUs with bonus hacked up OpenGL drivers.
All points are ones I am speaking from experience on. We shipped TINY METAL on MacOS, the lack of cross build delayed the release. The horrible sales numbers meant carrying forward support was a net drag on the game. All further games I work on do not get MacOS ports for these reasons.
This is SO annoying. I can cross compile to Windows from GNU/Linux quite easily. In fact with Wine I can even get MSVC running. But Apple, even though they employ many of the Clang/LLVM developers, believes that you must use their OS to target any Apple product.
Your only reprieve outside of buying their extremely expensive hardware is using CI services like Travis or Github actions.
This has been an issue for decades. Twenty years ago I was doing grid/HPC computing at Sun and there were a lot of bioinformatics firms that used macs and wanted compute clusters of them. It was a huge problem even then.
> 4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
IMO their lack of support has less to do with hate and more that they just didn't find value in that demographic. No one is making money off gaming hardware. On the other hand Apple has put in a LOT of effort into iOS gaming. Steve Jobs himself had multiple games showcased in his keynotes.
Huh? I mean, surely nobody is making Apple-money from gaming hardware. But plenty of companies of various sizes are decently profitable and making money in this space.
Where does this nonesense come from? There's a whole market segment just catering to PC non-console games with companies manufacturing RGB lighted RAM, specialized motherboards and plenty of gaming periphelias. Even gaming laptop market is booming.
And that's even ignoring "tiny" companies like nVidia.
Some gaming keyboards full of fancy LEDs and software and stuff and military-grade whatever retail for the price of a small car.
Linux is very backwards compatible. I've run an OpenGL application I wrote 10+ years ago without any trouble and have run non 3D applications that were over 20 years old without a need to recompile. This is because the Linux kernel has a very stable ABI.
Unfortunatly, this isn't the case if you ship with dependencies on dynamic libraries but that's pretty easy to avoid. Static link everything and only dynamically depend on SDL or something.
You could also go the windows route and ship all the DLLs. This is what steam does under Linux, they ship their own Ubuntu 14.04
Out of curiosity, what exactly were your struggles with Linux/Android backwards compatibility? Considering how many apps I run still on my phone still use Gingerbread-era UIs, and how Linux executables from as far back as the mid-90's are supposed to be able to run on even the absolute latest kernel (Linus Torvalds having publicly chewed people out on the LKML for breaking said backwards-compatibility), it's surprising that these would somehow be classified as not having solid backwards compatibility.
The main thing that comes to mind with non-Android Linux is library versions, since those do occasionally break backwards compatibility, but this shouldn't matter too much if you're compiling static executables, or using some isolated runtime like the one Steam (IIRC) provides.
As a point of comparison here, World of Goo's Linux version came out in 2009, and it still works on my system (Slackware64-current) which - while not at the absolute most bleeding edge - is still using library and driver and kernel versions substantially more recent than most "LTS" distro releases.
As a Mac user, I buy other hardware to play games on! Probably the only real Apple game platform is iOS. And even then I’m a bit more careful of what games I buy.
The only Mac gaming I do is with emulators like DOS Box. The market must be really tiny.
You can’t swap sound outputs while an application is running. Fullscreen Direct3D games can freeze in a way that obscures all other windows, including the Task Manager, preventing you from ever killing them. USB device power management is abysmal, and devices often just won’t wake up after sleep. The OS itself is a complete clusterfuck of half-new, half-old, half-ancient things like the Control Panel. Everything prompts constantly—usually with modal windows—for absolutely pointless decisions (and no I’m not talking about UAC).
This is before I even get to what awful citizens of the platform their developers are. Everyone wants to hijack the right-click menu. For all the complaints about the Mac App Store, the Windows Store is—as best I can tell—bordering 100% crapware with no way to find anything of reasonable quality. Everything’s UI seems to have been built with entirely custom components designed by a color-blind child who’s seen too many sci-fi movies.
To top it all off, I am continually just floored whenever I read Raymond Chen’s blog. He often has posts explaining why $thing works some unexpected way or has some sharp edge, and the answer is always because thirty years ago a team at Microsoft built something insane and convoluted (admittedly through the lens of someone watching today), it’s now baked in at the lowest levels of Windows, and it can’t be touched, changed, or removed because of their commitment to backward compatibility.
I struggle to find any redeeming qualities of Windows as a user.
I get that the Mac is a poor platform for gaming development. I really do. But goddamn would I kill for that to change, and for me to be able to run games on my Mac some day.
Actually, I’d say the ‘platform’ is Apple Arcade. I imagine that’ll grow more.
We do have Flatpak[0] which could be used for indy, DRM-free games.
Valve is also working on a Steam Linux Runtime[1] which uses Linux namespaces to make older titles work on newer distributions.
[0] https://flatpak.org/ [1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/16386755...
I have a 6 year old imac 5K. I don't game a lot but I always had a weak spot for x-plane. X-plane 11 came out shortly after I got this machine and I've been running it throughout. It has improved a lot over the years and they just released a beta with metal support. It's quite amazing that I can get decent performance with this version in 2020 that is better than what I got in 2015 with the same hardware. I run it with number of objects maxed out at a low resolution and mostly can keep the fps above 25-30, which is the minimum for an acceptable experience in a flightsim. The GPU is a still pretty decent AMD R9 M295X with 4GB ram.
However, my Steam library looks pretty depressing. As of Catalina, only a handful of games actually still work. I wasn't really playing most of them but I did spend money on this stuff at some point. I've actually been considering switching to Linux recently specifically because of Steam and having access to a bit wider selection of games. Apparently a lot of stuff works pretty well these days; certainly much more than what works on macs.
IMHO if Apple ever does a move on the gaming front, they have a good shot at domininating this market. If they can manage to mass market a good enough product, the numbers start adding up. That's why the IOS store is such a money maker. I've always been puzzled why they never made more of an effort to position the Apple TV as a gaming console. They tried, a little, but it never added up to much.
Apple making their now widely rumored move to their own CPU/GPU could unlock this. IMHO any VR/AR plans they may have are probably dependent on that. I doubt they'll make life easy for the likes of Steam to run in such an environment though. Apple has never liked middlemen.
I build for OSX from Linux using clang all the time. You just need to grab the sdk from xcode and get your toolchain all setup.
https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
I’m a Mac user and develop on the Mac so you might think I’d bend over backwards to make an excuse, but...not possible in this area. Those gpus do render beautiful pictures and can do some cool gpgpu crunching, but aren’t appropriate for gaming.
Took about 2 days to take a win project to linux, that same win project took about 3 weeks to port to mac.
That was the first time I’d done it of course (to either mac or linux), but I just found the mac documentation to be severely lacking.
Also all macs are now stuck on OpenGL 4.1 forever, it may not matter much now, but it will show in future.
And yes I know Vulkan is a thing but I think that’ll take a while to fully be adopted by the games community.
Another factor in play might be that, if rumors are to be believed, future Macbooks will be shipping with ARM chips, with yet-to-be-determined CPU and Graphics performance. That might be a bridge too far for crossplatform projects who are already frustrated about having to maintain a Metal backend just for Mac.
Thus the average matters.
Do video game makers plan for updates? Am I getting this wrong, or are patches and such deployed without a game recompile?
Every game is different, but for every Subnautica with 5+ years of active development post initial sale you'll get a bunch of successful games and only marginal updates for 2 months.
For my next game, Railgrade, I am planning a couple years of updates, but even that will be dwarfed by the long tail years of continued sales after updates are done. I expect Railgrade to be on the market for 5+ years. For consoles it should be purchase-able for at least a decade until Nintendo shuts down the eShop. Then it should continue being playable for decades more.
At some point emulators will take over and my effort can keep bringing players joy for eons more. I am not interested in Apple's "expiring" model of art.
In a way, this is the whole point of the emulation community. Proprietary software was developed for really old systems and they don't work on modern computers. The old systems had to be emulated as virtual machines on top of which the old software could run.
And yes, many expansions and additional content are usually data-driven, so it might not require a recompile.
Mozilla cross compiles Mac (and soon Windows, I believe) Firefox builds on Linux build machines.
(I’m not saying that I disagree with some of the other issues)
Another major issue is broken OpenGL: bad drivers, very old version and nowadays deprecated.
In 2010 macOS gaming was in a good spot. Nowadays, Apple is making sure you don't use Macs for games.
I really like a lot of the ideas that Apple implements, but the upgrade treadmill is notorious and not one of them.
Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS and the complete build quality that has been slipping over the years. All Apple users know we're paying more for the hardware than machines preinstalled with windows.
Did Steve Jobs really dislike games? I assume he might have viewed them naively as a waste of time. Most people consider that assumption true and unless you consider them some type of therapy to unwind from the world but even then it can be argued there are healthier options for the majority of people that play games.
edit: ah yes, I get downvoted for writing an honest comment because that's HN crowd.
For the same reason as macOS games must be build on Apple machines, iPhone and iPad applications must also be build on Apple hardware. There is an entire market of companies that rent out "server farms" of MacMini's in datacenters for this exact reason. It massively raises the cost and complexity of a modern development/integration system to have "special snowflakes".
As it comes to hardware, the problem is you can't get something "reasonable". You can build a $500 Windows compatible PC that's not half bad. You can stick a low in Nvidia RTX card in that (for a few hundred more) and get some really reasonable gaming performance out of it. However to get an RTX level gaming performance out of a mac... you're out however much it cost to buy the new MacPro... so let's call that $10k. Most normal people are not going to pay that.
Dislike may be a bit strong, but John Carmack described him as indifferent:
> Over the years I've been through a number of initiatives where Apple wants to get serious about games, and we've done things with them. The idea way back with Quake 3 on there, that was my deal with Steve Jobs: if Apple adopts OpenGL rather than going off and doing QuickTime3D or something else of their own which was going to be a bad idea, then I'll personally port the Quake 3 stuff rather than working with a partner company on that. And we went through all that. All of our Apple ports have been successful - they've all made money - but it's marginal money, and we have worked with Aspyr usually on all the other ones after that, but I do think it kind of comes from the top.
> The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. This is going to be one of those things that I say something in an interview and it gets fed back to him and I'm on his shithead list for a while on that, until he needs me to do something else there. But I think that that's my general opinion. He's not a gamer. It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it.
> There are people at Apple who want to support all this - and there's no roadblocks for us right now, we're going to support the Mac on Rage, we hope to get a version of Quake Live going up on the Mac there - but it's just that's not what the Mac platform's about, and I don't really expect that to change because it's a tough equation now that you've got everybody dual-booting their Macs and everything: why would you want to go to the extra trouble of [developing games for Mac]?
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack...
As far as I know it is against the terms of service to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, so you can't just run a macOS VM.
> Hardware isn't horrible from Apple. It's just more expensive for macOS.
Is that not the same thing, effectively? For a given buying power, a player that chooses mac will have objectively poorer hardware.
Yes, there are a few capable rigs for Apple systems, but they are ludicrously expensive and thus provide a minuscule install base for your game, so it's basically not worth the effort for a triple-A studio. Less demanding games might be more viable, but it's still a lot of costs in porting, build infrastructure and publishing for very little return.
Re Steve Jobs on games, you can believe in your own skepticism, or you can hear it directly from John Carmack, the creator of DOOM, who tried to work with Steve Jobs to get a proper foundation for gaming on the Mac. He did not succeed.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/john-carmack-talks-stev...
'[Steve] claimed to have never read a comic book in his life (“I hate them more than I hate video games,” he told me)...' — https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/bob-iger-remembers-s...
I followed a bunch of online guides to do everything I can to disable the acceleration and everything else, but for some reason when I try to play a game it still feels terrible. Even when the game has a high framerate the mouse never feels smooth.
Tried multiple MBPs. Multiple gaming mice from multiple manufacturers, etc.
Has anyone ever had any luck making a mouse feel as smooth as it does on Windows? If so, what did you do?
Downside is it's a one-shot sensitivity which can't be adjusted, owing to the hacky nature of it, which was semi-found-by-chance to boot. After lots of searching on threads, seems this is one of the only hacks that works, so doesn't seem to be much support from macOS on this stuff.
Used to have an app format of this so I didn't have to run the console command every time at login, but need to find an updated solution for Catalina.
Regarding the comment above, it is definitely possible there are subtle configuration differences that cause the described behavior (different acceleration curves, polling rate/DPI settings, display refresh rates, etc). FWIW, my “gaming” mouse works fine with my MBP, but it takes a moment to readjust to the different sensitivity and acceleration behavior.
I'd get rid of my Windows computer in an instant if it wasn't for the poor support Mac has for gaming. Windows is fine but I enjoy the Mac workflow more.
I priced out VR recently and I was unimpressed with the price per value available, with most systems adding $500-$1,000 to my gaming system’s cost, and some requiring that I modify my room to work properly. And that’s not even accounting for the high cost of a VR capable gaming rig, if you don’t own one. This is a pretty steep financial and logistical hill to climb given the current set of titles available.
I'm dead serious though the experience you get in a good immersive VR rig is completely unrivaled. Well worth the hassle and overhead. This will get better as costs come down and developers continue to innovate.
My basic take is that the technology is really impressive; I agree with proponents that the Quest finally nails it technically. However, I don't think it's enough better than other options to make it worth the significant drawbacks. Something being immersive is ultimately a function of the player experience, not the hardware. And as is demonstrated to me whenever I try to get the kids to turn off almost any game, non-VR hardware is definitely immersive.
If anything, facehugger VR seems less immersive, because the stuff is way less comfortable than other gaming hardware. The kid who loved rhythm games would play Beat Saber less than non-VR games because of neck discomfort and face irritation. Battery life was also lower than the Switch, and of course infinitely lower than the Playstation. Which also cut into immersion.
I did really appreciate the new 6-axis controllers; they were very cool, and gave a great sense of spatial freedom. But unfortunately, that freedom is a lie; my sense of immersion quickly ended every time I hit a virtual boundary. To successfully play Superhot, I found I had to continuously maintain two spatial frames of reference: VR and reality. So it ultimately felt less immersive to me than a console game, where I could just plop down on the couch and forget my body entirely.
The entire concept of the game (time only progresses while you're moving) fits _so well_ with VR. It makes you feel like a complete badass as you're able to perform ninja-like feats of dexterity and dodge bullets all the while being a just challenging-enough puzzle and providing a decent workout.
Everything else I've played was either basically a tech demo or felt like our old games built within the limitations of VR (what really differentiates Beat Saber from DDR, Guitar Hero, etc?). SUPERHOT was one of the few games I played that really felt like a proper VR game.
Beat Saber is the most fun game I have ever played. No qualifiers. No shifty language. Nothing else is even in the same order of magnitude as Beat Saber. I dare to even call it a video game, because very few other games even possess the language to compete with it. The combat in FF7R is visceral, but you're not actually swinging Cloud's sword. The loop in Animal Crossing is entrancing, but it doesn't become your entire world like when you put a headset on. Even other VR games, which have that language they can use to tell their gameplay, often feel like the VR experience is bolted onto something which could, and maybe should, be non-VR. You often fight with the game; the game transplants you into a world, not just on a screen, but every degree surrounding you, yet you're limited in how you move, you're limited in how the game allows you to interact, nothing feels natural, and you soon adapt your actions with what the game wants.
I am solidly in the camp that, honestly, VR will not become a household item like a game console is. Even with headsets priced about at the level of a game console, like the Rift, the platform has too many downfalls.
Startlingly few games work well in VR. Even an experience like Half Life Alyx, the pinnacle of VR technology, feels like a shell of a game like Half Life 2. Its different. It can't tell a strong story, because players don't generally spend more than 30-90 minutes in VR at a time. It can't really innovate in puzzle design, because movement and viewport control is so heavy that it becomes tiring if you ask the player to do too much. The mechanics feel incredible. No one enters HL:A for the first time, loads that pistol, and doesn't have this HUGE GRIN on their face. But, its also a novelty; it wears off far too quickly once you begin realizing how many fundamentally core things Valve had to sacrifice to make the game work at all.
Nearly every game in VR is, bluntly, a tech demo. The platform is still figuring out if it is viable. Of the top selling VR games on Steam, #7 is a sim game which models a hyper-realistic anime girl, allowing you to mess with her clothes in a predictable anime way, and #10 is Skyrim. Of course, HL:A and Beat Saber are #1 and #2, but roughly this state is where VR was six years ago. It hasn't really evolved, and I'm not convinced HL:A was the catalyst I think Valve is hoping it is.
But, maybe I'm wrong. I will say this: There is no price you can pay for a VR headset that does not make Beat Saber worth it (within your means, of course). It is that good. I have an Index ($1000); beyond spending an hour or two in as many games as I can, 100% of my time is spent in Beat Saber, and I do not regret the purchase. Everything else VR has to offer is just icing. But this, a platform, does not make.
I think one of the problems of VR is one of cost and credibility. Even if I knew you personally and trusted you, there is no way in hell I’m going to float thousands of dollars getting a new gaming PC, VR headset, and customizing my room for the full setup just because someone said it’s amazing. The risk/reward ratio for that is just insane, and not in a good way.
Heck, even $500 for an entry level setup is a pretty dicey proposition, assuming my PC can lift it. $500 can buy me a lot of non-VR gaming satisfaction with effectively 0 risk.
If it was $200, I’d consider it.
But for VR? It is a niche, for sure, but I know a few people really enjoy it.
It can be a niche forever (like high end sound equipment) or it can grow into mainstream (like TV), I have no idea, but I doubt it will fade away.
Apparently Quest sales figures aren't public, but I see estimates that they sold a million units last year. Nintendo sold that many Switches last month. And the month before that. And the month before that. (And in December it was something like 5 million/month.)
However much niche users enjoy it, I have a hard time seeing how they'll sustain enough of a developer ecosystem to keep them entertained. High end sound equipment can draft off of every music player in the world for content. But good VR is very much VR-specific.
Quite bullish that the next generation will be absolutely incredible. I bought an upgraded dev machine to try out VR dev because of the Quest -- it seems like it will be the next mass-computing interface.
That being said, I use my VR headset probably even less than my 3d printer. As mindblowing as it is when I put the headset on (and truly, it never gets old), I realized it's just not for me.
I usually play games on my sofa, with a steam controller and the screen on my wall through a projector. I always play turn by turn or low intensity games rather than fast-paced action games. I have my laptop on front of me on my coffee table, and constantly check my mailbox, rss feeds and many sources of news, on the laptop between playing two turns in the games or message with friends on my phone.
This is a funny thing, because I didn't realized that before I bought a VR headset : basically, I'm always multitasking during my leisure time, and you just can't do that in VR. Each time I think "hey, let's chill in No Man's Sky", my immediate reaction is "oh wait, but if I do that, I can do _only_ that", and I play a classic game instead.
Now, this is a very personal experience, maybe that won't be a problem for anyone else. But as far as I'm concerned, VR fullfills all its promises, and yet it's not for me.
EDIT : fun fact, the time when VR is really useful for me is during week-end during the day when I don't feel like working on a side project or learning a new thing. I can't use the projector with daylight, so in those cases I'll just put the VR headset on rather than closing shutters.
For me it's the multiplayer games that I like, more of my friends are getting VR headsets right now and I suspect that as more of them get into it the more we'll end up playing VR together.
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“Go spend a few hundred to prove the value” is a hard sell.
but 3D TV and movies were pretty bad... It was always a gimmick. The experience you get in VR is nothing like that.
Pretty much Mac owners are on laptops. Even in the PC world few laptops can power VR. Those that do tend to be bulky for cooling and have nVidia GPUs; both things which MacBooks seem unwilling to have.
Having a extensible desktop at 1k that supports nVidia would probably go a long way.
From Apple's perspective, that's a machine with razor-thin margins. Why would they want to sell that when all of their other products have enviable margins?
Moreover, such a machine would cannibalize their high-end Mac Pro sales. After all the money they spent to develop it, having your pro customers scoop up the thin margin gaming machines seems like a poor strategy.
iOS is an exception due to it's position in the market but I've been seeing less and less interest in mobile overtime too
Game developers who want to reach a broad market and are willing to meet their deployment platforms halfway do not say this. They just port and ship.
Don’t start with system requirements first and make a game targeting that because you want to show everyone how elite a hacker you are.
If Sony didn’t require games achieve 60FPS at 1080p on PlayStation 4 before they’d allow them on the platform, most of the developers would be targeting PS 4 Pro because they want to show off. I expect that’s mostly the case anyway, and these developers have to be dragged by their corporate masters kicking and screaming back to baseline PS 4 support.
What kind of impact will that have on the ecosystem?