The scuttlebutt is that Steam is not going to get ported, and Valve has given up on Apple since the 32 bit drop in general and the Metal/Vulkan mess.
I have seen a huge downtick in games with Mac releases too… even for stuff where it seems like it would be possible with an extra platform export.
Apple seems to care about gaming for about 15 minutes every year, and one day they will figure out it can work on their stuff if they’re willing to accept that their platform will be nobody’s priority.
Going from DirectX to Vulkan to Metal is simply too many translation layers to work well. You're almost always going to end up with an annoying bottleneck and poor hardware utilization. MoltenVK alone might be fine if Vulkan was more widely supported by shipping games.
I think it's more plausible that Valve decides to make a Proton for Mac using the D3D to Metal translation layer from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit—but that would be going against Apple's intended purpose for the toolkit.
I don't know, this is just stuff I heard, but I think some of it is Valve just being _annoyed_. Like Apple made this choice despite reaching a point where the highest end graphics card they ship is equivalent to a high-end... laptop graphics card! You shouldn't be in charge of a thing if you're not going to cover a wide spectrum.
At least with USB-C Apple "donated" their designs.
> At least with USB-C Apple "donated" their designs.
What do you mean? I've always thought that it was designed jointly by the same standards committee as the previous iterations. The first USB-C device I know about and have used was the Nexus 6P. This was early enough in the standard's life that no one had any USB-C cables (or had any idea that it's a thing) so I had to carry my own one at all times in case I wanted to charge my phone. Apple started putting USB-C ports into MacBooks a year or so later, iirc.
My understanding of the narrative was that Apple showed up with a lot of stuff regarding USB-C at the outset, even if they weren't the first person with it on their device.
This was just stuff I heard though. Vaguely, many years ago.
What about Game Porting Toolkit? To be honest I feel like that's resulted in fewer native ports and more Mac players enjoying the x86 library that would never be ported natively.
I have seen a huge downtick in games with Mac releases too… even for stuff where it seems like it would be possible with an extra platform export.
Apple seems to care about gaming for about 15 minutes every year, and one day they will figure out it can work on their stuff if they’re willing to accept that their platform will be nobody’s priority.