> Unless Apple funds your games like some other platforms do, it’s better to just blow the porting budget on something that’s at least fun. I haven’t heard of anyone’s game funded by Apple, but maybe it happens? These deals are rarely made public.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought/assumed that Valve's work to get Steam and their GoldSource and Source game engines working on Mac was with some sort of support from Apple - I know they did Linux support around the same time but the extra work to get everything working on a Mac wouldn't have been trivial.
That’s the only avenue I see where porting a AAA-style game makes sense for a Mac financially.
Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and several Counter-Strike games were also ported, but CS:GO was later discontinued for Macs. These were done without Apple’s money as I understand. And the discontinuation seems related to support costs on a platform that doesn’t have many gamers.
Yeah I think Valve ported their whole catalogue of games, but I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation - I thought they quietly dropped the Mac support tag from all of their games two or three months ago, probably because Intel Macs haven't been sold in a few years now? Presumably they didn't want to sink more money into Mac support (they had 11 years worth of Mac usage statistics to back up their decision).
> I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation
They didn't update their old games with 64-bit support, and in February they dropped support for the last macOS with 32-bit support (Mojave) because 98% of Mac Steam users had updated to newer OS releases. Mojave (released in 2018) hasn't received security updates in years, and doesn't support the latest CEF, which the Steam client is based on. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/macos/32-bit-mac-holdo...
I don’t think Intel v. ARM matters too much once the engine HALs support it natively, or through Rosetta 2. This to me doesn’t seem too bad.
The OS APIs and building an ergonomic experience is the challenging part. Supporting APIs is harder than it may seem. That’s graphics, sound, task scheduling and multi threading, I/O for both files and devices, and many more. All these things have different approaches on different OSes, as well as different limits of what is allowed and what is not. Different best practices and degrees of documentation, too. This all then needs to make for a good player experience and meet gamer expectations. It’s a Herculean task.
It is even harder, because many graphics APIs, for example, support different features. So either your artists must accommodate and create several versions of skeletal meshes, visual effects, and similar; or your engineers must develop new graphics technologies to compensate automatically. And if that didn’t seem hard enough, try recruiting from a pool of game graphics programmers for macOS without a hot six figures a year burning a hole in your pocket. Now consider this for other APIs, though they are often more standard and less challenging.
I could be wrong, but many corners are cut for platforms that don’t have that many players — you just can’t justify the costs it would take to do an excellent port. And that creates pretty deep and difficult to patch issues. The same is seen on games ported to Linux.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought/assumed that Valve's work to get Steam and their GoldSource and Source game engines working on Mac was with some sort of support from Apple - I know they did Linux support around the same time but the extra work to get everything working on a Mac wouldn't have been trivial.