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Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 7 months ago* (6 children)

Apple doesn't support Vulcan (or the support is outdated, idk exactly), and expects devs to use Metal instead. Which they don't. So outside of small indie games, people gaming on Mac likely boot Windows anyway, or at least that's how it was ten years ago — the situation might've changed with the M* processors, in that I'm not sure Windows runs on them.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    No, there’s no way to easily install Windows on Apple Silicon like back in the days of Bootcamp on Intel. If there’s no native macOS version of a game, you have to use translation layers like you would on Linux - either Wine or Apple’s own Game Porting Toolkit.

    There’s also no support for 32-bit apps any more, so many older games with native macOS releases don’t work anymore either.

    That said, when I looked through my Steam & GOG libraries on Mac I was surprised at how many games do apparently run natively. Far more than I expected. But it’s just a curiosity really - if I want to play a game I’ll use my PC.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    how many games do apparently run natively

    From what I understand, indie devs mostly just check a box in their engine's build script to compile the game for MacOS. It's rather the big boys who always have trouble porting their games anywhere due to bespoke engines, anticheat or whatnot. And also sim racing devs for some reason, those never support anything but Windows — even though Feral has ported F1 games to Mac and they worked fine.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Very few things in game dev are as simple as checking a box in the engine, unfortunately.

    To distribute a macOS game on Steam I believe the app needs to be signed and notarised, which requires several extra steps and a (paid) Apple Developer account. It’s one reason why many devs simply don’t bother supporting the platform.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago

    Sure, but the developer account costs about two and a half Doordash pizzas (which every USian orders every day for some unfathomable reason, judging by the incessant complaining on Reddit), and to my understanding signing can be automated.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I recently got my custom game engine running on an M4 Macbook, and it was definitely a pain. Using MoltenVK to translate the API works, but there's a bunch of device features that are missing still I had to work around.

    Off the top of my head it's missing drawIndirectCount, linePolygonMode, and the ability to set line thickness above 1 px, which are Vulkan 1.2 features. I also had to do some tweaking since several device limits are lower (can only reference ~500 textures at once instead of 64k like most systems)

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