Apple doesn’t ship consumer systems with dedicated GPUs in them and they’re on their own custom silicon now. Developing cross platform games for them must be a major PITA.
The GPUs aren’t really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel’s integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.
The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won’t go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple’s highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.
It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.
I’m all for games being as cross-platform as possible, but considering how Apple doesn’t offer apps such as iMessage, Facetime, etc. on other platforms, I’m less sympathetic to them for this.
Apple users chose a famously closed ecosystem, so they shouldn’t be surprised when some things aren’t available to them.
The issue here is that Counter Strike Global Offensive did have official Mac support. Then when CS2 came out, Valve replaced the CSGO client with CS2, rather than making it a new client, and then announced they’re cutting Mac support. There is still a weird way to launch GO, but good luck finding players to play against now. It was pretty shitty of them to not leave GO as its own client or to not continue supporting Mac. This isn’t quite a case of a new game not having Mac support, what happened from Mac users’ point of view is their counter strike game updated and now they can’t play it anymore.
They’ve made Linux gaming a thing. And there where no players there either. So I do not believe that is their actual reason.
The actual reason is that Valve does not want to be beholden or locked to a corporate entity like Apple or Microsoft. They would be very dependent on the whims of those companies.
Linux gives them a platform where they know and can influence it’s future.
Good. I hope more developers follow suit cause maybe it might finally convince Apple to start selling PCs with proper GPUs in them again. It won’t happen, but I can dream.
If it’s any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.
I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn’t.
I have a feeling this response is directly related to how Linux users for yeeeeeeears have been told "we won't support Linux because there just aren't enough users to justify it". Now that there are official more Linux users than Mac users it makes sense to support Windows and then Linux if you can only afford to support the 2 biggest operating systems, but yeah, I really think this is more about Valve pulling a switcheroo on the usual "not enough users to support Linux" line we always hear.
Of course, that's what I was implying. The Steam data set for Operating Systems includes the Steam Deck under "Linux" which is why it's suddenly jumped up above iOS users. I'm saying that I think Valve employees are obviously Linux enthusiasts and have heard that line from video game developers for years, so now it's giving them a little bit of schadenfreude to say it about iOS users.
I mean... if Apple makes it a shit platform to support, this isn't a surprise. Valve can control the entire environment on Linux. If something goes wrong, they can look at the code of the kernel. On Mac, they have to ask Apple for support. For <1% of the player-base, that's way too much of a hassle.
It’s telling that Apple is trying to develop Proton-like tools for macOS, but even Valve, who are very actively developing them for Linux and have invested in porting software to macOS for years, are sort of giving up. Apple is so, so bad at working with game devs, it’s amazing. I’m guessing they did their own thing internally and just published it instead of actually working with Valve and listening to the industry, as always.
Valve has been using MoltenVK to run Dota2 on Mac1. I’m a bit worried that if Valve would cut the funding on MoltenVK2. Furthermore, CS:GO had been an example of a cross-platform example for multiple-player game. Valve’s games may still support Linux/SteamOS, but what if other developers only release their games as win-only in future?
I agree. It's a mistake for Valve to reduce platform support as it becomes a justification for dropping other platforms for other developers as well.
I know that MacOS is a bit of a pain to support right now with how steam and third party applications are treated, but it would be a bigger issue for Apple to drop support if Valve maintained a strong presence on the platform via steam. With the way things are now, Apple might rip the bandaid off and just remove the ability to have third party stores on their computers. This is already what they do with Iphones/Ipads
… it literally contains the Steamworks SDK: github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton which becomes pretty awkward to ship on your own storefront. You’d have to do a good bit of work to make Proton steam-free. No one is going to do that for 2% of the market. Just like arguing you could use Chromium and anyone who wants to make a browser can use it but realistically it creates an ecosystem around Google and for Proton, around Valve.
Don’t forget that the only reason Proton even exists is because they added a version of Steam Play to Linux Steam users.
One dev does it in his spare time. I use it to run games that aren't on Steam like Ubisoft and Blizzard stuff.
But yes, as a software company you'd probably have to pay someone to create and maintain a similar release for your own use - but that's part of being a software company.
In terms of numbers (according to the Steamwide statistics, which may be different than CS:GO), MacOS isn’t that far behind Linux in terms of usage. I get that Valve is pushing Linux and all, but this a bit scummy (saying this as a Linux user)…
Unless there is more Politics involved. My understanding (and I may be wrong) is that developing software for Apple is basically a quagmire of regulations, proprietary lockout and big pits you need to pour money into.
Also, strictly reading help.steampowered.com/en/…/73EF-08A3-0935-6369 they didn’t say that they were discontinuing it BECAUSE of lack of playerbase, but that they didn’t expect it to have much impact due to the small playerbase. Low player count is probably one reason, but I suspect there might be more factors in play.
EDIT: I know the article does mention the API issues, but I’m just a bit annoyed that they decided to title it the way they did for clickbait.
For games, a big one is that none of the common APIs are supported, apple just supports Metal and nothing else. There are compatibility layers, but it's a hurdle.
Apple just shoots itself in the foot with proprietary APIs that nobody else supports. Why should Valve write an additional translation layer for an OS that’s less used than Linux? macOS was always bad for gaming, it merely got worse.
Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn’t affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms’ store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples’ hardware, you can’t make games that would put private citizens’ safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.
Valve’s statement adds that players using DirectX 9, 32-bit operating systems or macOS “represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players”. Dumping these platforms makes sense from that perspective, but it’s a bitter pill to swallow for the Macintoshers amongst us or those who, for whatever reason, play on very old PCs.
I don’t like this decision, since I know the lack of support for different platforms than Windows as someone playing on Linux. Valve invests into proton and thus game support on Steam Deck and ChromeOS, so I’d have thought they’d make sure CS runs on macOS too.
Big difference I see from Linux and Windows is that they are OS that can be installed on different devices. MacOS is not the case, and even trying to get Linux to be stable and reliable on Apple hardware after the move to their own CPUs is a project in itself with Asahi Linux.
So I can see the lack of interest with how MacOS is a very restrictive Mac hardware only type experience for most people with how getting a hackintosh working is rather involved.
I’d have thought the pain point would have been the processor architecture (ARM64) rather than operating system - MacOS still supports AMD64 using a compatibility layer but it would probably be quite a drawback to game performance.
Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.
The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.
What’s your experience here? I’m interested to hear about projects that you have done this for.
The source engine has code that’s over 20 years old. A monolithic project like a game engine, which is statically and dynamically linked with god knows how many libraries they don’t even have code for, let alone permission, to compile in a different architecture, is not gonna be an easy thing to do.
I’ve brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:
During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn’t affect anything I did)
But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you’re more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.
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