It has ray tracing with touch screen controls for the masses to play a reskinned bejeweled with banner ads. It's not a real gaming platform. No keyboard and mouse support. No first party controller. They even took away 3d touch that would have helped a lot with the haptics of touch screen controls.
Why does it matter if Apple makes their own controller? iOS/iPadOS supports other popular controllers and the Apple Store even sells multiple controllers (including the PS5 controller).
Adding built in support for a user's existing controllers, (XBox, PlayStation or Nintendo) to iOS devices and Macs is another one of those things that debunks the "Apple doesn't care about gaming" conspiracy theory.
Apple once argued in court that they ought to be allowed to kick out all games built on Unreal engine by third party developers from their platform.
Imagine you have developed a game, it is selling well, and one day you find out that the game engine you are using has been banned for disobedience and Apple wants you to rewrite your entire game in a different engine.
Apple doesn’t just not care about games, they despise game developers with a burning passion.
It's all a bit moot. Gaming is an ecosystem, and MacOS is not a big part of it. Even if Apple supported all the things it needed to, developers still wouldn't build for it, it's too small a segment.
Apple also has no buy in for the segment of gaming people wish it supported. Where SteamOS and Windows both have first party AAA game development studios.
It's not moot; it's software! So many developers put their pearls before swine these days, when the technical side of things couldn't be more clear.
Apple wants the same level of control Microsoft had with DirectX. It is blatant, and they're fighting for it even harder than Microsoft did. There's nothing wrong with offering a high-level API, but there is a problem with avoiding industry standards for the sake of maximizing your market size.
Stuff like the Game Porting Toolkit demonstrates just how deeply behind Apple is. They're desperate to prove how capable Metal can be, without acknowledging why nobody targets it. It's not surprising that a DXVK port could also support Metal. It's just not what developers intend to support; not upstream, downstream or direct from Apple. That sort of pointless insistence is where I draw the line between "just business" and "being an anti-competitive asshole".
How exactly does not caring (much) about gaming require a conspiracy? It should be the default state for the manufacturer of a computing platform whose main competitor has already cornered the gaming market.
Becsuse this is the gaming community and we can't speak subtly, apparently. There's definitely some spectrum between "does not support any games" and "full on dedicated gaming machine" and given the efforts of Google/Apple they are certainly somewhere in between.
I mean, IOS supports K&M and oodles of Bluetooth controllers, including console ones. Dunno why you want Apple to sell you $150 iController anyway that locks you into their walled garden3.
I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
> I think we're well past the point where phones can't play "real games". If you don't want to do that in lieu of preserving battery, that's understandable. But at this point mobile has usurped what we used to called handheld gaming.
Nah. Anyone gaming seriously will still take a Switch because even if their phone theoretically has more horsepower, in practice it's just not as good a gaming platform.
> I'd hope by now we'd dig deeper and ask questions like "why isn't there a steam for IOS/android"? The answer is obvious for IOS and I hope future regulations help to allow alternative stores, but android seemed like a very obvious void for years.
Amazon ran an alternative app store for a while, and were pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it. I don't know exactly why, but my naive explanation would be that no-one was spending money there because mobile games are bad and not worth paying for (or perhaps just that it's a lemon market and while there are good proper games on mobile it's impossible to distinguish them from the bad ones until you've bought it).
>Anyone gaming seriously will still take a Switch because even if their phone theoretically has more horsepower, in practice it's just not as good a gaming platform.
I love my switch, but it and the steam deck do highlight an aspect that died in Gen 8: "pocketable" handhelds are really no more. I can fit a vita in my pockets with little issue, and I have baggy enough jeans where I could even fit a GPD Win in if I really tried. But I'd say the latter is past practical pocketability. You can throw a switch in a bag but so can my laptop. I liked handhelds for the ability to simply grab and go.
Phones picked up that mantle for 6 years, since there was nothing else left. and I await the day that some portable PC strives to hit that Vita size. won't happen for years but probably by the end of the decade.
>pushing the gaming angle on it pretty heavily, but they got rid of it.
I think they pulled out the same time they gave up in the Kindle fire lines. Kindle was a store that penetrated the market but not Amazon. I even remeber the days where they had "free app of the day" a LA Epic Games Store.
It still technically exists but isn't really trying to compete as a store anymore. It has some "Amazon coin" deals for a few f2p games that let you get expensive whale packs for slightly less money. Probably due to some deal they made with certain game studios.
I don't believe you can make money on F-droid, and Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
Well yea, F Droid is made for mostly open source games and apps. Huge deal breaker for games using proprietary engines (since the lions share is on Unity) and doesn't want to make it's assets open source.
This theoretical "steam of Android" would work similarly to how desktop steam works. Allows sale of proprietary premium games, Bans f2p games in the beginning (inevitably opening up once it's culture is established), does some QA to ensure certain features (e.g. Input, compatibility, no viruses, etc.), has discovery algorithms for consumers, user reviews, forums, etc. It could even allow adult games like Steam, but it may also ban those for a while to establish culture (the porn black hole is a real, scary phenomenon).
>Google is unlikely to tolerate you turning your Play Store app into a seondary app store (or if they did tolerate it, they might switch at any moment).
I think it'd be fine in the beginning if you banned f2p apps (which most of google's revenue comes from), but yes. I'd wonder how big it'd get before we get the next Apple v. Epic debacle over such matters.
If you, as Valve, launch Steam and take your own payments within Steam - which I suspect Google would quash instantly - you would build up an install base that "owns" value in your store (modulo weaselly subscriber agreements).
When Google does Google things and kills your popular product, perhaps citing that it is a competing app store, you now have millions of angry gamers. Maybe they cannot sue you, but they can certainly abandon your market on other platforms.
Sure, I have no doubt about that. But you wouldn't be on their app store to begin with. Or at least, not expect to be on the store for long (I don't think any of the alternative app stores I used were on the play store). That does lose you some marketing, but you're already swimming up a creek as is trying to sell premium games to begin with.
Now, can Google remove your apk regardless? I haven't heard of a case, but it's not impossible for Google to her in the way. The much less publicized lawsuit from Epic involved Google blocking Epic from negotiating with Fortnite pre-installs with OEMs, so Google won't just sit by and let their money walk (even if they were leaving it on the table to begin with). Not a bad bet if you're determined, but it's not easy street even if you find your audience.
Again, Apple uses the same GPU cores across all it's hardware platforms. It will have hardware ray tracing on handhelds, tablets, laptops, desktops as well as on their upconing AR/VR platform as the SOCs are updated.
That might be useful if iPhones and iPads weren't gimped platforms.
There is no Steam (let alone any other game store) on iDevices. Just Apple's store.
As a consumer, I don't wanna pay for a game on Apple's store just so I can have a shitty iPhone experience. Especially when nearly every other game I have is on Steam and I can play on whatever device of mine I want.
>Especially when nearly every other game I have is on Steam and I can play on whatever device of mine I want.
Except for Mac, apparently. Not much android support either.
I'd say we can't truly reach "whatever device I want" until we at least cover the 3 major desktop platforms, the 2 major mobile platforms, and the 3 major console platforms. Until then we are all making compromises when buying a game.
What I said was accurate. _I_ can play on whatever device _I_ want. :-)
I take your point. Even so, Steam is leagues ahead of everyone else in this regard. I have Steam games I bought 10 years ago that I can still play on my current desktop PC. That is absolutely not the case with consoles. It isn't even the case for mobile for me, since I switched from Android a few years back.
It isn't 'just another' DRM platform. It's in a league of its own with the efforts create a virtual OS-platform to run games indefinitely. That's neither technically nor functionally trivial.
They encourage windows games to bundle old and insecure dlls, which the games generally did anyway. On windows, they don't really do anything here, it's mostly just that windows provides quite a bit of backwards compatibility anyway.
On linux, they do a bit more. They ship a hacked up copy of various libraries from ubuntu 12.04, mostly without security patches, and have the games use those, calling it the "steam runtime" despite it really being "ancient ubuntu libraries". They reduce the security of your machine, and I would only play steam games on a burner machine you don't login to your bank accounts on.
I mean you're not wrong, but games need a stable set of libraries to target. This comment implies they haven't updated those in a decade, but they have releases based on Debian Buster and Bookworm https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
The environment for both windows and linux provides unsandboxed acccess to the roaming/home folders, where game saves are typically stored. That's also where your browser's cookies to access your bank are stored.
Many of these games have such fragile netcode that they'll crash even if you don't fuzz them.
Every single metric on the business side supports those “not real gamers” being worth far more than the self identified gaming enthusiasts that balk at paying more than $60 for a AAA title for 30 years straight
