Apple is bringing Game Mode and a porting toolkit to macOS Sonoma. It’s a good start, but Apple needs to do far more to attract gamers and game makers to the Mac.
Apple is bringing Game Mode and a porting toolkit to macOS Sonoma. It’s a good start, but Apple needs to do far more to attract gamers and game makers to the Mac.
Here’s the thing, until they can put out a value better than a $400 PS5, I don’t feel like it matters what they do. They’re stuck in an extraordinarily thin price niche where on one end you’ve got lower-priced consoles that blow Macs out of the water in gaming, and on the other end you’ve got similarly-priced traditional gaming PCs and laptops which also blow Macs out of the water for gaming. The “not having games” problem is entirely secondary here, Macs aren’t competing as gaming machines. They’re doing all this work to make it easier for developers to put their games on the platform, but not a single thought has gone into attracting consumers. The magic mouse completely blows for gaming, that’s not even a question, so why does Apple still handicap the experience for people using third-party mice? Why hold something like smooth scrolling ransom if they want people to take the platform seriously? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe they’re just wanting to focus on controller players, great, so then consider that a controller doesn’t come with a Mac and that the same DualSense controller that Apple sells comes stock with that PS5.
It’s like they’ve got a small group of software engineers that want gaming on Mac to be viable but everyone else at the company missed the memo.