Even Beat Saber-the VR game a random person on the street will most likely be able to name- ranks at only 237 with a peak player count of 2,830. Valve itself made one of the best efforts to change that situation with its acclaimed VR shooter Half Life: Alyx, but only a little more than a month after release, it ranks at only 300 on Steam Charts with a mere 6,344 players at peak. As GearBrain reports, sales of virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Quest have seen a definite uptick since shelter-in-place orders began, but despite some valiant efforts over the last few years, VR as a whole hasn’t become the culture-shaping force it was expected to be in the last decade. It’s important to keep in mind, though, that SteamVR’s removal from macOS probably isn’t a purely Apple problem. It’s too early to tell how Apple will handle this transition, but there’s a good chance that most existing compatible games won’t work at all with these new machines.
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Most analysts now agree that Apple will be transitioning away from Intel to ARM processors for at least some models of the Mac as early as 2021. And as we’ve seen, even relatively big ones like Psyonix are skipping out.Īnd worse things may still be on the horizon. Many developers acknowledge Metal as a good renderer, but it requires dedicated attention that many smaller studios simply don’t have resources for.
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For now, OpenGL still works on the Mac, but as PC Gamer reported, many developers are thinking about passing on porting their games to the Mac out of a fear that Apple might pull support for OpenGL at any time. The lowest point came in 2018 when Apple announced it was deprecating the widely used cross-platform graphics renderer OpenGL in favor of its own Metal.
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Apple may have had a good idea with Apple Arcade, and it might even be building its own VR headset or (yes) a “gaming Mac,” but on the whole Apple has spent much of the last couple of years digging a grave for Mac gaming. For one thing, only high-end Macs have GPUs capable of adequately handling popular games like Rise of the Tomb Raider that get ported to macOS. That in itself is a reminder that Apple itself is responsible for this state of affairs. Even my roundup of the 20 best Mac games is problematic since a good chunk of those games won’t work on macOS Catalina because of the shift from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture. Eventually we scrapped the column altogether.
Anecdotally, I could feel the state of Mac gaming growing worse when I was working on my monthly roundup of the best Mac games, as each time it grew harder and harder to find 10 or even five new games worth recommending. The situation undoubtedly grows direr when we venture away from popular games like Rocket League. Apply that figure to today’s Steam player count and, at best, that would mean that only around 300 people are playing Rocket League on a Mac. Psyonix dropped support for macOS in March, though, and PC Gamer reported that a mere 0.3 percent of Rocket League players played on macOS or Linux. You can get a good idea of how awful the situation is by taking a look at the figures for Psyonix’s popular 2015 soccer-with-cars game Rocket League, which still pulls in around 100,000 players per day on Steam.