I was scrolling through the Mac App Store this morning and I saw a great piece they had about how gaming on Mac is better than ever. This year, Apple introduced several improvements to their devices, including Game Mode, which reduces background activity to enhance performance, and personalized spatial audio support in games for a more immersive gaming experience.
Additionally, games on Mac will now require less space to download and later this year can be installed on alternate drives. That’s a big one for me as I currently have an M1 MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage — not a lot of room for good looking games once I use the device for a bit. I’ve been hearing about all the great stuff Apple’s doing in the graphics space and considering how much I’ve enjoyed the performance of my Mac over the years, I’d love to explore gaming further on the Mac. Apple is now going to enable me to do that.
I also want to do more research into Game Porting Toolkit as I remember seeing videos about using that to get games running on the Mac. I know that’s not something I’ll be getting to right now, but definitely a project for the future.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the point of Mac being a true gaming platform in the same way Windows is, but I’m happy to see Apple acknoweoledigng that their users want to play games on Mac. Whether that can undo the damage of all the years they weren’t focused on gaming remains to be seen.
The one area where I have gamed a bit over the years on my Mac has been Apple Arcade. I personally love the service and it’s where the majority of the games on my iPhone and iPad are from at this point, but I feel like Apple’s mission with the service has also been muddled over the years. Even all these years later, it’s unclear if Apple wants the service to be a place that attracts core gamers or not.
AAA games on the iPhone 15 Pro line wasn’t the success Apple was probably hoping it would be, but I think it’s something Apple can learn from. This may be the time to show the world what their devices can do. Sign some deals with publishers to get AAA games on the service. Games like Fantasian should have paved the way for bigger and better games to hit the service, but it feels like Apple’s been stuck in a loop of simply mobile first games. I think there is a middle ground though. Much like there’s “+” games that exist only on the iPhone and iPad, it may be time for Apple to limit those more powerful Arcade titles to only Mac. Then they can give Apple silicon the gaming demo it really needs.
Dan Stransky 