If you’ve followed me for a while (cheers to you), you know I went on a bit of a tirade over at Laptop Mag — namely about how Apple is squandering the gaming potential of its Mac systems and it's time the company actually cared.
Because let’s be real, these are expensive machines. For the price you’re paying, you want it to do it all. And the various Reddit discussions around this prove that’s exactly what people want. To have to buy both a MacBook and a gaming laptop (like my combo of M3 Pro MacBook Pro and Asus TUF Gaming A14) is a common price to pay for work and play.
But Apple’s been gradually turning a corner. Regularly, the Cupertino crew will talk about its gaming credentials — you may have seen them go in hard on the ray tracing capabilities in the M4 MacBook Pro. On top of that, you’ve seen the Game Porting Toolkit, updates to Apple’s DLSS-equivalent in Metal, and you’ve seen a slow trickle of games come to the system too, which started with Resident Evil Village back in 2022.
And now, one of the biggest dominos has fallen. Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to the Mac, and embracing all those GPU cores to bring path tracing, frame generation and built-in Spatial Audio. If you listen closely (beyond the conversations with your choombas) you’ll hear the winds of change as the Mac starts to become a rather viable gaming platform.
Kicking it up a notch
From Cyberpunk 2077 coming next year to Control making the move, and the likes of Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Civilization VII coming day one to Apple’s platform, things are moving in the right direction.
This is all down to the new iteration of Game Porting Toolkit — providing a stable base to repackage games originally built for PC for Apple’s platform — and Metal 3 unlocking all of Apple silicon’s GPU power such as hardware-based ray tracing and frame generation.
During WWDC 2024, Apple also mentioned a bunch of games coming too, including Prince of Persia — The Lost Crown, Dead Island 2 and Palworld. The library is growing, be it on Apple’s App Store or Steam, and with the MacBook Pro’s phenomenal power and heat management, you can play a lot of these games with far quieter fan noise.
Not quite there yet
But let’s not ignore the obvious fact here. Outside of these day one releases, and newer titles like Lies of P and Baldur’s Gate 3 coming to Mac sharpish, the other Mac games right now are kind of old. Windows is still the de facto platform to play these titles first, and Apple still has a ways to go in making Mac a day one platform, too.
This is the hurdle it has to clear, and the Game Porting Toolkit can go some way to helping with this. Pair that with the continuing development in Metal FX and the company could be onto a winner.
However, as is the case with game development, it’s all about the economy of time. Is the hours required to port a game worth it based on how much money could be potentially made? Mac gaming can be a bit of a question mark over this, but I’ve got a suggestion.
Apple Arcade is your friend
Apple Arcade is low key one of the better game subscription services out there in terms of quality of titles. There’s an impressive variety available — from fun casual titles to gripping single-player narrative-driven gems. But if there’s one key thing missing, it’s access to AAA games.
This is one of the key ways you see the likes of PS Plus, Xbox Game Pass and the Epic Games Store encourage platform lock-in — provide a library of big titles to pull people in and keep them.
At the moment, while this criticism is a little short sighted given the quality of these smaller titles, Apple Arcade is very much iOS orientated. It’s time for a new tier with desktop-class games to dip your toes into and see what these systems are capable of.
But ultimately, we’re in a position of change for MacBook gaming. After years of me thinking it was just all lip service from Apple, things are prepped for this to be a monster platform for games. Now, with all its ducks in a row, it’s time to see whether this dream is fully realized — and whether I can truly do it all on one system.
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