Recent adventure with handheld consoles took me back to Apple

My first computer that could run Windows was a 2006 Mac Pro. None of Apple’s efforts to court game developers over the years have been serious and I wouldn’t put much weight into the current stuff now and I don’t think Valve has much to worry about.

That said, I still think people are missing the OP’s point. Pointing out that an iPad Air can run Death Stranding better and more efficiently than a Steam Deck at a similar price point is absolutely a fair critique of the Steam deck and a bunch of you are twisting yourself into knots trying to avoid admitting that Apple can make a good product.

It was one person. Others admit that apple hardware is good enough, but Apple themselves will find a way to screw up any advantage they have because of their aversion to gamers. Also it';s about the games, nit the hardware.

On another point, your choice of game is terrible. Not the game itself, but the fact it's a trainwreck of a UI on the iPad. There's over a dozen(!) onscreen buttons trying to mimic a psx controller but with a completely different layout. Steam deck is no problem since it can handle all of this out of the box without resorting to adding anything.

But is that solved by pairing a Bluetooth gamepad?

I don't think Apple is going to release any time soon any device with gaming-friendly controller hardware built in, but really the Steam/Switch and similar devices are unique in incorporating a gamepad. Plenty of people game on laptops/desktops/consoles using a separate controller. I think an iPad with a kickstand and wireless gamepad is a good enough form factor.

koala said:

I think an iPad with a kickstand and wireless gamepad is a good enough form factor.

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It is! I use mine this way and it's a great mobile gaming station—for Game Pass streaming, and (now) emulation. The number of native AAA-level games in Apple's ecosystem remains... thin. Death Stranding is great, but who hasn't already played that?

As a switch owner, I'd find that a horrible modality.

The entire point of the switch and the Steamdeck is it's portability. you can walk with it open if needed. play anywhere. Requiring a table top completely undermines the point.

I also own a Switch. I hate the joy cons and would say that the screen feels cramped in ways that the older dedicated handhelds did not. I gave up on Monster Hunter World because it was too miserable of an experience. Nintendo’s previous handhelds got handheld specific games that played well on small screens. I’d classify BOTW as marginally playable in handheld mode and all the third party AAA titles as unplayable.

I’d much rather play a game on an iPad with a paired controller. It’s a shame that Apple won’t make a real effort to court game developers with stable APIs and a commitment for long term support and development. Larian did port DOS2 to iOS and they do not appear to have any plan to repeat that process with BG3 even though it runs great on M-Series Macs and in the same game engine. Apple is clearly doing something wrong.

YoHo said:

As a switch owner, I'd find that a horrible modality.

The entire point of the switch and the Steamdeck is it's portability. you can walk with it open if needed. play anywhere. Requiring a table top completely undermines the point.

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Oh, you're not wrong. There are disadvantages, and our family owns a Switch (2 of them, actually), and an Series X, too. But as LordDaMan indicated, however, "it's about the games," and using the iPad in that manner is about accessing certain games when the primary "portal" to that library is unavailable.

Apple A17 Pro chip changed the game with AAA game titles coming this time, truly incredible if It matters

dwinston33 said:

Apple A17 Pro chip changed the game with AAA game titles coming this time, truly incredible if It matters

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There's always been a small number of AAA games on the iPad. Recall Street Fighter IV and Civ 5 years back? The problem is you only get a few and the rest never appears on there.

Lets put out an example. Here's the top 10 sellers on steam right now. As of this post and not including DLC/non-games the top 10 list is:

1. Destiny 2
2. Bodycam
3. Elden ring
4. Counter Strike 2
5. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel
6. Ghost of Tsushima
7. Helldivers 2
8. Call of Duty: Black Ops III
9. Baldur's gate 3
10. Dead by Daylight

Of those exactly 1 game is on IOS and 1 is available on a mac. Go through the entire 100 item list and you'll won't find many that runs on iOS or a mac

dwinston33 said:

Apple A17 Pro chip changed the game with AAA game titles coming this time, truly incredible if It matters

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OK we all saw that Apple Keynote.

Look-- the A17 Pro is a good processor and the iPod is a very good platform in general and good for certain modalities of games, but it is just not where you want to go in order to play AAA games first. There are better options for that specific type of gameplay-- either games that play well on a gamepad on a console + TV or PC, ultimate performance/modded/indie/keyboard/mouse games on a PC, or handheld games on a switch or Steam Deck or RoG Ally or whatever similar product comes next. Laptops play a peripheral role as well. iPads are an also-ran for AAA playstyles even before we think about what titles are even available.

For games that are mobile-first, touch-first, the iPad is a very valid platform. There are games that try to do clever things with the touchscreen, but the complexity of addressing the inputs required for a true AAA game with a fundamentally touchscreen experience are just not great even if the SoC can handle the visuals of the game. The modality matters, and the availability of titles matter. My iPad is massively faster than a Nintendo Switch, but it's just not going to compete with a form factor I can hold by the controller edges of the screen for games where that's the best option. In that one way, it's not as good as a smartphone + backbone or similar.

A lot of things must change before Apple releases something in Switch/Deck form factor. But there are other formats that are valid for AAA, and basically a gamepad controller and a variable size screen are good for a ton of games. Esp. if you can easily use a large screen.

It's not at all a hardware/form-factor problem. There's something else (and it has been discussed here).

dspariI said:

That was totally wrong, but people were questioning Nintendo after the Wii U failing internationally; I will always feel compelled to point out that it was #1 in Japan until the Switch was officially announced.

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Are you referring to the Wii U as being #1 in Japan or Nintendo as a whole? Because Wii U was never #1 in Japan.

3DS was the #1 console in Japan by a gigantic margin, because the Japanese market has been very heavily skewed towards handheld gaming for a long time. Even if we ignore handhelds, Wii U was also easily outsold by the PS4 in Japan.

Asral said:

Are you referring to the Wii U as being #1 in Japan or Nintendo as a whole? Because Wii U was never #1 in Japan.

3DS was the #1 console in Japan by a gigantic margin, because the Japanese market has been very heavily skewed towards handheld gaming for a long time. Even if we ignore handhelds, Wii U was also easily outsold by the PS4 in Japan.

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Specifically non-handhelds. The PS4 did outsell it in the long run (~8.5m vs. ~3.5m), but during the time they were on sale at the same time, the PS4 only crossed the Wii U's lifetime sales in the late September using Media Create's weekly numbers*. There is huge caveat that the Wii U was on sale for two years before the PS4 launched i.e. Sony sold in 2 years what Nintendo did in 4.

Your main point is definitely true. Japan has had a preference for portables with the 3DS's sales compared to the Wii U in the region being 8x overall, 7x at that point and 6x as time from launch. I really loved the Wii U, but I still have my 3DS next to me at my desk and plugged into my Switch for power

* Sony is really cagey with hardware sales figures, but Media Create's numbers are only 2% off from Nintendo's official numbers (3.23m for MC versus 3.30m from Nintendo to 9/30/16).

dspariI said:

Specifically non-handhelds. The PS4 did outsell it in the long run (~8.5m vs. ~3.5m), but during the time they were on sale at the same time, the PS4 only crossed the Wii U's lifetime sales in the late September using Media Create's weekly numbers*. There is huge caveat that the Wii U was on sale for two years before the PS4 launched i.e. Sony sold in 2 years what Nintendo did in 4.

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Oh, that's what you meant. Sure, that's technically true but it's kind of a weird way to count it since it only highlights the fact that PS4 launched later.

Although if you're gonna use lifetime sales, then the PS3 was technically the #1 non-handheld console in Japan throughout that time period. PS3 was still being produced and sold in Japan until it was discontinued in May 2017 (it sold 50 thousand units in 2016!), it still had new games coming out in 2017, and it had lifetime sales of over 10 million. The PS4 still hasn't caught up to it in Japan, although PS4 did much better internationally.

dwinston33 said:

Apple A17 Pro chip changed the game with AAA game titles coming this time, truly incredible if It matters

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Nobody bought them though

Assassin's Creed Mirage was downloaded approximately 123,000 times since June 6, Appfigures says. However, it has only managed gross revenue of $138,000.
The report believes that the revenue level indicates that fewer than 3,000 people were willing to unlock the full game at $49.99.

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I was just going to sign this "see y'all in five years when this topic hits again" but I'm trying to come up with why this attempt cratered so hard and got nothing. Is it the ecosystem? the hardware? The user base?

Paul Hill said:

Is it the ecosystem? the hardware? The user base?

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I dunno. Yes? Maybe? All of the above? You're asking the question that has been churned over and over again in this thread, and also in our long-running Apple And Gaming thread in the MacAch (82 pages and counting).

I think we can agree, the hardware isn't the barrier it once was. While no one (no one with their head on straight, that is) is claiming your average iPhone or Mac is 4090 or even 4060-level performant, at least there's now a powerful graphics and CPU baseline across all modern Apple devices for developers to leverage. Add to it Apple's recent focus on improving porting tools and Metal APIs, and there's the foundation of devices that are capable of playing modern games with reasonable graphics fidelity without stress. That's a huge improvement over where things were even 5 years ago, and credit where credit is due.

Livewise, the ecosystem offers some interesting opportunities for developers and users alike: Simultaneous development targeting a wide range of platforms, from iPhone to iPad to Mac to AppleTV, is possible, with (for better or worse) an App Store mono-culture that makes marketing and distribution simple and easy to monetize. Apple doesn't always make the practical realities of this easy, but the opportunity is there in a way that it's not elsewhere.

So, is it the users? In part, perhaps. Casual gamers, which Apple owns in droves, are not likely to be motivated to try an immersive, challenging game in the first place, especially one that requires (and deserves) a much higher upfront cost (set aside the irony of how Apple profits handsomely from extracting money through the FTP/loot box mechanics that dominate casual gaming). And gaming enthusiasts like myself aren't going to wait for some thin trickle of AAA games to show up on our primary platform. As I said early on in this thread, it's about the games. I'll adjust my platforms as necessary in order to experience the games I want to play. The platform doesn't matter to me. As the type of user who doesn't blink at paying $60 or $70 for a game on day one if it's a game I really want to play, in addition to maintaining a (relatively) expensive Game Pass subscription, any publisher only targeting Apple devices years after a game has debuted elsewhere has zero chance of capturing my interest. Zero. Because I've already either played the game elsewhere, or decided I'm not interested in the first place.

So I'd like to suggest a 4th reason: The article you quote from AppleInsider is based on an article on MobileGamer.biz, which hints at the problem in its final graf:

“Overall, the story with AAA titles coming to Apple devices makes more sense from a marketing perspective,” adds Appmagic’s Zubov. “The news about another project coming to mobile will get guaranteed publicity and perhaps will motivate a small number of people to buy the Pro version of the phone.”

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It's cultural. Because this latest attempt to lure gamers and game development to Apple platforms smacks of the same backhanded effort that has always plagued Apple's moves in this space: It comes across as a marketing conceit designed to make expensive devices appear more desirable rather than a genuine interest in fostering a community of gamers on their terms. By comparison, Microsoft has succeeded in bringing and keeping games on its platforms, despite other ham-fisted consumer space failures, because they meet gamers where they are and deliver experiences that gamers want to have on the timeline and with the diversity of choice that gamers expect.

Apple is absolutely capable of this sort of thinking. It is their exacting attention to meeting the needs of creatives that has made me, as an artist and graphic designer, an Apple loyalist for 25+ years. But you can't fake it, any more so than Microsoft producing one model of Surface Studio (as cool as it was, in presentation) would make me switch platforms. There's just no understanding of my community as an artist within Microsoft, just as there's no understanding of my community as a gamer within Apple. Failure is predestined.

cateye said:

any publisher only targeting Apple devices years after a game has debuted elsewhere has zero chance of capturing my interest. Zero. Because I've already either played the game elsewhere, or decided I'm not interested in the first place.

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I have mined your post and found the gold nugget.

I think this is it. The test would be to be launched at day one and then see how it goes. At that point you have someone who wants to buy it and can pick from multiple platforms...how many pick the Apple platform over xbox/PS/Switch/Windows/Android/other.

Paul Hill said:

I was just going to sign this "see y'all in five years when this topic hits again" but I'm trying to come up with why this attempt cratered so hard and got nothing. Is it the ecosystem? the hardware? The user base?

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Take the set of people who care enough about AAA games to pay $60 for one. Next, take the set of people who don't care enough about AAA games to own a gaming PC or a console. Finally, take the set of people who've got a high-end iOS device. Find the intersection of these three sets. That's the potential audience for a full-price AAA game on iOS. It's not surprising that it's quite small.

It's interesting that iOS devices are now fast enough to run some AAA games at playable speeds, but the move here is to sell them for $14.99 a year or two after they debut elsewhere. Precisely because iOS isn't taken seriously as an AAA gaming platform, you can reach a new audience at a lower price there without worrying that this will cannibalize full-price sales elsewhere.

Echohead2 said:

At that point you have someone who wants to buy it and can pick from multiple platforms...how many pick the Apple platform over xbox/PS/Switch/Windows/Android/other.

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The counterpoint I often see argued within the Apple community is there must be a vast middle ground of "pro-casuals," ready to graduate from match 3 mechanics, but not interested the expense or complexity of chasing AAA games on a different platform, even something as self-contained as a console. And those people may exist (in fact, I know they exist, they have their own message board on MacRumors).

The problem is, if they actually existed in any great numbers, than something like Death Stranding coming to the Mac should've been a home run. I just don't think there are enough people who are willing to say "I like games, but only on my Mac/iPhone/iPad" to sustain developer effort or attention. Or if there are, 3-4 games every 12 months isn't going to be enough to motivate even the "pro-casual" crowd to care.

ZnU said:

you can reach a new audience at a lower price there without worrying that this will cannibalize full-price sales elsewhere.

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But is a lower price point and the demonstrated low sales going to be enough to pay for the development costs required to move your game to an entirely unique stack? There's the Catch-22. Maybe Apple's new porting tools will help alleviate that pressure point eventually, but if they're serious about helping developers nurture and serve the audience you describe, I think Apple can and should do a lot more to improve those economics through full-throated support of key middleware rather than always spinning up bespoke solutions.

Forget that it's iOS or an Apple product for now. It's a slab of glass (phone sized or iPad sized) that is capable of playing games.

Assuming you have options-- at least one other good platform that you could use to play that game without any of the large number of compromises that are driven by a touchscreen interface, at what price point that's lower than a more dedicated gaming system makes sense. Spoiler alert: if you have options, it's going to be pretty low.

Apple is down to convincing people that it will have exclusives worth buying their platform to get-- even Microsoft and Sony are failing at that-- or price games accordingly for the fact that other options exist and usually work better for games not originally intended for a touch interface. Or they need some other pricing regime altogether.

As it stands, in the market now if they're serious, they MIGHT be a ~3rd-5th place contender against current competition depending on how you slice the market/if you define AAA gaming writ large vs premium mobile gaming. There are platforms that are further down the stack, but it's not a great best-case scenario.

cateye said:

The counterpoint I often see argued within the Apple community is there must be a vast middle ground of "pro-casuals," ready to graduate from match 3 mechanics, but not interested the expense or complexity of chasing AAA games on a different platform, even something as self-contained as a console. And those people may exist (in fact, I know they exist, they have their own message board on MacRumors).

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Heh, you’ve just recreated Nintendo’s entire strategy with the DS and Wii. Which hey, they moved ~260 million systems with that strategy, so it can work. Of course they did it on the back of their own internal studios which Apple notably lacks, but oh well.

cateye said:

The problem is, if they actually existed in any great numbers, than something like Death Stranding coming to the Mac should've been a home run. I just don't think there are enough people who are willing to say "I like games, but only on my Mac/iPhone/iPad" to sustain developer effort or attention. Or if there are, 3-4 games every 12 months isn't going to be enough to motivate even the "pro-casual" crowd to care.

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The only additional point I’d make is that it feels like overall market forces do favor the Mac making at least some inroads. Game budgets have exploded, making additional sales critical (see SquareEnix publicly abandoning exclusivity going forward after FF7 Rebirth underperformed). The rise of middleware means once you’ve got an engine running on a platform the marginal costs of additional ports using that same engine drop dramatically. And Apple’s shipping performant systems with what looks to finally be a stable and modern development platform, with a customer base that skews towards gaming’s natural demographics (end consumers, families, and high school/college students with enough disposable income to afford a Mac).

I’m not arguing against the reality of the last, well, entirety of time since 1984, but it sure feels like Mac gaming shouldn’t be the joke it unquestionably is and that at some point the dam breaks. Although it sure hasn’t yet, and it’s not obvious that it ever will.

Chris FOM said:

I’m not arguing against the reality of the last, well, entirety of time since 1984, but it sure feels like Mac gaming shouldn’t be the joke it unquestionably is and that at some point the dam breaks. Although it sure hasn’t yet, and it’s not obvious that it ever will.

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I suspect some of it is just historical prejudice. "Apple sucks at gaming!" following by "always has, always will" or something.

Perception is hard to break.

cateye said:

The counterpoint I often see argued within the Apple community is there must be a vast middle ground of "pro-casuals," ready to graduate from match 3 mechanics, but not interested the expense or complexity of chasing AAA games on a different platform, even something as self-contained as a console. And those people may exist (in fact, I know they exist, they have their own message board on MacRumors).

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With the exception of the small group of hardcore Apple enthusiasts who exclusively use Apple devices, I suspect most of these "pro-casuals" just end up getting a Playstation or Switch after a while.

Chris FOM said:

Heh, you’ve just recreated Nintendo’s entire strategy with the DS and Wii. Which hey, they moved ~260 million systems with that strategy, so it can work. Of course they did it on the back of their own internal studios which Apple notably lacks, but oh well.

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Totally! but I think we can agree that Nintendo is quite the unicorn. And their success has a lot to do with the uniqueness of what those internal studios produce. The Switch is near perform in terms of its form and function, but it's not without weaknesses: It's terrifically underpowered, the hardware engineering is suspect (don't even look at a Joycon the wrong way or it will instantly start to drift), etc. Yet my family is so invested in Nintendo's IP we own two.

So we're back to it: The games matter. But Apple will always be about the sanctity of their vision for their platforms, first and foremost. This will always be their disconnect with games.

Echohead2 said:

I suspect some of it is just historical prejudice. "Apple sucks at gaming!" following by "always has, always will" or something.

Perception is hard to break.

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Most of us are grizzled old veterans of the whole mac vs pc wars. The people who are into gaming tend to skew a much younger crowd. They don't have the bias about how you can't game on a mac since those battles are ancient history of like 25+ years ago and no one ever brings them up anymore..

What they have seen is that every so often there's this big promise of this time apple is going to go all out for gaming, and they fail to deliver.

cateye said:

So we're back to it: The games matter. But Apple will always be about the sanctity of their vision for their platforms, first and foremost. This will always be their disconnect with games.

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Everyone has a vision of thier devices. Apple's problem is that they don't care if you game while others do care. They pay some lip service to gamers, but that's all it really is. I don;t think metal for instance was making a great api as it was making an api that apple fully owns and controls. Contrast this withs ay DirectX which came about because under windows you couldn't directly write to the screen and using what existed was really slow for a game, so Microsoft made sure you had something that replicated the benefits that DOS had with screen writes. The very first game using DirectX was Doom, which Microsoft ported for free and let ID retain the rights to sell. I can't fathom Apple doing something like that for gaming

At the beginning, I think Apple did have the right idea with Arcade. Throw a bunch of money at mid to large budget indie games and some smaller releases from major studios. Some of those early games are very good. Shinsekai from Capcom is one of the best metroidvanias ever made. When that didn't succeed in the short term, pivoting more towards casual games does show that's where they think the audience really is. They could turn things around a little by at least giving major games an income floor. The price base+DLC price of RE VII, Village and the 4 remake isn't outside the range of what the older Arcade games went for when they came to other platforms.

dspariI said:

At the beginning, I think Apple did have the right idea with Arcade. Throw a bunch of money at mid to large budget indie games and some smaller releases from major studios.

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I agree, I think the early approach showed promise and it was, to a limited degree, exactly the sort of "throw money at the problem and stay out of the way" approach some of us have argued Apple needs to pursue. No one would confuse these early efforts for anything but mobile games, but they were a cut above in terms of production values and there were some gems.

What happened next depends on who you ask. Games that were signed deals had their funding withdrawn. Apple's willingness to spend six figures or more on a ground-up timed exclusive became spending only five figures for puzzle-style games and remasters/remakes of existing properties with no exclusivity. While Apple Arcade's remaining tentpole features—no ads, no IAP—aren't to be overlooked as this instantly solves what makes mobile gaming completely miserable and forgettable otherwise, many have noticed that some of the games coming to AA lately reflect the "lowest possible effort" status that suggest minimal seed capital: existing games, stripping IAP mechanics, but with few other changes. In some cases, the missing IAP gates or thresholds affect or break gameplay.

For a company that supposedly "sweats the details," Apple Arcade has become a remarkably shoddy effort and yet again suggests Apple see gaming more as something they have to reduce themselves to enable rather than embracing it for its creative potential.

Chris FOM said:

The rise of middleware means once you’ve got an engine running on a platform the marginal costs of additional ports using that same engine drop dramatically. And Apple’s shipping performant systems with what looks to finally be a stable and modern development platform, with a customer base that skews towards gaming’s natural demographics (end consumers, families, and high school/college students with enough disposable income to afford a Mac).

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This is where my thinking is at. Every single off-to-college Mac sold has sufficiently performant hardware to run AAA games. The M series chips are here to stay. It takes a while to turn the cruise liner of gaming engines, but when (if...?) those are in place the calculus starts to shift.

Nevarre said:

Forget that it's iOS or an Apple product for now. It's a slab of glass (phone sized or iPad sized) that is capable of playing games.

Assuming you have options-- at least one other good platform that you could use to play that game without any of the large number of compromises that are driven by a touchscreen interface, at what price point that's lower than a more dedicated gaming system makes sense. Spoiler alert: if you have options, it's going to be pretty low.

Apple is down to convincing people that it will have exclusives worth buying their platform to get-- even Microsoft and Sony are failing at that-- or price games accordingly for the fact that other options exist and usually work better for games not originally intended for a touch interface. Or they need some other pricing regime altogether.

As it stands, in the market now if they're serious, they MIGHT be a ~3rd-5th place contender against current competition depending on how you slice the market/if you define AAA gaming writ large vs premium mobile gaming. There are platforms that are further down the stack, but it's not a great best-case scenario.

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There are games on iOS that require (or highly recommend) a controller and Apple sells quite a few different options in-store and online. Your focus on the touch screen interface is misguided.

I do think these game ports need to be closer to sale price than the day 1 retail price because the games have been available through other outlets for 50%-80% off before they hit the iOS/Mac App Store. The games either need to come out on day 1 or they need to match sale prices.

I highly prefer playing games on my iPad Pro(with an Xbox controller) over my Switch and have purchased stuff on the iOS App Store for the mobility the iPad offers. The Switch screen sucks (at least the LCD one does), it’s too small, and I’m not a fan of the joycons (it doesn’t help that one of mine drifts). Most of the time I’ve actually spent on the switch has been with it docked and with the Nintendo pro controller and any non-exclusives get purchased on other platforms. If I’m traveling and expect to have some down time, I’ll either bring my iPad or MacBook Pro.

ant1pathy said:

This is where my thinking is at. Every single off-to-college Mac sold has sufficiently performant hardware to run AAA games. The M series chips are here to stay. It takes a while to turn the cruise liner of gaming engines, but when (if...?) those are in place the calculus starts to shift.

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I'm old enough to recall the same exact argument 20+ years ago with the g3 macs. Apple even went as far as to show benchmarks on how powerful it is.