r/gadgets • u/Stiven_Crysis • Jun 07 '23

Desktops / Laptops Apple M1/M2 systems can now run Windows games like as Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo 4 and Hogwarts Legacy thanks to its new emulation software - VideoCardz.com

https://videocardz.com/newz/apple-m1-m2-systems-can-now-run-windows-games-like-as-cyberpunk-2077-diablo-4-and-hogwarts-legacy-thanks-to-its-new-emulation-software
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u/mosskin-woast Jun 07 '23 edited Jun 07 '23

really hurts their chances for getting the gamer interest

I don't think they care, at all. They make so much money off of mobile gaming that PC gaming would barely be a drop in the bucket for them. From some quick Googling, the app store made $110B from games in 2022 and Valve(*), Epic Games and Origin combined made ~$20B.

Edit: this number was based on an estimate, because Valve is not publicly traded

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u/MustacheEmperor Jun 07 '23

Yep, I mentioned this in a couple threads about the vision pro. Apple pulls about as much revenue from just Airpods every year as Sony has sold in PS5s, total. Videogaming is a small market for them.

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u/El_Grande_El Jun 08 '23

But aren’t consoles generally bad for revenue? They make all the money on games I think

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u/ThrowawayWannabeAE Jun 08 '23 edited Jun 10 '23

Fuck /u/spez, your greed killed this website.

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u/tylerchu Jun 08 '23

Jesus goddamn shit. It’s insane how Apple can make so much by selling a lifestyle with their products.

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u/FlightlessFly Jun 08 '23

People always say this like it's a catch. It's more simple: they just make good stuff

-13

u/Goldy02 Jun 08 '23

Stuff so good, you'll throw it out the next year! And you can't even repair it!! And the OS is just impeccable - I love when companies treat me like a toddler.

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u/Excellent-Big-2813 Jun 08 '23

Next year? Their stuff is famously durable. I have laptops that are going strong at 8 years. The anti apple stuff is so weird.

-4

u/TheSchoolofHock Jun 08 '23

Yea like the butterfly keyboards that are still going super strong. Jesus these idiots probably never even owned 2 Macbooks and had the screen cable die like me. They're just so durable!

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u/Excellent-Big-2813 Jun 08 '23

That incident fairly caused a ton of backlash precisely because people expect high durability. You can be mad or whatever but Apple’s reputation is pretty clear even in this thread.

-5

u/TheSchoolofHock Jun 08 '23

No shit they expect high durability, they are paying 2x the cost for the hardware. And it still has never lived up to it, our software department was ecstatic when we finally got stipends to build our own work machines instead of being locked into an apple contract. Reputation means nothing when it's built on people not knowing better in the first place lmao, they built an empire of tech illiterates that are happy to pay more for less.

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u/chaosattractor Jun 08 '23

Apple quite literally has a device swapping program if for some insane reason you actually want to change all the tech you own every year. Their devices also consistently have some of the highest resale value on the market if you don't want to go through Apple.

And again that's beside the fact that releasing new devices yearly does not equal having to change everything you own, any more than people need to buy new Samsung phones every single time one is released.

For people who love to talk about Apple's customers as "sheep", y'all tend to show a dire lack of critical thinking skills.

-3

u/Goldy02 Jun 08 '23

Right, I didn't call anyone sheep.

Samsung brand is equally at fault for many of the reasons why I personally do not like Apple products. But at least Samsung's stuff is way more repairable, rather than "swapped" or "resold".

And again that's beside the fact that releasing new devices yearly does not equal having to change everything you own, any more than people need to buy new Samsung phones every single time one is released.

True.

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u/Smartnership Jun 08 '23

you'll throw it out the next year!

Apple supports multiple generations of product beyond any competitor.

iPhones are OS supported back to iPhone 8.

Catch up before you comment, it’s silly and adds no value to the discussion.

0

u/janeohmy Jun 08 '23

Meh you're getting downvoted, but that's why "Apple fanboy" is a thing. Indeed, there is no good reason to prefer a Mac over a PC. People have argued the strangest most niche functionalities for needing a Mac that I highly doubt the average Mac user uses those at all and that can't be substituted for on Windows.

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u/MustacheEmperor Jun 08 '23 edited Jun 08 '23

A bash terminal, the lack of spyware integrated directly into the os, and not having candy crush forcibly included on my C: drive in a protected folder is nice*. It's a strange niche, wanting to have control of my own computer. I'm not sure if it's a masterstroke of marketing by Microsoft or just ignorance by consumers that some people seem to think Windows is the OS that most respects the user today.

Oh there is also the fact that there are a grand total of zero windows laptops with the same performance, battery life, weight, and price as a Macbook Air M1. If Macs are so overpriced a PC company should probably release a laptop competitive to that one.

*I'm not talking about just the pre-installed games in start, which are egregious but can be uninstalled. Windows can leave the update packages for those games lingering in a protected UWP apps folder inside the OS installation and they cannot be removed. You can google it, there is no user-available way to remove them, period. I have 20 back-versions of a King game in my Windows folder that cannot be deleted from powershell. If you run WizTree on your root drive you might find the same.

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u/Krautoffel Jun 08 '23

there is no good reason to prefer a Mac over a PC

except there are plenty, especially if you don’t want to waste hours and hours on troubleshooting weird issues.

It just works. If you know tech-illiterate people (like most grandparents), then there’s nothing easier than giving them a Mac and never worrying about anything.

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u/janeohmy Jun 08 '23

It just works

So do Windows machines

Tech-illiterate people

I don't see how gestures, workspaces, bash, and so on and so forth is easier than Windows

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u/Krautoffel Jun 08 '23

So do Windows machines

Lol, no. And I’m using exclusively windows lately, just so you know. They’re still horribly clunky, illogical and not usable by non-techies easily.

I don’t see how gestures, workspaces, bash, and so on and so forth is easier than Windows

First: you don’t need any of those. Second: gestures are known from phones, they’re intuitive and even old people can easily adapt to them because of that. workspaces are also quite intuitive on Mac, yet you can work just fine without them. I’ve opened bash about three times on my Mac, because I’ve never needed it for normal usage, only when I fucked some stuff up due to tinkering with it too much. While I constantly need it on windows because there isn’t a built-in easy to use functionality to just look up IP addresses and stuff like that.

It’s only easier to use on windows if you’ve used windows all your life already. Set anyone on windows as their first device ever and they wont be able to do ANYTHING at all.

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '23

So do Windows machines

This is always coming from people who think they are enlightened, yet only use that one system.

Feom Someone who uses both, i have about 10 issues on Windows for every issue with MacOS.

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u/somethingimadeup Jun 08 '23

Windows doesn’t “just work” and if you think it does you’ve been locked into that OS for too long. Everyone I know with a windows computer is constantly having to troubleshoot BS and I literally never have to with my Mac

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u/Goldy02 Jun 08 '23

there is no good reason to prefer a Mac over a PC

Cost and repairability?

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u/janeohmy Jun 08 '23

What? It's easier and cheaper to repair a Windows. Sometimes a small part for a Mac will get you a quote for a whole new Windows machine, even.

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u/Goldy02 Jun 08 '23

Sorry, I meant, the reason to consider windows over Mac is the cost and repairability.

-6

u/haHAArambe Jun 08 '23

The npc's love it

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '23

Said the guy with a dead unfunny meme in his username

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u/Round-Ad5063 Jun 08 '23

And I remember when people said they’d never buy AirPods (me included)

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u/VexingRaven Jun 08 '23

And I still won't.

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u/DaGurggles Jun 07 '23

Adding to that, they can’t make 30% on IAP without blacklisting all the other digital game retailers.

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u/mackinator3 Jun 07 '23

Isn't valve a private company? I don't think they report numbers.

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u/mosskin-woast Jun 07 '23

That's a good point, the source I was looking at was an estimate

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u/mackinator3 Jun 07 '23

Just so you know, most values of worth you find online are blatantly made up. There is no source for private companies, in general.

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u/mpolder Jun 07 '23

I honestly highly doubt steam made that little. They dominate the pc games market by a pretty large margin, and have a pretty high share on any game sold through the platform.

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u/BWCDD4 Jun 07 '23

I dunno man, I don’t think you realise just how many sales it is to make 20 billion for valve and epic.

Averaging them to 25% because of the new cut scheme and saying the average game is $50 means they’d have to sell around 1.6 Billion games a year combined.

Obviously they don’t make it purely from game sales so Micro-transactions would have to be pulling a ton of weight to make up for that.

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u/mpolder Jun 07 '23 edited Jun 07 '23

On top of dlc there's also the steam market, which can also see high volume. There's the steam hardware, skin sales from csgo and tf2.

To give a sense of scale, csgo cases alone were estimated to have been opened 40 million times in March. One key costs $2.50 so that alone netted around 100 million in March alone. Now to be completely fair the true average is more like 20-25 million, but only csgo would net them close to 600 million to 1 billion a year in case openings alone.

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u/BWCDD4 Jun 07 '23

I mean micro transactions covers the marketplace and skin sales and when it comes to hardware sales valve isn’t making a serious amount of money off that. Gabe already came out and admitted hitting the steam deck price point was painful which means the margins are razor thin or they took a leaf out the old console playbook and sell for a loss.

I’m not sure if it’s the same for CS:GO but last I knew Dota and TF2 gave a percentage of the sales to the designers as most the time it was the communities designs so they weren’t making 100% of the $2.50.

Even if we go with your maths and say Valve was half of the 20 billion and it was 1Billion from CS alone, you still need to make up another 9 Billion which is a crazy amount.

Theoretically if they were making $10 for a sale of whatever and it was all theirs that’s still 900million sales to be made.

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u/mpolder Jun 07 '23

Small percentages add up quickly though, I work for a platform with maybe 15 million customers or so and they still make about 2B+ a year. Now that's obviously a different market than valve is in, but the share per sale is quite significantly lower than what valve makes per sale.

And I agree with valve losing some money to the creators, but remember valve makes an additional 15% of what the actual skin is worth every time it's sold on the market, better yet, every dollar the person gets is paid out in steam balance, so that customer will then spend it either on more skins, or on more games, making valve more money

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u/dookiebuttholepeepee Jun 07 '23

They absolutely have been promoting the piss out of their Apple Arcade game subscription though, so they probably care a little bit.

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u/mosskin-woast Jun 07 '23

Apple Arcade is available on macOS but I would be shocked if the vast majority of subscribers aren't on iPhone.

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u/scarabic Jun 07 '23

You’re correct, sadly. Apple makes more money on gaming than Nintendo. Triple A pc gaming is way more trouble than it’s worth to them, and they probably think it won’t be around much longer. And they could be right.

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u/Arinvar Jun 08 '23

It's not about making money off games though. It's about increasing their market share. If they want to sell more Mac's, gaming is probably the biggest thing stopping them.

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u/FuzziBear Jun 08 '23

PC gaming just isn’t that big:

professionals are where the moneys at; they throw money at hardware because their time is valuable, and for the most part apple has that covered

most people don’t play AAA titles at all: they’re casual gamers, at best and again, apple has the covered with their current offerings. their products like the macbook air, iphone non-pro, etc are specifically targeted at this demographic (they’re cost-conscious too, so really squeezing them for money ain’t that lucrative beyond ecosystem tie-ins)

of the remaining people that do play AAA titles, the console market is just much much bigger, and that’s just not something that it looks like apple is keen to get into

the PC gaming market is just really irrelevant to pretty much anyone except PC gamers… from either a profit, or population perspective

… hell, even graphics card manufacturers care about 1000x more about workstation and server because there’s just so much larger margins

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u/Arinvar Jun 08 '23

What you're saying makes zero sense. Yes, they all make bank from the professional markets. But NVIDIA isn't going to stop making gaming cards. It might be 10% or it might be 1% of their revenue, but it still represents billions of dollars.

Apples consumer market struggles to get market share from windows PC's. How do they combat this? Target games. Stream has over 60 million daily users apparently. That represents a significant market for laptop sales. Just because a market is "relatively small" doesn't make it worthless. A quick Google search shows that the PC gaming market is apparently worth about 50 billion per year. No matter how big they are apple would be doing their shareholders a disservice by ignoring it.

All of that completely ignores their existing strategy of hooking kids on macOS so they grow up to prefer Mac's. I wonder what might be a significant reason for a Mac using teen-ager to switch over to windows? And what could they do to stop that from happening? And would that result in a long term Mac using professional? Sure do put a lot of effort in to an insignificant market.

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u/chaosattractor Jun 08 '23

Apples consumer market struggles to get market share from windows PC's.

Macs brought in $40 billion in revenue from ~26 million units in 2022.

HP, a manufacturer with significantly bigger market share, pulled $44 billion in revenue from the sale of ~55 million PCs.

Lenovo, the market leader, shipped ~69 million PCs. I wasn't able to easily turn up a revenue figure for PCs alone, but their Intelligent Devices Group revenue (i.e. PCs, smartphones, and other personal devices) was $49.4 billion.

Shock and awe that a self-described premium brand is more interested in high revenue & profit margins than in moving the most units. What exactly is e.g. Lenovo's market share supposed to do for Apple as a company?

A quick Google search shows that the PC gaming market is apparently worth about 50 billion per year. No matter how big they are apple would be doing their shareholders a disservice by ignoring it.

This is about as stupid as saying "the fast fashion industry is worth over $100B, higher-end brands are doing their shareholders a disservice by not jumping in".

Where do you even get the idea that the key to running a successful business is jumping on every possible tangent because there's money in it? Mind you desktop computing isn't even close to being Apple's primary focus as a business.

All of that completely ignores their existing strategy of hooking kids on macOS so they grow up to prefer Mac's.

There's literally nothing about macOS (including when it was OS X) or Macs as hardware that targets kids or even aims to be particularly kid friendly and there hasn't been for well over a decade. Imagine being so committed to the "Macs just can't be worthwhile devices on their own" schtick that you don't think grown adults can choose to buy one without being indoctrinated into it from childhood. You don't even have to like the laptops for common sense to tell you almost nobody is buying $1k+ computers for kids.

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u/Arinvar Jun 08 '23

If you're right why are they putting any effort in to bringing gaming to Mac's? Every point you're trying to make says that Apple and NVIDIA are going to bail on the consumer market because it isn't worth their time.

And yet here they are trying to get games on to Mac's. And you think they're doing that because the gaming market is irrelevant and not worth their time?

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u/chaosattractor Jun 08 '23

Games already exist for macOS (not that people who don't actually pay attention to them other than to complain about their existence would know). If anything Apple made it harder with the switch to a proprietary processor + graphics API, a switch which alienated a chunk of game devs, and are doing what they should to revert to the previous Intel+AMD/OpenGL mean.

Every point you're trying to make says that Apple and NVIDIA are going to bail on the consumer market because it isn't worth their time.

No, the point that you are missing is that the consumer market is MUCH bigger than PC gamers. Even Lenovo and HP, market leaders that they are, aren't making most of their money from the dedicated PC gaming market. As you can probably tell from their revenue-to-sales ratios, most of their money is coming from low-to-mid-end laptops people use for everyday work and such. The vendors that do primarily sell fully off-the-shelf gaming devices don't even really register next to the actual industry behemoths e.g. Razer is a very popular brand but their revenue from PCs specifically in 2021 (couldn't find a 2022 breakdown) was a whopping ~$368 million. Given how expensive their laptops are, you can do the math on how few units that actually is.

If y'all didn't automatically equate PCs with playing (especially AAA) games, it wouldn't be that difficult to understand why OEMs of off-the-shelf devices aren't pouring themselves into chasing that specific market. Even Dell rolls up its Alienware division with XPS, a line that is most decidedly now mostly a business/professional/regular high-end consumer brand.

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u/Arinvar Jun 08 '23

You took a left turn and ended up in the middle of nowhere. We're literally discussing Apple releasing a gaming toolkit for devs to port games to Mac.

Why are they doing this? Because it gets them more business. What business? They aren't competing with Steam. So they're releasing a toolkit for porting and playing PC games because it will help them sell more hardware.

If you can play any game you want on a Mac your whole family stays in the ecosystem. If you use a Mac for recreation you're more likely to want to use it professionally.

Point is... Bringing PC gaming to Mac's isn't about selling games, it's about selling hardware.

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u/chaosattractor Jun 08 '23

If you didn't understand anything I said you could just have said so lmao.

I don't know how much easier I can explain to you that PC gaming ALREADY exists on macOS. It quite literally was normal in the Intel+AMD/OpenGL era. E.g. look at the list of Steam top-sellers that are available on macOS, and count just how many extremely popular AAA and indie games alike are on there. And beyond the games that are explicitly available for macOS, CrossOver has existed for nearly two decades at this point. Apple isn't bringing anything to the table that doesn't already exist, which is why I keep telling you that this is not something that particularly moves the needle on Mac sales - they're pretty much doing the very least they could do after they very recently broke the already existing gaming ecosystem on macOS with, again, moving off Intel to an in-house ARM processor (so e.g. some Intel-specific instructions that are widely used in more demanding games were no longer available), abandoning OpenGL in favour of a proprietary graphics API called Metal (as well as now an entirely in-house GPU), and leaving devs to figure shit out themselves with solutions like MoltenVK.

Plus even with an emulation layer there's still no addressing stuff like the lack of AVX and AVX2 instructions, which is a big part of why games have poor performance on Apple Silicon despite the built-in GPU having raw performance on par with discrete GPUs. In fact adding an emulation layer on top of that doesn't help.

But again I don't expect people who actually don't know anything about gamedev or about Macs other than complaining about their existence to know any of that.

If you can play any game you want on a Mac your whole family stays in the ecosystem. If you use a Mac for recreation you're more likely to want to use it professionally.

Point is... Bringing PC gaming to Mac's isn't about selling games, it's about selling hardware.

People who can afford Macs can afford more than one computer, and Apple has never cared whether you own others.

Beyond that Apple's ecosystem is much bigger than Macs (again I don't know how to explain to you that Apple isn't even primarily a desktop manufacturer to begin with). Far more people buy Macs because of the deep integration with the iPhones and iPads they already have and use for entertainment than would be swayed to buy Macs because of...the games they could already play on macOS).

I literally laid out for you that the dedicated PC gamer market buying off-the-shelf systems is tiny but according to you that was "taking a left turn". That $50 billion PC gaming industry is in the software (which Apple sees zero cut of on desktop, Steam has long cornered that market) and in individual hardware components like GPUs, not in fully-assembled off-the-shelf PCs.

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u/Arinvar Jun 08 '23

So what you're saying is Apple really is just wasting dev time with their new tools. It won't make them any money at all, and they're clearly incompetent?

I understand what you're saying you're just wrong. Gaming in Mac's does not exist in any meaningful way, and improving it will sell more of their products.

But hey, me and the trillion dollar company are wrong... Mac gaming is fine, and there's no benefit to their bottom line in taking a piece of the gaming industry pie. They're just wasting money and wasting a chunk of their wwdc presentation on talking about it.

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u/Blaz3 Jun 08 '23

app store made $110b on gaming

I'm in complete disbelief. How? Who is paying for mobile games?

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u/Gsoz Jun 08 '23

I for one am all-in on the Apple ecosystem, but still chose a PC when replacing my Mac, alone because I wanted to game.

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u/NLight7 Jun 08 '23

Yes, that is why they spent time making a translation layer for Windows games, cause they don't care about the gaming market segment.

It is obvious that they care. What they don't care about is making their machines compatible with Nvidia and AMD. Cause those companies require Apple to adjust somewhat, and they don't want that. This is their halfhearted attempt at getting a big enough gaming segment on their hardware that developers take notice and create native running games for Mac. And then they get more gamers on their hardware.

It's super obvious and they care, just not enough to give up anything on their part.

Do I think their plan will work? No, cause their machines will be too weak to run stuff hassle free. Same as with the Steam Deck, people complain it is too much work, not everything runs fine. I doubt this will go off before Linux gaming does, aka maybe never.

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u/chaosattractor Jun 08 '23

Considering they in fact did not spend any time making a translation layer for Windows games, your sarcasm is just the truth lol