Apple’s gaming strategy is so bizarre. Early on it basically was the platform for gaming (remember when Halo was previewed at MacWorld? (What sort of weird alternate timeline would we have had if Apple bought it instead of Microsoft? Would there even be an Xbox?)) and it again regained that title, but as a side effect of the iPhone’s portable-but-powerful platform.
But their current strategy seems lacking.
- Why isn’t there an integration with Steam? You’re not getting around the fact that people have huge collections of purchases on that platform, so having some way to not double-purchase by linking your Steam and App Store accounts would already help.
- This new Games app is basically just the App Store but pared down without the junk.
- Why doesn’t Apple have an in-house porting team? If a company like Nightdive can come in and fill the gap by porting classic titles to modern platforms, I’m sure Apple could pull their weight to help convince developers.
People always mention how macOS isn’t a large enough platform to justify developing games for it, but I’d argue that if more games supported it (and ran well), why would anyone want to have to buy both a Mac and a PC? They could accelerate this effort by taking a similar strategy to what Sony did to reverse their fortunes in the 360/PS3 era—find the top-tier, critically acclaimed games and port those to macOS. That alone would shift the conversation to “Well, with a Mac I’ll always be able to play the top games, but maybe I miss out on the random indie stuff.”