Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It
Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac to Justify It
So...how long before Apple realizes that game devs are notoriously time-crunched and forcing them to target yet another proprietary graphics API is a stupid move for their gaming ambitions?
I'm not convinced they'll ever realize the problem with their strategy. They'll keep half-assing it every couple of years and wondering why they don't have a larger gaming audience.
It's because they're addicted to their walled gardens. Everything within Apple's ecosystem must be tightly overseen and controlled, with little exception.
Yeah, they keep trying to bring their walled-garden approach to gaming and it just won't work. It's like trying to build another console in the current gaming market and unrealistically expecting it to take off.
It's also why I think the Vision Pro, despite how cool and innovative the tech might be, is also DOA.
Was CS:GO available natively on Mac? If so, this is unfortunate news for the small subset of Mac users who played, since CS:GO is now no more.
Damn Whoopie Goldberg gonna be so mad
Can you explain this joke, seen it more than once guessing she was used in apple marketing?
Whoopie got mad and called out Blizzard for not releasing Diablo 4 on Mac. I think it was on tiktok.
"This is what I’m asking you, Blizzard Entertainment,” Goldberg said, “This is Whoopi. You know how much I love Diablo. I would like y’all to let those of us who use our [Macs] to play. Allow us to play on the Apple. Take Diablo IV and let us do it and have a great time.”
https://kotaku.com/diablo-4-iv-for-mac-whoopi-goldberg-upset-blizzard-port-1850519443
Honestly? Kinda hate cs2. It runs worse (3080ti btw), most of my smoke grenades no longer work, they removed team deathmatch, they removed short competitive matches, and you can no longer play csgo. The more I play the less I'm a fan
I get the feeling it was pushed out before everything was ready. I am willing to bet that all these missing features are coming later. Not sure why they didn't just wait before pushing out the game. The smokes are just different, players just need to adapt to new mechanics instead of using the same grenade tactics that they've memorized for years.
Yeah they haven't confirmed whether these features are making it back I believe, but they really ought to and I expect they will too. Smokes Im fine with. Mostly just annoying since the game feels almost identical to GO. A lot of smokes still work too so it's kinda trial and error to find which ones work now and dont.
I also find it annoying I can no longer see how much I damaged an enemy via console, but that's fair enough too.
Isn't CSGO CPU bound for the most part anyways?
Generally yeah but it still matters. I have a 5800X fwiw
I think much missing stuff is going to be coming. I think they just didn't want to delay CS2 any longer. CSGO is still playable from the properties panel. You can enable a legacy CSGO mode. Not sure about matchmaking though.
On my 3060ti with max everything I always have over 200 fps, but yes, definitely not as fast as CSGO still. What fps are you getting?
It seems odd not to have TDM from the outset. I somehow doubt turning off team damage or shortening the match length requires a huge dev lift. Maybe some surrounding infrastructure but still. On the FPS, I'll have to check! It feels like a lot lower than 200. I only have 144hz anyway so it must be worse than that
I think everyone would rather development effort for games go into Linux as opposed to macOS.
As a Mac user, I’m fine with this tbh. I don’t game on my Mac and most people I know with one don’t either.
As a user of an ecosystem that I care about, I totally do not. Why should the health of an ecosystem be dictated by my usage patterns or that of people that I know? Bit self-centered, also?
Also, today’s Apple fans and their “Apple-no-gaming” fiction are too quick to “forget” Bungie and how upset Steve Jobs was when Halo became Microsoft-exclusive. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/
Wow you guys hate apple more than I do and I really think they're overpriced but okay hard and software for people with other needs. The apple users I know don't really think about gaming at all, wondering how many seriously do.
The hatred has nothing to do with the products but the lack of participation in open standards like OpenGL or Vulkan.
Their products are incredibly well made (though I'd fuckin hope so given the pricing) and their software experience (barring the lack of good graphics API support) is quite nice.
I mean it would be kinda nice to have games on mac
It will probably work soon with that Windows compatibility thing apple is working on
You mean repackaged Wine that they're pretending to have invented? Yeah should do.
Really just repackaged Proton, with some ridiculous install requirements including fucking Homebrew.
It's not even Alpha level software right now. But, just to argue their side: it is meant as a preview for game developers to package their games with right now, and not the general public.
Still... Fucking Homebrew.
The one that explicitly states in its license that you're not allowed to ship anything using it?
just install windows-version of steam, and a windows-version of CS:2, same way wine on linux works for blizzard launcher
It's meant more to help developers with their porting efforts though, not really meant for normal users like Valve's doing with Proton.
And there's nothing wrong with this. While I'd love to see companies develop games that run on all of the main three OSes, there is cost involved. And Valve determined that cost to be too high to worry with. This doesn't mean Macs suck, it just means Macs are not a viable gaming platform for some companies and some games.
Imagine if we saw reason instead of simply adding ourselves to the "Macs suck" bandwagon. What a world that would be -- with logic and reason and understanding. Nah, just pissing on things is better.
Is there a Proton-like software for Mac?
Wine is available for Mac, and Apple has started work on their game toolkit which was shown to run cyberpunk (albeit not well)
So yeah, but you're probably better off just dual booting asahi tbh.
Does Asahi have full support for the GPU yet? Would Proton work on a non-x86-x64 architecture? Last time I tried it (around 6 months back, been a minute) it worked great for anything that didn't need acceleration but I didn't think it could handle much more.
Too bad Apple guys won't be able to play a casino with extra steps
Same is true for many other games that get shit for their Microtransactions. But Valve is on the "good guy" site, so rules don't apply the same.
Will there be any new Macs really? Isnt everything just some iPhone/ipad with iOS soonish? I doubt macs have any relevance in the future - just like last time when there was no Steve Jobs around. I mean there arent really any apps even for their watch.... So why bother? Maybe they can just usw some cloudgaming ...Apple ppl love paying and subscriptions.
People have been saying that for years
Millions of developers of numerous technologies use Macs. To say macs won't have relevance in the future is clearly uninformed. As a gaming platform, sure, Macs leave plenty to be desired, but as development computers, they work extremely well, if overpriced.
lol MacBooks are insanely good with the release of the M chips, this opinion you’re sporting is pretty dated.
Maybe. But who needs it? I say nobody. The poor Photoshop and illu guys are already getting replaced. There is no need for osx so there is no need for desktop Macs and macbooks will run IOS and be nothing but a superpowerd ipad. Innovation with Apple is zero - they the money to do a new chip but nobody devs anymore for the iwatch since the idea how Apple wants to make business is pretty dated.
Meta app on iwatch ...lol. 90s are calling and they want Apple back in the grave i hear. Or maybe Bill Gates can help them AGAIN?
Whoopi Goldberg is gonna be pissed.
Whoopie is not going to be happy
is this a surprise to anyone?
I switched from windows to Mac.. I agree. The video cards on the M1/M2 is pretty bad (no proper raytracing and such). I actually got a PS5 and use that instead for gaming (and already have a XBOX Series X)
What....even a lot of niche games support Mac because there is a market there. But I am not playing a shooter on Mac anyway so whatever.
…what do you mean? It’s not like Mac support was near universal before either
That makes sense but I assumed that since it’s also on Linux, it would be a 0 effort port
In the earlier days of OS X this was true. A port from one to the other was somewhat trivial. However, Apple has done Apple things and tried to invent their own gaming library API after killing off OpenGL support on Macs and they've probably been up to some other buggery since then as well. Porting to Mac is probably equally as difficult from Windows now as Linux, and Linux has overtaken them on number of people who are playing on Steam.
Games have never been “trivial” to port to Mac, why do you think there are so few games that have been ported? Unless you write it for macOS, it’s just not easy or even worth it to port, has been since the Apple II days.
They still have some pretty old version of OpenGL and Metal was a bit before Vulkan, so it’s sort of a lightning vs USB C situation.
I don’t believe that it was easy. Since it started macOS was based on BSD, not Linux, which is quite different. They also use different types of binaries and the similarities between kernels should end beyond the BSD compatibility layer. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSDisJustmacOSWithouttheGoodBits
macOS is BSD based, not Linux based. Different graphics underpinnings as well. Apple has released some helper layers to assist in porting, but it’s still no cakewalk.
Isn't the Linux version just the windows version running with the usual compatibility layers (proton or whatever)? In other words, not an actual port?
No, it's native Linux with native Vulkan as well.
The Linux version of cs:go had native logic and wrapped rendering via valve's ToGL from before proton. CS2 is fully native though.
This is far from a black and white answer. A lot of the first gen steam machine 'ports', including those from Valve, Aspyr, Feral and Virtual Programming used source code level wrapper libraries to convert D3D calls to OpenGL. This added a little bit of extra overhead to the port so a lot of these early ports suffered a little slower performance (in my opinion an average of about 15% slower). These ports were compiled from source code so they were still native ports, if a little half-assed for time and manpower's sake. As time went on Valve and VP's wrappers improved to the point that you could get 1:1 performance or sometimes much better performance running the port under linux (for example VP's wrapper would multi-thread the renderer even if the original D3D renderer was singled-threaded). Feral went on to re-code a handful of their later ports from D3D to Vulkan, again, achieving better performance under linux. A few game engines were written with linux in mind from the start, such as The Talos Principle/Serious Sam 3, and those titles, in my opinion, would be best to use to compare the relative performance of the two OS's at that time.
Nowadays you still have a fair amount of indie titles coming out with native linux support. Not many larger titles in recent years, but you do still get some such as Psychonauts 2 and stuff from Paradox. Proton has gotten so good now that many games will run better on linux from day 1 than on Windows-steal-yo-data-11.
There's no such thing as a zero-effort port
It would be, if you use macOS on an intel CPU with an AMD GPU.
But porting it to an entirely different CPU and GPU architecture with entirely different graphics API (Metal) makes no sense whatsoever.
It could be a 0 effort port but there will be a ton of working fixing issues and making sure it works on new OS versions etc
Apple: only implements a proprietary graphics API
Also Apple: Why does no one make games for my platform??
Luckily it plays on Apple Silicon Macs beautifully through CrossOver. In the MacGaming sub users are getting 100+fps.
It does, but Valve doesn't spend money in taking any responsibility over it. Also I presume anticheat might not work properly.
In any scenario, the translation layer has a performance impact which for any competitive player is something that makes Apple a no-go.
Is this true? Could I not do OpenGL on a Mac?
They ship an outdated and unreliable implementation 😅 There are things that use it, but my understanding is you couldn't use it in the same way you can on other platforms.
OpenGL is a fossil at this point.
CS 2 isn't on open gl
Steve Jobs quite openly hated the idea of anyone gaming on a Mac because he felt like it made their products seem more childish or something. It seems like either nobody at Apple has managed to dig that particular brainworm out yet or have just decided that printing iPhone money makes all other concerns irrelevant.
This is absolutely not true, certainly not at the time of Bungie and how Microsoft made Halo Xbox-exclusive: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/