OfficialThunderbolt @ OfficialThunderbolt @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm talking about the platform, not the store front. Windows has far more than 90% of the PC gaming world market share, far more than what's enough to monopolize the PC gaming scene; GNU and macOS are a super distant second and third place. Whenever most people talk about "PC gaming", what they really mean is Windows, even though there are other PC platforms out there.

Because, to the majority of console gamers in the Americas and Europe, Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, and Madden are the Only Games That Actually Matter™. There are a few million people that buy PlayStations just to play 1-2 of those games to the exclusion of everything else.

Now that they've taken out one of the four major reasons why people outside of Asia buy PlayStations, they can extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on console gaming. It's sickening.

And somehow, I don't think that Sony resurrecting the Resistance series & making it into an annual release that always launches during the holiday season will make much of a difference.

What a sad day for gamers. Microsoft now has all it needs to extinguish PlayStation & assert a monopoly on consoles, just as they do on PCs already, and the regulators will give them a wink and a nudge.

Last month, one of the PS Plus Essential games of the month was by a developer that went out of business a few days before the game went live.

Downvotes don't work on Beehaw-hosted forums.

They can't buy Square Enix or Capcom; Japan has laws protecting certain Japanese companies from being bought out by foreign companies.

But why? Disney has made several attempts before to break into gaming, none of which have worked out well. The best Disney games have all been licensed games by Square Enix, BioWare, Capcom, etc.

Also, Disney doesn't have the cash to buy EA, so buying EA would involve them going deeply into debt. With today's interest rates, that would be too risky.

Even though they got burned really badly on OpenGL? It would've been better if Apple never discontinued QuickDraw 3D.

Your understanding is not quite correct. The regulations are for App Store apps only, which wouldn't affect CS2, and even if they did, they are not much different from other platforms' store regulations (no strong adult content, no gambling aides, no games that encourage you to damage peoples' hardware, you can't make games that would put private citizens' safety at risk, etc.). And the only money you have to pay is for a developer subscription, which gets you code signatures & anti-malware validation.

If it's any consolation, the Windows version runs on macOS Sonoma, but you need to use Whisky to install Windows Steam & launch it from there. Also, you need to adjust some graphics settings that can only be adjusted using the command line, or the frame rate will be unplayably bad.

I feared that CS2 would use some kernel-level anti-cheat solution, which would prevent it from running on macOS, but it doesn't.

The GPUs aren't really a problem; the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra chips are much more powerful than Intel's integrated GPUs, are very competitive with other mobile GPUs, and are competitive with all but the high end of desktop GPUs. The main thing holding them back is they consume less electricity, which is important in a laptop, but is not necessarily important in a desktop PC.

The problem is, game developers tend to pick the platforms that will make them the most money, and Microsoft has held an uncontested monopoly on the PC OS market for more than thirty years now. They have held onto their monopoly for so long because they have the high ground on GPUs (Apple has a grudge against Nvidia that probably won't go away until Tim Cook retires), and they also hold a number of popular games that are exclusive to Windows (Call of Duty, FIFA, Madden, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Fortnite, Diablo, Far Cry) whereas Apple's highest profile exclusive macOS game at the moment is Hello Kitty.

It seems like each time Apple makes gains in the PC market (iPod/iPhone halo effect, keeping controversial UI changes to a minimum), Microsoft gains one and a half times that.

I've brought various apps, bundles, and frameworks from PowerPC to Intel to 64-bit to ARM ever since macOS 10.0 first launched. Usually the most difficult parts were:

1. During the PPC to Intel transition, converting code that expected all data to be big-endian over to handling little-endian data, and catching integer division by zero before sending such operations to the CPU
2. During the 64-bit transition, switching from all the APIs Apple removed over to newer APIs, if not already done, and converting all code that expected integers and pointers to be 32-bit over to 64-bit
3. During the ARM transition, converting code that abused variadic functions to code that used them properly, and converting all code that expected long doubles to be 128-bit over to 64-bit (I know some developers were burned by the VM page size change, but that didn't affect anything I did)

But yeah, usually the most difficult part of the transition is managing the dependencies. Whenever Apple transitions CPU architectures, if your app depends on a closed-source third-party library or kernel extension made by developers that went out of business years ago, you're more or less screwed unless you can find or build a replacement.

Not really, unless the game code was written in X86-64 assembly language, does low-level VM allocation for some reason, or otherwise has special dependencies on Intel CPU-isms. With a few exceptions, C/C++/Objective-C code written for X86-64 can be easily recompiled for ARM64.

The PowerPC to X86 transition was much rougher, because of the byte order change + PPC allowing integer division by zero while X86 disallowed it.

Multiplayer trophies are the worst, in general, except in multiplayer-only games. Once the servers go offline, those multiplayer trophies become unattainable. It's especially a problem on PlayStation where, once the trophies become unattainable, so does the platinum.

Oopsies. Thanks. Corrected.

Yes; until D3DMetal came out, I was using my Steam Deck as a gaming PC, in order to play games not ported to macOS.

It contains an arbitration clause. Arbitration clauses are evil. No one should ever agree to them.

Define "irony": the company that got into their current position by pushing almost all of their competition to the sidelines now complains that someone else pushed them to the sidelines.

Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly a surprise. I tried it on my Steam Deck, and not only could I not figure out how to make the graphics look decent on my monitor, but I had a problem where the game would eventually stop accepting mouse input, forcing me to quit and relaunch. I didn't get far until I switched to the macOS version once it came out.

How are people playing that game on a Steam Deck?

I do. The originals were locked behind an anti-consumer EULA once Disney got ahold of them. Since I won't agree to their EULA, I was holding out hope for the remake.