Let's see. Unreal Engine can build for Apple Silicon. So any game dev can make his choice himself. Unity and others are also there as good frameworks.
More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.
Majority of game development companies don't build their own tooling. Option to build a binary for ARM Mac is not sufficient to bring high quality experience to whatever proprietary tech Apple will put out there. And it's quite certain it's gonna be incompatible with Meta's offerings, wont integrate with other platforms, etc.
I not saying like Apple have no chances at all here, but building own gaming ecosystem is extremely prohibitive expensive even for large corporations. Both Microsoft and Sony spent a decades on building their console ecosystems as well as tens of billions of dollars.
Google and Meta both tried an failed miserably. Both Microsoft and Epic tried to compete with Valve on PC, spent billions and 5 years later their store is still dont have any real marketshare.
Most importantly Apple just can't really go out and buy some companies simply because Microsoft, Tencent and few other giants already own half of big players out there. So it's gonna be really really hard for them to create mass market product that can compete.
PS: I won't even start on fact that it's gonna be impossible to do it "in secret" for them this time. Competitors will be on them immediately.
The only way they could have convinced me it actually might be around 18 months after launch is if Alphabet spun out an entirely new company for it.
Launching it as Google Stadia was basically a self-fulfilling prophecy of cancellation. Few wanted to pay good money for product that was going to dissolve in a year or two.
The most important thing is frameworks. No joke, nothing is currently stopping Apple from making a headset that ships with support for Half Life: Alyx. If they support DXVK at a protocol level and ship a Wine runtime like the Steam Deck does, they could support Beat Saber, Tabletop Sim and VRChat without their developers even knowing.
But they won't. As-is, Apple's insistence on iron-fisting their ecosystem is hurting them greatly. It's the reason gaming on Mac died, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the reason inferior headsets outsell the Apple one 10:1.
They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx (a Steam exclusive designed for the Valve Index) or Beat Saber (by Meta-owned Beat Games).
> It's the reason gaming on Mac died
Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles on one side and custom-built gaming rigs on the other. The majority of their sold systems are battery-powered, and your first chance at a GPU power envelope of even 150W is the Mac Pro. Which, coincidentally, is also the only Mac left that has a dGPU option.
The real question is why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
> They still would have to _license_ Half Life: Alyx
Nope. The user can license it, as long as the client is supported. And good news too, recent Steam updates have added support for ARM64 clients on Unix systems.
> Some gaming on Mac died because they are pinched by consoles
I mean, most gaming on Mac died because of inconvenient 32-bit lib depreciation and Apple's coincidentally unfortunate refusal to support a standardized graphics API. With Proton, Macs are a Steam Deck. Without them, they're a Steam Machine. They're not mega-powerful machines in the first place, but neither is my Thinkpad and it still plays nice with Wine.
> why so few developers take the effort to build and support their iOS games for iPadOS and macOS.
Now that is a head-scratcher. My best guess is that the market is thin, and the carrot at the end of the stick isn't big. It's much easier than porting a DirectX or Vulkan title from scratch though, that's for certain.
More importantly, Apple did not ruin relationsships with Media companies. I'd love to see some more VR concerts or other events. Meta totally failed at scaling this.