Aspyr Will Stop Selling 32-Bit Mac Games After Today

I find it hard to believe it would be that hard to compile it as a 64bit binary. I wonder what library they're using that's causing it to be a deal breaker, surely every once in a while they get a few sales

It's not as simple as selecting the 64-bit target and recompiling. (I'm simplifying here...) The code will have many memory-mapped data structures where an integer is expected to be 32-bits. When integers are suddenly 64-bits, all of the addresses and offsets are no longer correct as they were set with the expectation that an integer was 4 bytes. Additionally, things like the graphics subsystem will need to target 64-bit drivers instead of 32-bit, and these things are usually not 100% the same across the entire API.

Yes, a forward thinking programmer can compensate for a lot of this when they write the code in the first place, but that doesn't mean they were forward thinking. As such, to update a given title, it can take one or more programmers a fair amount of time to update the data structures, target new drivers, etc, then test everything. For older titles, the cost of updating is often more than the expected profit from sales, so it doesn't make financial sense to update.

The Aspyr software list wasn't anywhere near as long as I was expecting, so that means that for a lot of titles, they really only did (or will) have to set the target to 64-bit or do some minor updates. Most of what is being dropped is quite old.

With that said, it's still sad that titles are being dropped. I expect things to be far worse for non-Feral/Asypr titles. There are a lot of small studios that aren't as committed to the Mac platform as those two, and I don't expect anywhere near as good of a conversion rate.

Of course it would be too hard to take a couple of million from the CEO and upgrade these games to 64bit.

Do you have any evidence that suggests that the CEO of Aspyr; a company who's entire revenue stream is based off porting games to Linux and Mac platforms, even makes a million dollars a year?

I'm confident that it's gotten harder to play games in macOS over the past 4 years. Back then, we had fairly up-to-date OpenGL, proper Nvidia support, and no looming 32-bit deprecations. Now Apple is asking for trouble with their war on open graphics standards and all this compatibility-breaking nonsense.

There are plenty of tests out there showing Mac-compatible games running worse in macOS than in Windows, and often it's not something the FPS meter can capture. I'm not a gamer, so idc usually, but every now and then I want to play CS:GO and have to reboot into Windows cause it's that bad in macOS. And it used to run fine 4 years ago.

Do you have any evidence that suggests that the CEO of Aspyr; a company who's entire revenue stream is based off porting games to Linux and Mac platforms, even makes a million dollars a year?

Of course not. It’s just assumed that all corporations are evil, and they have infinite funds to spend on whatever someone who has never run a business wants!

Ironically, people run their own lives like businesses all the time. If OP’s employer came to him and said, “hey, you know that work you did 6 years ago? I need you to redo it to today’s standards, on your own time, for free. Actually, I need to take money from you to do it, but hey, you make more than Kevin over in the call center, so you can afford it, right?” He’d quit his job that day.

I find it hard to believe it would be that hard to compile it as a 64bit binary.

Games often are, just like other performance-critical code.

I wonder what library they're using that's causing it to be a deal breaker, surely every once in a while they get a few sales

All it takes is a dependency on some old version of Havoc, PhysX, Unreal, whatever. Then you first need to move to a newer library, which in turn will introduce lots of breakage.

I hope they'll be able to upgrade Civilization 5 to 64-bit. Might have to hold off on upgrading the OS if not. :)

They've already done Civ V as of last month...

Finally a non whine post on Macrumours and even an interesting one! Yes I agree the list is quite short, still sad to see Borderlands the presequel, it has few years.... why it was 32bit???

I think the Windows version is 32-bit and so is the engine. Certainly if there are not enough sales they really can’t afford it to port it to 64-bit.

Of course it would be too hard to take a couple of million from the CEO and upgrade these games to 64bit.

I got a reply from Aspyr some years back that the beat selling Mac game sold about 250K copies. Considering the average Mac game costs somewhere between $ 20 and $ 60, that isn’t a lot of money we’re talking about. Aspyr has expenses like any other company including expensive licenses, developers ($$$), QA department and support people. The CEO of the company will probably earn a very average salary after all payments.

Well, LinkedIn guesses it has 167 employees. Even if it's only a third of that, it takes a lot more revenue than a million a year to pay those.

“Those” are irrelevant. He’s talking about the CEO’s pay.

I'm confident that it's gotten harder to play games in macOS over the past 4 years. Back then, we had fairly up-to-date OpenGL, proper Nvidia support, and no looming 32-bit deprecations. Now Apple is asking for trouble with their war on open graphics standards and all this compatibility-breaking nonsense.

There are plenty of tests out there showing Mac-compatible games running worse in macOS than in Windows, and often it's not something the FPS meter can capture. I'm not a gamer, so idc usually, but every now and then I want to play CS:GO and have to reboot into Windows cause it's that bad in macOS. And it used to run fine 4 years ago.

People that say that playing games on Mac has become hard wasn't here ten years ago. :P

OpenGL was up-to-date on Mac until a several years ago, but it was and is severely lacking and in dire need of a replacement. Apple provided that with Metal. While many would have preferred Vulkan, simply because it was bound to become a standard, Apple gave us Metal instead. This was a good thing, since Metal came out almost two years before Vulkan, which gave it a huge headstart. At the same time, Metal is supported on WAY more units than Vulkan is. Mac developers have also taken Metal up just fine, and all new game releases support Metal. That Mac games run worse than their Windows equivalents was true - But only for OpenGL games. A properly ported Metal game often runs as good as, or better, than their DirectX12/Vulkan counterpart - And there are quite a few of those already.

What? Apple has always been way behind the official specifications on OpenGL, and as you said games were always extremely slow on Macs.

I know it's hard to believe in these days, but when Apple adopted OpenGL back in MacOS 9, they actually were up-to-date, and they managed to include new versions in a timely fashion in the early days of Mac OS X, with often just a few months between the new OpenGL specifications and their implementation. They began to fall behind around the release of Leopard, when the gap between updates of the specifications and the implementation in OS X began to grow.

And there in fact was a (very brief) window in time when Apple adopted multithreaded OpenGL and a bunch of games actually performed faster under OS X than under Windows.

Who has dropped macOS support due to Metal? All major porting companies are doing Metal releases just fine.

Because it's their business model. If they wouldn't adapt, they would perish. But if you look at first-party conversions, you will notice that Mac support has quite dwindled. While in the OpenGL days it was relatively easy and feasible for developers like Flying Wild Hog (Shadow Warrior) or 4A Games (Metro series) to support OS X, they all dropped the Mac like a hot potato when Apple went proprietary. Frontier Development (Elite Dangerous) also explicitly mentioned Metal as reason for ending Mac support.