Aspyr has announced that today is the last day of sales for its 32-bit Mac games, in anticipation of Apple's upcoming move to 64-bit only apps on macOS Catalina later this year.
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After today, Aspyr's remaining library of Mac games for sale will be 64-bit or will receive a 64-bit update by September, when macOS Catalina is expected to release. The company promised that it will continue to port games to Mac, and that it has a "number of big announcements" for different platforms coming in the fall.
“Once Apple announced it was discontinuing support for 32-bit titles, we decided ending sales for those games was the right thing to do, and well before Apple’s support ends later this year,” said Elizabeth Howard, vice president of publishing at Aspyr. “Giving players fun, innovative games across all platforms is our focus, and we have some exciting new projects that we will reveal very soon.”
Players will be able to continue to enjoy 32-bit games if they don't upgrade to macOS Catalina and remain on macOS Mojave and below, but 32-bit games will no longer be sold on the Aspyr store. Aspyr gave a complete list of all the 32-bit games being removed from its library, which you can read here. This includes Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, multiple Call of Duty games, Civilization IV, Tomb Raider 2, and more.
Aspyr is a video game developer and publisher that brings popular games to Mac computers, and also creates games for mobile devices, Linux, and Windows PC. You can check out the Aspyr store to browse the company's full suite of Mac games.
Top Rated Comments
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?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.
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.
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...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.