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?

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'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.

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.