Apple silicon’s arrival on the Mac has led to renewed hope of a robust macOS gaming market emerging. For as loved as Macs may be among the general population of users, when it comes to gaming, PCs and consoles have long proven necessary if you want to play the latest games. Apple’s success with gaming on iOS has not translated to the Mac.
But things have started to shift. Last year Apple debuted a new porting tool that enabled PC games to more easily be brought to macOS, and we’ve started to see more AAA titles come to the Mac as a result. Typically though, those titles have launched only after extended runs on other platforms.
Now, we may have evidence of even more hope for Mac gaming’s future, as one of this fall’s highly anticipated titles, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, is coming to the Mac day-and-date with the PC and consoles.
Apple’s newfound push into gaming
Apple hasn’t been shy about pushing the Mac’s potential as a gaming platform since the advent of M-series chips. Not only does Apple silicon make the Mac significantly more capable of running modern games well, it also provides a greater incentive for developers.
When Macs ran on Intel chips, developers had to build once for Mac and separately for the iPhone and iPad. Now, with a single unified chip architecture, work that’s done toward iPhone and iPad versions of a game—platforms that are comparably much larger in scale than the Mac—can provide a great head start toward creating a macOS version.
Are there still concerns about Apple’s gaming strategy? Of course. (I’m looking at you, Apple TV). But the company has made consistent moves toward making the Mac a more appealing platform to develop games for.
Same-day releases are a big next step for the Mac
Apple’s hope is that all of its efforts will lead to a turn of fortunes for the Mac, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows is the latest evidence of that starting to happen.
It was encouraging to see Death Stranding Director’s Cut come to the Mac, and Resident Evil 4 before it, but both high-profile titles already had successful runs on other platforms. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is one of the first big tests of how a AAA title can do when launched on the Mac alongside competing platforms.
If it’s successful, developers will have all the more reason to start considering Mac users as an untapped new revenue stream that’s worth prioritizing.
That would represent a major shift, but if Apple keeps pushing hard on the Mac’s gaming capabilities, perhaps its efforts will prove successful.
