Nahh, I hear what you’re saying but gaming on Mac has had nothing to do with Apple “opening their walled garden”, especially in the before times when Macs ran on Intel and briefly supported eGPUs.

It was more of a chicken and egg problem between game devs who didn’t want to do the extra work of supporting an OS that in their eyes had a customer base uninterested in gaming, and Users who took to building PCs or using Consoles precisely because so few games support Macs.

I’ve been gaming on Macs (and other devices) for almost as long as I’ve been able to use Computers, both running macOS and Windows. Sure the hardware has never been exactly high end from a serious gamer’s perspective, but historically games that DO support Macs run just fine on them. When booted into Windows there is zero difference in performance between an Intel Mac and a PC with the same hardware. Nothing Apple does to Macs make them inherently harder to develop games for, the issue is nobody wants to do the work of porting to another OS.

To summarize, the historical excuse from game devs is basically “nobody games on Macs so we don’t want to invest in supporting them”, while the historical excuse from users has been “none of the games I want to play support Macs, so I won’t game on one”. Apple can do everything on their side correctly to entice developers to support their platform but without the perception of ROI (in the form of a substantial user base they can’t easily see) they never will.

Macs have always been great gaming machines, typically bought by younger demos who tend to game more, AND are highly valued within the creative professional community. These people would play games on the machine they already have, provided they’re able to.

Developers: If you build it, they will play.