Valve drops VR support for macOS
Mac is a horrible platform to support for video game developers. Speaking from experience the issues are:<p>1. No cross platform builds allowed. We can compile to Windows, Linux, Android, Switch, PS4, Xbox One all from one windows build machine.<p>2. Shifting sand of non-backwards compatibility. Notice how of the above list everyone except Linux and Android have solid back compat stories. Video games are in development for 2-3 years, and stay on the market for 5+ years with no planned recompiles. So a 7 year period of support after inital build machine setup is expected, anything less is going to get your platform side lined.<p>3. Small market. Mac users make up a share of sales similar to Linux. &quot;What are you talking about! Linux is 1% while Mac is a whole 4%!&quot;, nope! Those numbers are the same insignificance per a video game business plan. Platforms with such low sales, like Stadia, might be support provided the platform owner pays porting costs.<p>4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple&#x27;s support.<p>5. Horrible hardware. Supposing you&#x27;ve decided to ignore all the downsides, and the small upside still appeals to you. Now you have to tune your game to run on hardware which would put cheap Wal-Mart machines to the test. Apple&#x27;s install base is almost all integrated older intel GPUs. If you do not support Metal, then you are forced to support these old intel integrated GPUs with bonus hacked up OpenGL drivers.<p>All points are ones I am speaking from experience on. We shipped TINY METAL on MacOS, the lack of cross build delayed the release. The horrible sales numbers meant carrying forward support was a net drag on the game. All further games I work on do not get MacOS ports for these reasons.