Valve have started offering refunds for CS:GO prime (not any of the microtransactions) if you played mostly on a Mac, or if you bought prime on a low-end Windows machine* between the CS2 beta and CS2 release https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/73EF-08A3-0935-6369
make sure to get your refunds in if you were affected!
this post also acts as the first true confirmation that macOS will likely never be supported for CS2. disappointing
@ipg it would absolutely kill on apple silicon though... what a waste
@xian @ari "for years", macs haven't been capable of gaming except for mac pros, this is not the case now and since like 2021
moltenvk makes porting to mac from vulkan "not terrible" and works pretty well even for demanding situations (RPCS3 uses it to get full-speed PS3 emulation on M1 Pro, even through Rosetta - high performance even without rewriting their x86_64 backend or Vulkan graphics code...)
and also, Valve are a massive mega company, they have the funds to hire developers to work on the Mac port of Source 2
@xian @ari apple made the game porting toolkit version of wine as well as D3DMetal, but they try to encourage native Metal development rather than Proton's solution of keeping Windows and DirectX the de-facto standard rather than trying to encourage native Linux or Vulkan development (again, not a bad thing in the short term, but you don't see nearly as many linux ports now as you used to, i know a few people who have outright said they don't want to port to linux since proton works well enough)
@ipg @ari if I’m being honest, I think Valve has lost more money so far in developing Proton and the Steam Deck, I’m pretty sure the Deck is sold at a loss, and the Linux install base is rather small. (Probably more focused on building a userbase for the future). But I hear ya.
I hear you, but Apple could just do both. The best thing about Proton is not what future games it enables you to play, its the current backlog of PC titles and the ease and portability of it. There are tonnes of Linux games that have been broken or that don’t work on some distro or whatever out of the box because dependencies change over time, but this is not (as large) of an issue with Proton
I just have the belief that if Apple really wanted to bring gaming to their platform they would have done so already, the excuse they use that the companies should port their entire catalog there without any userbase that would buy the games is not realistic at all, same goes for Linux native ports. I wish companies would do that, but obviously some sort of compatibility layer for the current catalog of games has to be used or created by Apple, since they are the platform owner and not an open community project like Linux distros.
Besides, we are talking about the company that has basically viewed their platform as something “you work on, its not a toy” for the past 20 years. It will be hard, if not impossible to wash away that moniker and get people to even view the mac lineup as something that you would even consider gaming on.