Make the software work on ARM so people can do their day to day tasks, then the games will come.
Mac OS has had a decent push for games on their Apple Silicon Macs recently. With how powerful the iGPU is even a lowly MacBook air can run modern games. It’s just getting more and more developers to pay attention to anything outside of Windows (aka nothing has changed in the last 20 years). Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is. A lot of native Linux ports just straight up suck and the proton version runs better.
Day-to-day software does work on ARM, games don’t. I can run macOS or Linux on ARM, but that’s not going to encourage game developers to port their software to that architecture.
Apple doesn’t particularly care about gaming on macOS, if they did, they’d be working directly with game developers to get games working there. They have made some attempts to improve APIs and whatnot games would need, but that’s also relevant for other software Apple seems to care about more (CAD, Adobe products, etc). Gaming just isn’t something they really care about.
Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is
Absolutely. I actually didn’t make a Steam account until they ported their client to Linux, and back then they didn’t have any form of compatibility for Windows games. It wasn’t until 2018 (~5 years after initial Linux launch) that they released Proton. That’s a big part of why Steam Machines failed, they were released 3 years before Proton was a thing so game selection was extremely limited. Valve hoped devs would create native ports for Linux, but that never happened, and it’s why Proton is a thing at all, and why the Steam Deck launched years after the initial Proton launch (they wanted a large library of games).
Make the software work on ARM so people can do their day to day tasks, then the games will come.
Mac OS has had a decent push for games on their Apple Silicon Macs recently. With how powerful the iGPU is even a lowly MacBook air can run modern games. It’s just getting more and more developers to pay attention to anything outside of Windows (aka nothing has changed in the last 20 years). Proton is the only reason the steam deck is as good as it is. A lot of native Linux ports just straight up suck and the proton version runs better.
Day-to-day software does work on ARM, games don’t. I can run macOS or Linux on ARM, but that’s not going to encourage game developers to port their software to that architecture.
Apple doesn’t particularly care about gaming on macOS, if they did, they’d be working directly with game developers to get games working there. They have made some attempts to improve APIs and whatnot games would need, but that’s also relevant for other software Apple seems to care about more (CAD, Adobe products, etc). Gaming just isn’t something they really care about.
Absolutely. I actually didn’t make a Steam account until they ported their client to Linux, and back then they didn’t have any form of compatibility for Windows games. It wasn’t until 2018 (~5 years after initial Linux launch) that they released Proton. That’s a big part of why Steam Machines failed, they were released 3 years before Proton was a thing so game selection was extremely limited. Valve hoped devs would create native ports for Linux, but that never happened, and it’s why Proton is a thing at all, and why the Steam Deck launched years after the initial Proton launch (they wanted a large library of games).