Skyrim on Mac When?

Apple needs first party Vulkan support. It would be a huge first step to making many modern games very functional on Mac.

Just because there are 89 million macs out there doesn't mean there are 89 million mac gamers out there. If you've got the money to buy a mac, you've probably got the money to buy a games console for your gaming needs.

Macs just aren't a popular gaming platform. I'm sure there's a vicious cycle there about how the lack of games cause a lack of gamers, but still.

Steam publishes their hardware survey. About 2.45% of Steam installs are on Mac. 58% of those users are still on Intel. With 5-10% of OS market share that means that mac users are twice to four times less likely to want to game compared to Windows users, and most PCs in the world definitely don't run Steam.

There's also the performance problem: Macs come with high resolution displays and comparatively bad GPUs. The Intel Iris GPUs aren't bad, but they're no gamer powerhouse. The ARM chips are a lot better, but they're still crushed by any dedicated GPU in most similarly priced computers, especially in laptops. Their excellent AI+transcoding support blowing PC out of the water doesn't help when you want to render a game.

My expectation would be that a port of modern Skyrim (the re-release with signiciant bumps to the graphics) would result in a stuttery mess on most Apple users with an interest in gaming. I'm sure the original release would play fine, but giving Mac users the inferior version probably wouldn't go down well. Yes, the new Macs have been demoed to show some very graphically intense games, but if their Tomb Raider demo was anything to go by, the graphical fidelity of the new models still leaves much to be desired, especially for such an expensive device.

Lastly, there's the fact that Microsoft bought Bethesda. They've been working hard at making Xbox Game Pass a thing, unifying Windows and Xbox where they can. With the absolute defeat in performance per watt that Apple brought to the desktop space, I think it would only hurt Microsoft to invest time into making Mac a more viable gaming ecosystem. They can't ignore the gaming market when it comes to the PS5 or Switch, but why invest in bringing a new competitor to the market?

I know Skyrim has been ported to pretty much any device, but with the small amounts of Mac gamers, the relatively slow GPU in most Macs, and the whole OpenGL/Metal situation, I don't see how it would make sense for Bethesda to ship Skyrim to Mac.

It's the main reason why Windows failed to catch on in the mobile market space. And yes, their constant changes to APIs didn't help, but that's the reason their lack of content started in the first place.

It's a vicious cycle that can only be broken by huge investments and trade deals from Apple. They're trying to get games back on the platform: https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/06/apple-gaming-updates/

However, they're doing so relying on their upscaling tech from the get go. They're also marketing this exclusively for ARM Macs, which are still the minority out there. Perhaps in another couple of years the cycle will be broken, but Apple has historically been quite dismissive of gaming on Mac for anything but "casual" games.

It works smoothly with high quality using CrossOver (wine) on my M1 MacBook pro from 2021.

With Apple’s switch to Intel, there was much more support for porting games to Mac. Unfortunately, since Apple overpriced commodity Intel hardware, Macs were noticeably underpowered especially when compared to PC desktops, which was made even slower due to the lack of video card options. It made no sense to play games on a slower system. And that is how the idea of playing non-iOS games on a Mac died.

I am happy to use PCs for games, while using Macs for everything else.