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Skyrim on Mac When?

skyrimonmacwhen.com

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Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#41

Post by david_allison »

TheTon wrote: post #37
robby_w_g wrote: post #14

The potential user base for skyrim on macOS is much lower because there simply isn't a large user base of gamers on Mac platforms. Mac users of Steam represent 2.45% of the total user base in the following survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I think it’s safe to say that Steam stats undercount the potential size of the Mac gaming market. There are a few reasons for this: - The trailing effect of Apple’s underpowered Intel Macs. For many years the average Mac was an Intel MacBook Air, which never had a hope of running many contemporary games. - As a result, few developers tried to target Macs, which meant Steam felt like a bit of a ghost town for Mac user…

Apple's removal of 32-bit support has significantly reduced the number of games which are natively available for newer Macs.

Many users aren't going to go through the effort/expense of working around this.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#43

Post by setgree »

Careful what you wish for. I find that StarCraft Anthology — the original which was released for free, not the remastered version — is the app most likely to crash my 2020 MacBook. When devs put this stuff on many years after the fact as a sop to diehard fans, they don’t really have an incentive to do a good job on the implementation side. There is no reason that a 1998 game should crash a 2020 computer.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#44

Post by solardev »

Kaze404 wrote: post #27
finiteseries wrote: post #4

Today, if you can stand 1080p, a ridiculously small bitrate, and using a gamepad: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Later this year, or whenever Microsoft upgrades xcloud if you’d like to actually enjoy playing it!

Nvidia GeForce Now is also an option if you already own the game on Steam

GeForce Now is incredible, but some publishers like Bethesda removed all their games from it. I dunno why. It's really sad, because the catalog started out huge and gets smaller every year.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#45

Post by solardev »

finiteseries wrote: post #4

Today, if you can stand 1080p, a ridiculously small bitrate, and using a gamepad: https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-pass/cloud-gaming Later this year, or whenever Microsoft upgrades xcloud if you’d like to actually enjoy playing it!

There's also https://shadow.tech/ that lets you run Steam in the cloud (any game you own, not limited to a subset). It's a lot more of a PITA to use and keep updated than xCloud or GeForce Now, though.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#46

Post by jurmous »

In the past most Macs sold were Macbook Airs or other Macs which only had integrated Intel graphics. These made Macs a less attractive market to develop games for as the games run poorly on them.

Now with the way more powerful graphics by default on the M1 chips, I expect way more games to come out in the future supporting Macs. Like how No Man's Sky is coming out for Mac in the fall. Also the unified memory on Apple Silicon will help a lot in game performance when the games are optimised to use it.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#47

Post by TheTon »

david_allison wrote: post #41
TheTon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s safe to say that Steam stats undercount the potential size of the Mac gaming market. There are a few reasons for this: - The trailing effect of Apple’s underpowered Intel Macs. For many years the average Mac was an Intel MacBook Air, which never had a hope of running many contemporary games. - As a result, few developers tried to target Macs, which meant Steam felt like a bit of a ghost town for Mac user…

Apple's removal of 32-bit support has significantly reduced the number of games which are natively available for newer Macs. Many users aren't going to go through the effort/expense of working around this.

That’s a good point. A poor commitment to backwards compatibility on Apple’s part hasn’t helped. However, I assume they did it to smooth the transition to Apple Silicon. On the long view Apple Silicon is going to be a bigger benefit than the ability to run old games.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#48

Post by goosedragons »

chaostheory wrote: post #40
chadlavi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a circular argument. No content or support is the reason there are very few Mac gamers. There are an awful lot of people out there who have a Mac and play games on other platforms and devices. Probably even people who bought a pc just to be able to play games on it.

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 u…

To make matters worse the Mac ports were often not as optimized as the PC versions often leading to worse performance than the PC version on the same hardware. And before Steam started selling Mac versions they were often more expensive and several months old. I distinctly remember seeing SimCity 4 as a "new" release for Mac in the local Mac shop for over twice the price of what I had paid for it on PC a few months prior WITH the expansion pack.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#49

Post by goosedragons »

KerrAvon wrote: post #20
robby_w_g wrote: post #14

The potential user base for skyrim on macOS is much lower because there simply isn't a large user base of gamers on Mac platforms. Mac users of Steam represent 2.45% of the total user base in the following survey: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I wonder if that went down after macOS Catalina, where Apple removed 32-bit x86 app support and nearly every game in the Steam catalog available for the Mac became unplayable overnight. That’s when I decided to give up and build a gaming PC. Maybe others came to the same conclusion.

Yeah I had a Mac at the time and had to chose between updating to Catalina to play the newest Tomb Raider or lose access to a huge swath of my Steam games. Not a great choice.

Re: Skyrim on Mac When?

#50

Post by smegsicle »

charliebwrites wrote: post #3

Hey HN! And welcome to a hill I'm willing to die on. I've been teaching myself basic HTML/JS/CSS to begin my webdev journey and this is the first project I've put together. It was recommended to me to make a project I'm passionate about so that I'm motivated to keep learning and get something real out there. Well here it is: SkyrimOnMacWhen.com! Its been far too long since Skyrim came out for there to be no release f…

if you wanted something fun to do server-side, you could calculate #skyrimCounter and bake it into the html rather than displaying a noscript error
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