Apple Game Porting Toolkit 2 kind of makes it clear Apple aren’t trying to force developers to make native games; taking a similar approach to Steam and Proton (Game Porting Toolkit is based on CodeWeavers’ CrossOver, the same developers working on Proton with Valve).

As far as I'd heard, Apple's licensing only permitted GPTK to be used to evaluate games and their porting potential, and that they prohibited actually shipping games with it (whether this is just applying to the MAS or whether it was actually a licensing term within GPT I'm unsure).

Of course, I can't find a concrete source on this, and perhaps it changed. The download, which I assume has the license with it, is locked behind having an Apple Developer account it seems.

Unfortunately for Apple, right now gaming on Linux is a better experience than gaming on Mac, which is really saying something. One has to wonder why Apple doesn't take a page from Valve's book and develop a compatibility layer for macOS like Valve's Proton platform, which has brought hundreds of Windows games to Linux.

I guess PC Gamer hasn't heard of Crossover or Whisky, both of which bring that functionality to Mac.

I think one of the largest issues with Mac gaming is the cost is higher if you only care about gaming. Why would you spend more to play on Mac when you could get the same performance for much cheaper. Right now the only market is single computer users that chose Mac first for other reasons that do not have a console for gaming.

Apple does have a compatibility layer. But it's restricted only to devs wanting to port their games to metal.

lol Xcode. I miss the days of Metrowerks Codewarrior. I guess back then, the official Mac tool was some clunky shell environment. I can't even remember what it was called. But ironically, I'm more comfortable on the command line than in Xcode these days, which is not a shining endorsement for the latter.

Automator is kind of interesting though. I've been looking at it lately and it's pretty powerful once you figure it out. Again ironically, I've been using it mostly to manage terminal sessions in their own windows, so even though it's meant for gui scripting, I'm doing sort of command line on steroids with it.

I use a Mac. I’m not really interested in high end games though. I like turn-based things.

I’m still using a 2018 Mac Mini (middle-of-the-road specs) and I run things like Pathfinder:Kingmaker and Wasteland 3 just fine. Both are older, but came out around the same time as the computer. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 suffers.

You can add eGPUs to them, but I’ve never bothered to look too much in to it because I’m satisfied with the games available to me.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about the new M-series but have yet to try one.