I find this hard to believe, particularly because Apple works extremely hard to drive a wedge between "casual" mobile-focused experiences and "Triple-A" console titles. MacOS could feasibly run DX12 games with near-native performance if Apple supported Vulkan/DXVK, but they actively chose to go in a different path for their mobile and desktop chips. Apple Silicon is not the same architecture as the PS5 or Xbox Series X, it doesn't support the same APIs and it generally doesn't attract the same crowd. The onus is entirely on Apple to get their software stack working for game developers, and they've decided to eschew that on a hardware and software level. Much like the story with Linux-native games, it doesn't matter 'how well it can run' on the hardware, it's more about stability and API coverage/compatibility. Unless Apple starts investing Nintendo-amounts of money for in-house studios that make AAA Metal-based games, they're simply not going to see anything besides the Tomb Raider-style experiments we've gotten in the past.

Plus, all of this is to ignore ~20 years of legacy PC games that simply don't run on Mac, emulated or otherwise. So now, the whole "Mac as a game console" thesis presupposes a grassroots gamedev uprising, which seems increasingly unlikely as major Mac-supporting studios like Blizzard and Eidos get bought up by larger companies. So... now we're relying on over-worked indie devs to port their DX11 Unity game to Metal/Unix? Good luck, I guess.

> But for many years now, console gaming has shifted to become the primary platform for AAA gaming, largely because too many gamers are being priced out of PC gaming by the shocking cost of the required hardware. The Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition costs $699 / £649 / AU$1,139 at MSRP, which is enough money for a gamer to buy a PS5 or XBox Series X | S and a cheap 4K TV to play it on.

This is already on its return and was part of the shortages. Which, by the way also highly affects the mentioned consoles. You know, those PS5s nobody actually has in stock anywhere.

> But the only thing that remains constant is change, and Apple, which has long been counted out of the PC gaming conversation (for very legit reasons) is finally turning its sights back on the gaming field it had all but abandoned two decades ago, and the company feels like it’s in a much better position to compete with Windows PCs than ever before.

Apple is actually far from a constant in the gaming market. Once every decade or so they have a big marketing boost towards gaming. Every time they fail to sustain it and just let it whither away. The last few times were at the end of the PowerPC era with Aspyr doing PC game ports (e.g. Battlefield 1942). Then later with the nVidia 320M era where they partnered with EA and had mac versions of call of duty. Even the narrative was the same at the time: They were the most powerful integrated graphics, even the base MacBook was supposedly Gaming-capable. They paraded a few devs around on stage, quoting all the marketing buzzwords. And 2 years later it was all forgotten. All they had to show for it was a handful of AAA releases. Apple's latest "All MacBooks are Gaming MacBooks" blahblah sounds like the latest phase they're going through.

Right now they're too invested in Metal which is great for developers bringing Phone ports to Mac. But horrible for PC and console devs because it's yet another API to support. And Mac will never be the mainstay of computing. Its pricing and limitations will guarantee it a niche (however much of a profitable one for Apple). Apple will never be the biggest PC platform and they're happy with that. That means game devs can never target just Apple and have enough of a target audience to forget about PC.

> Meanwhile, as the price of PC gaming components continues to soar and more and more gamers move away from the traditional gaming rig out of necessity, the platform incentives for game developers are going to continue to shift away from high-end PC builds.

Game developers have long shifted away from high-end specs because they target consoles now. Many PC games are sad console ports. Yes. This does not have that much to do with Macs.

> most gamers have long given up on experiencing 8K gaming on their PC.

Sooo... Where do I buy my reasonably-priced 8K monitor? Just asking... 8K is just not a thing on PC. In fact most of my friends don't even have 4K. I do though, and a 3080Ti to match.

> But more importantly than that, when it comes to things like testing … testing how it looks, and does it render correctly, and all that, you can come in and validate that the result is correct, it doesn't matter which Mac we're testing it on. If it's an M1-based architecture, we get the same result from all of them.”

Yeah sure, but now there's also M1 Pro, M2, etc. Testing different versions is still a thing. Also, thinking that Apple will keep this advantage to themselves is lunacy. Intel and AMD will catch up.

This is yet the same thing as before. Announce a big boost for Mac Gaming. Parade a few developers on stage who are super enthusiastic. Then let things fizzle out. It's just the story of Apple and gaming. They're just too much of a mainstream company to really do what it takes to take on the serious gaming market.