Will Macs Ever Be Taken Seriously by Gamers?

howtogeek.com:

For decades the idea of gaming on a Mac has been seen as a joke by "hardcore" gamers,but that wasn't always the case, and maybe in the near future the Mac's gaming credentials will return.

Macs Used to Be the Best Gaming Computers

When PC gaming was still just PC speaker bleeps and bloops, Apple computers offered a gaming experience on another level. Games like Karateka, Prince of Persia, Oregon Trail, and Ultima 1 on the Apple II set the standard for high-end gaming in the late 70s and early 80s. By the 90s every major game worth mentioning had a Mac version, and titles like Myst and the Marathon Trilogy by Bungie showed that Mac was a serious gaming platform, even if it only catered to a much smaller segment of the personal computer market than it does today. Heck, the first Halo game was set to be a Mac exclusive, announced by Steve Jobs himself. Sure, it was a totally different style of game at that point, but it was still on everyone's radar.

From there, the shift to Intel from PowerPC made porting Windows games to Mac easier, but the results weren't always stellar, and when Apple killed 32-bit app support for macOS Catalina, making most of the Mac back catalog unplayable, it didn't help. Still, anyone who doesn't think of the Mac as an important gaming platform has to completely ignore the points in its long existence where it was leading gaming technology or highly influential.

Apple Is Taking Gaming Seriously

While Apple may have lost focus on gaming, and its latter Intel-based systems usually lacked the GPU power to play anything well, things are very different now. Thanks to the technology the company developed for iPhone and iPad, and its experience with being a gaming platform there, Apple Silicon is a serious hardware platform for games. Even the lowliest M1 Apple Silicon systems are comparable in performance to the last-generation consoles millions of people are still actively using to this day, and its second and third generation of Apple