As I said the vast majority of games. For example Minecraft is not a native Windows application in any way. It just creates a window and then renders the entire contents of the window itself instead of using win32 to make an interface.
No, only a tiny minority of PC games run on the JVM. The vast majority are native and not running on any kind of VM. Even with the Unity engine the games are natively compiled.
I didn't intend to bring up the JVM. Minecraft Bedrock edition is written in C++ and renders the entire window contents and even has its own UI framework that it uses.
There's way more to it than GUI libraries. That is a native Windows application calling Windows APIs. You can't run that Windows executable on Linux without Wine/Proton.
Even a console application (no GUI) depends on operating system APIs.
> That's like saying you can't run Firefox without freetype. Requiring a dependency doesn't make you no longer native.
At this point you're just trolling.
Take notepad.exe and try to run it on Linux. It wont run because its Windows native. That's a native application. Same as 99% of games that aren't JVM based.
> How, by having a different OS? Sorry about that I guess.
> (If it had native Vulkan it wouldn't matter. The most effective strategy, the one Microsoft uses, is to buy all the game studios.)
By making their OS easy to target by game makers. There's no good excuse - Apple has access to the same graphics pipelines as everyone else. XPlat game engines have boiled it down to mostly a checkbox these days... so where's OSX? Apple has a lot of work to do before that's a reality.
> Calling Valve a game maker is a stretch;
You can't be serious, are you? Valve's titles are among the most popular games in the history of games. They may make most of their money through Steam, but to say Valve doesn't make games is ridiculous.
That wasn't even the point - Apple users will blame the actual studios/developers for not supporting OSX when the blame lies at Apple's feet.
Billions in annual profit, zero f's given about gaming on their platform. It's a choice - and one Apple users need to comprehend. Apple doesn't care.
Valve is not a normal company; there's no hierarchy and they're only capable of doing things if someone at the company decides to pay attention to it.
Do you remember what happened to TF2? It first degraded into an item trading game, then they abandoned it for years and it was full of bots. There's no reason Overwatch and Apex should've replaced it except that they stopped fighting for it.
TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
Counter-Strike is still one of the most-played games ever. CS:GO had an average of almost 1 million daily players while AAA Games like CoD Warzone hover around 200-500k.
DOTA/DOTA2 also rakes it in. They also have many very successful single-player games. Valve is a wildly successful game company - they just don't do the "yearly release" dance...
TF2 today is mostly unplayable due to bots and weirdness with their player matching game. I put a lot of hours into TF2 and the experience is almost unrecognizable today. CS:GO was, I think, completely outsourced to a third party. They still produce some game-like artifacts but primarily they're the owner and operator of the premier online games store
CS:GO is complicated - it started as a console port of CS:Source by a 3rd party developer, then was taken in-house and transformed into a full stand-alone new Counter-Strike game. So, it was indeed developed by Valve.
IDK anything about TF2 - but bots or not, 100k active daily players is nothing to sneeze at for a 16 year old game.
They are indeed the premier online game store - yes... but saying they are not a game developer is absurd. They don't release a new title every year, but when they do, it's a huge hit.
> TF2 was released in 2007... and has over 100k players playing right now as you read this[1].
They fixed it again after people sassed them enough about it, but it was always a better game than Overwatch and there's no reason people should've been tricked into playing that.
(Though, I don't know if the people on right now are actually playing TF2 or just trading hats.)
Who else supports Metal? Oh, that's right - only Apple.
There's more to game support than just graphics API.
Apple chooses to make game support on OSX hard - and shocker... you don't get games supporting OSX. Who can we blame? Apple...
Just like Apple chooses to make Linux kernel support hard on M1/M2 and leaves it entirely up to volunteers to make it work. Who do you blame? The Kernel developers or Apple?
The Metal API is heavily documented and Apple provides a plethora of code samples in four programming languages, with literal step-by-step how-to guides on porting from OpenGL to Metal.
You can complain that they don’t support third party low-level frameworks, sure. But they definitely make it easy and inviting to support their homegrown solutions
Depends what you mean by "default". Windows ships with DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan support. Call of Duty runs on Vulkan by default, for instance.
Vulkan is notable as being new (doesn't have legacy baggage OpenGL and DirectX have), is natively cross-platform, and is often more performant than other options for modern games.
It's cross platform in that if you want, you can write implementations for other platforms. In addition to supporting multiple platforms in its current state.
The difference is that Microsoft is responsible for the DirectX API on Windows but does not have anything to do with shipping OpenGl or Vulkan for Windows.
Microsoft plays roughly the same role a Khronos (specifies the API, provide conformance test suite, provide an SDK, etc.) but when it comes to actually “shipping” DirectX, Microsoft doesn't have anything to do either, it's all on the graphic card vendor to ship DirectX drivers. As an example, for a while after its release, many people didn't have access to DX12 at all, just because their GPU didn't have DX12 drivers.
So the situation is much less different between DirectX and Vulkan than you make it sound.
As great as WINE can be, it's not native. Apple has gone out of their way to prevent you from enjoying games on their systems.
And who do the users blame? Game makers - not Apple...