The Agony of Mac Gaming, Volume 2
All this could probably be solved with an Apple controller
Everyone is very excited now that Hollow Knight: Silksong has finally released after years of development. Especially Mac gamers! Because I'm a sicko, when I tired of dying in Silksong, I thought I would go back to the original game, which I had yet to play on a Mac (just the PC and PS4 versions) and thought it would be fun to die all the time in that one as well. That has been happening, but not for the reason one might be expecting, though yes, my old man gaming skills have dwindled more than I want to comfortably admit. No, in this instance it has to be an unfortunate compatibility issue - Hollow Knight, macOS, and an Xbox Series X controller do not seem to play well together. At all.
Controller compatibility is something that has plagued PC gaming for a long time, which is why I mostly avoided it for the simpler pastures of console gaming in the past. Things are way different now, thanks to the combination of Steam and the Xbox 360 controller, which brought PC gaming back to the masses during the latter days of the 360/PS3/Wii era when everyone was tired of using the old, tired hardware. Since then, it seems most major console releases see PC and (occasionally) Mac versions as well, taking advantage of a new market of people who are tired of game console restrictions, but were previously wary due to difficulties of getting games up and running. That specific console advantage has generally been neutralized. There's still always weird issues getting games to actually run, especially on Mac, where the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit decimated the playable library, but if they actually work? It's pretty much golden.
Except for damn Hollow Knight. If you want to play it with a keyboard, sure, but if you want to use the bog-standard Xbox controller, it's a nightmare. Imagine this: jumping, slashing, evading... then nothing. For 5, 10 seconds, you stand there while the already challenging enemies just have their way with you and all you can do is pray the controller reactivates before you're dead. This happened to me at the least opportune times, and then after a while, it just stops working entirely. What's up with that? It reminded me of the old days when they tried to make wireless controllers for the NES, and they were generally worthless due to constant signal drops and massive lag. This is bluetooth! There should be no reason why the controller just suddenly yeets itself out of working, long as it's connected to the computer. Maybe I'm just a simple luddite, but that seems weird?
This was the misadventure on my Mac mini M4, which is my primary Apple gaming device. After struggling through that, I spent some time with my M1 MacBook Air and tried to play Hollow Knight with the Dual Sense controller that is paired with that computer, it was all sunshine and rainbows. So the solution is to apparently use a controller with the battery life of a gerbil rather than the Xbox controller that lasts for weeks without needing new batteries. Got it. I don't know what is causing the issue with the controller not wanting to stay active, whether its macOS, the Apple Silicon chip, Hollow Knight, Steam, or the pad itself having some kind of existential crisis about its existence, but this is some real 1995 nonsense going on here.
The entire ordeal reminded me of a drum that I have beaten a bunch of times and will keep banging on until either Apple listens or Apple hires me to help do it, but they really need to create and release their own game controller. This is a company that has put a lot of effort into gaming on iOS and tvOS, and sometimes Mac, but haven't figured out that they hold an important pillar that could make everyone's gaming life easier and could drive adoption of the platform. They have already mastered the technology that lets you take your AirPods from one device to another seamlessly without having to pair and re-pair every time you go from your phone to your TV or your computer, what is stopping them from doing this with a controller? Call it AirPad, or Magic Controller, whatever. Marketing will figure that one out.
You already have a quasi-gaming console with Apple TV, since it can play Apple Arcade games and the like with bluetooth controllers. It would make perfect sense to have a matching gamepad to add the ease of use that Apple is known for. Having just one controller that can be carried across their devices and guarantee 100% compatibility - hopefully - with every game that has controller support just seems like easy money. Yes, okay, Apple would likely charge $100 for the thing, but also it would probably have insane battery life, USB-C charging, maybe even MagSafe if they're feeling particularly user-friendly that day. But you would only need one, maybe two if you have kids who want to play together and in that case I guess they could use a 3rd party controller. What's holding them back?
Again, I may be the only person on the planet who cares about the Mac gaming ecosystem enough to actually want to armchair quarterback some kind of unified systems to make it more console-like and user friendly, in the vein Apple is known for. Their hardware is powerful enough to handle most modern games now (long as they're optimized for Apple Silicon, mind you), and as graphical power is starting to become less important in a world where Hollow Knight and Silksong are standard bearers without pushing the hardware down to the metal, they can dig deeper and pull more and more quality games to the platform. However, Apple users are used to stuff just working, so this whole Hollow Knight controller mess is a real drag. A 1st party (so to speak) controller is the kind of first step that can become the watershed movement in a whole new market for the House that Jobs Built.
(They also need to redesign Gamecenter to be the answer to Steam, but that's another article for another time. I'm publishing this just ahead of the iPhone 17 Apple Event, so you'll just have to wait!)
