The Frustration of Mac Gaming, Volume 1
Just when I thought it was in... they pulled me back out.
Over the past several years, Apple has worked hand in hand with Capcom to deliver some of the very best conversions of their recent Resident Evil games to the Macintosh platforms, after the announcement and release of the Apple Silicon M Series chips. They began with Resident Evil Village as an appetizer, and have slowly gone backwards, publishing Resident Evil 7 and the remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4. These are not haphazard remakes either, as they shipped with all the kinds of features that make them extremely attractive to Mac owners: iCloud saves to play on multiple devices (including iPads and iPhones!), Apple achievements, and inclusion of all DLC to make them complete. Most importantly, they have been outstanding ports that are great demonstrators of what is possible on these computers, and could show the way for others to follow.
They must have sold decently enough for Capcom to keep coming back - they would not have spent the time doing so if Village had bombed initially. While I fully acknowledge that Mac will probably never have the same kind of gaming audience as Windows PCs have, there's a definite niche here that can be exploited to build up some customer loyalty. I can also acknowledge that it's possible Apple footed the bill on all these ports and thus Capcom doesn't really care if the games sell or not - they got their money. That's all well and good, and neither Apple or Capcom is likely to really provide any kind of data to back up either theory.
During the summer, Capcom announced the ninth entry into the series, Resident Evil: Requiem. Naturally, the game was announced for every major platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, and PC. However, despite the relationship that had formed between Apple and Capcom with those five Resident Evil ports, Requiem was not announced as a Day One release on Mac or other Apple devices. This is a common occurrence: happenings like Hollow Knight: Silksong or even Ball x Pit (which is awesome) don't happen every day if you're a Mac gamer. I guess it's possible that they're keeping it under wraps for a surprise announcement ahead of the February release, but it seems quite unlikely. Why would you not want to excite your user base by letting them know a highly-anticipated game would be coming to their platform of choice?
Apple is generally known for pushing products and sticking with them as long as possible - even the Vision Pro is getting supported despite hardly anyone caring about it. When it comes to video games, however, it just seems like they're excited for a while, then give up. When the M1 computers came out, they started pushing games like Resident Evil Village as a demonstration of what could come from their computers with regards to gaming, and they followed up with a decent series of ports of older titles like Control, GRID Legends, RoboCop, and Death Stranding for starters. CD Projekt Red just put out an amazing port of Cyberpunk 2077 as well. The sparseness of the releases, though, reeks of some kind of gaslighting that placates its small user base, then kind of forgets they exist. They're apparently doing it again in the marketing for their new M5 MacBook Pros:
It talks about an upcoming game, Crimson Desert, and how M5 will make games more immersive and realistic. This is great! But for what games? Cyberpunk was the last big one, and that game originally came out almost 5 years ago, no matterh. There's been some pretty big games released lately, none of which have even hinted at being ported to Mac at some point. Apple, y'all are rich! You have more money than sense, so why not spend some of it and get some of these games onto your platforms? Microsoft had to do this 25 years ago when they wanted to show the Xbox wasn't just some 3DO vanity project, which is what it looks like for Apple every time they pop out and say "hey, Mac can be awesome for gaming, check out these ports of games that came out years ago!" One can't get by on Apple Arcade games, which can often be great! But when NBA 2K26 is perfectly portable, and instead we're given NBA 2K26 Arcade edition, which looks like this:
It's just comical.
I'm definitely not wanting to be a port beggar - I will get RE Requiem on PS5 if I need to, but as someone who has some passion for playing games on Mac out of love for using the platform as a whole, it's beyond frustrating that the company itself can't summon that passion. If you have to throw out the moneyhat to get the game released on Day One, do it! Show you care. Show you mean it when you show all this cool tech and how it will make games awesome on Mac, by actually working to bring some of these games over to give people a reason to buy your hardware as a gaming device vs the competition. Hell, while I've ranted about old games being the scraps we're given, but still, call Sony, call Sega, call Capcom again, whoever. Just demonstrate some kind of commitment and enthusiasm and stick with it. How one can spend so much time getting all these Resident Evil games released - maybe even build a base of users who have some loyalty now - and then forget all about it when the first brand new RE game in years comes around? I don't really get it.
