Elder Scrolls Online Will Have Limited Mac Support in the Future | MMORPG.com

Comments

• velmax Member UncommonPosts: 224

  November 2020

  Apple has increasingly made it clear they care more about maximizing their profits then anything else. Not saying this is a negative or positive, but interesting to see how this changes the market.
• Sovrath Member LegendaryPosts: 32,780

  November 2020

  velmax said:

  Apple has increasingly made it clear they care more about maximizing their profits then anything else. Not saying this is a negative or positive, but interesting to see how this changes the market.

  All companies care about maximizing their profits unless they are non-profit OR unless they are just a small mom and pop that's happy to get by.
  
  I'm not completely clear on why they are doign this but I read an article that proposed that they wanted to have their main operating system the same as their mobile. I imagine that means having their mac operating system changed to something similar to iOS.
  
  Don't get me wrong, I love my mac and I use it for all my creative work but I play games on my PC which is used solely for that purpose.

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• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483

  November 2020 edited November 2020

  Expect most other PC games that also support Mac to do the same thing for the same reasons, with browser-based as the main exceptions.  Apple is the one breaking compatibility here, and intentionally making it hard to write code once that then runs runs on both Apple and non-Apple devices.
  
  Moving Macs to ARM might well make sense for Apple.  They had their choice of making compatibility between Mac and Windows easier or making compatibility between Mac and iOS easier.  Considering that iOS is where Apple makes most of their money and they don't build PCs at all, it's understandable that they'd prioritize Macs working smoothly with iOS and not PCs.  While this is the end of using a Mac as a gaming desktop, that use case was never important to Apple in the first place.
  

  
• Palebane Member RarePosts: 4,011

  November 2020

  Well Microsoft did buy Bethesda/Zenimax, so not a big surprise, IMO.

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• ChildoftheShadows Member EpicPosts: 2,193

  November 2020

  Considering the positive reviews so far I wouldn’t be surprised if it ran fine through rosetta II. I’m sure someone will try at some point so we’ll know
• vegetableoil Member RarePosts: 768

  November 2020

  ofc they want people to use pc/xbox, it's microsoft now.

  
• ashiru_1978 Member RarePosts: 818

  November 2020

  I hope Micro$oft make future Bethesda games exclusive and the other platforms can drown in their tears. I don't like MicroPenis$oft, and I don't hate other platforms either, but Mac in the past have been scumbags and PlayStation act like some Gods of Asia and they deserve a good kick in the nuts that will last them for a few decades.
  
  I'm especially glad about Mac becoming an even shittier environment that's harder to do anything on.
• Iselin Member LegendaryPosts: 18,719

  November 2020 edited November 2020

  Lol at some of the posts here. This has nothing to do with MS's upcoming purchase of Bethesda (which BTW, won't be finalized until early 2021) and everything to do with the new Macs changing their processor and OS.
  
  MS will undoubtedly have an influence on the timing of releases and exclusives in the future but this has nothing to do with that,

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• SethNW Member UncommonPosts: 7

  November 2020

  This really has nothing to do with Microsoft buying Zenimax. As is, currently MS is perfectly happy to have their stuff on other platforms, like putting Game Pass on Switch, because they are all about ecosystem, even if you aren't on their platform.
  
  As for whole thing, it us exactly that as to they say. Porting existing software is a lot of work, since ARM essentially is completely different architecture and has different instruction set. Si it us not just matter of recompiling the code, it requires rewrite and a ton of validation. Which at least early on costs a ton for not much in return. Maybe at some point with enough potential spending customers it will be worth it. But ESO is not some essential software people would flock to and vast majority of gaming audience there is on Windows. So at this point it us about cutting loses. And sadly that is Mac users.

  
• kitarad Member LegendaryPosts: 8,164

  November 2020 edited November 2020

  Nah this is completely Apple's move. They don't want the hassle of supporting games on the Mac for what little profit they make off it while dealing with all the incompatibility issues. No they want to focus on the mobile games and the huge amount of money they make off that and extend that OS to the Mac.
  
  Microsoft on the other hand wants to see their subscription based services be used universally and they want you to play that game on any platform so they are not going to limit that because it isn't about the platform it is about the steady monthly income. They will kill with that even if more units of PS 5 get sold in the long run. Microsoft has already laid the groundwork  to win this round and probably change the future of GAAS.

  

  
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483

  November 2020 edited November 2020

  Porting from x86 to ARM isn't necessarily a trivial thing to do.  It's not just about optimization.  For example, suppose that in one thread, you have two variables, foo and bar.  You know that both are zero initially.  Then you write in your code:
  
  foo = 5;
  bar = 10;
  
  In a different thread, you check the value of bar and see that it is 10.  As such, you know that the first thread has reached that line of its own code.  Are you guaranteed that the second thread will see a value of foo of 5 rather than 0?
  
  On x86, the answer to that is "yes".  If one thread writes one value before another, the latter value cannot appear in a different thread before the former.  On ARM, the answer is "no".  You have to have some sort of explicit synchronization to guarantee that the new value of foo will be visible to the second thread.
  
  How many times are there that a large software project does something like that in its code base?  It might not be very many.  But if you're assuming that you'll see the new value of foo and get the old one instead, that could cause arbitrarily weird behavior.  If the variables are pointers, it's likely to be a quick crash, but for anything else, it's much harder to predict.
  
  Tracking down the two places that you implicitly made that memory order assumption for subtle reasons out of 300k lines of code is really a pain, especially when the code works flawlessly on x86.  The code might even work flawlessly on ARM 99% of the time, or even 99.999% of the time.  It might only cause the game to crash once per hour in spite of running many times per second.  But that's still enough to be a huge problem.

  
• rwrz Member UncommonPosts: 2

  November 2020

  Chupa Apple!

  In Lak'Ech
  Im another of you