[l-p]

> As of June 3, 2021, there is no native support for Vulkan API provided by Apple devices.

> Apple deprecated OpenGL in iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave in favor of Metal, but it is still available as of macOS 11 Big Sur (including Apple silicon devices). The latest version supported for OpenGL is 4.1 from 2011.

OSX accounts for 2.62% of Steam users.

Implementing another graphics backend is prohibitively expensive for small studios whereas you could implement either OpenGL or Vulkan and get the other 97.38%. And that's without factoring in the required investment in single-use hardware, people, and skills.

DirectX is another safe choice but I try to stay away from anything proprietary or Microsoft-related.

[aseipp]

Not really. Small studios don't even bother writing their own rendering path most of the time; they're using alternative engines (Unity) or middleware (SDL, bgfx/libgdx/webgpu/whatever) to solve the problem entirely because they have better problems to actually slove.

Honestly the real issue is you probably wouldn't get many users or make a whole ton of money, really. Unless you target iOS or iPads, but that can add some significant constraints to the game. (But sometimes it's OK; Divinity Original Sin 2 basically works fine on an M1 Mac or an M1 iPad, as long as you have a Xbox controller to go with it.)

I think as programmers we desperately want to believe it's just a matter of programming and that we're in the critical path here, but it really isn't. Most of that stuff is a solved for a lot of cases. And if it was technological constraints, honestly, there's like a whole host of actual technological concerns, all of them really boring and crappy and not "cool" like rendering (like how do you CI and QA the damn thing, what kind of impacts might it have on your build system, do all the 3rd party things you have work here, etc.) Rendering is just "cool" to talk about but it's not actually as important as those; by the same token you never see giant threads on here about like OS-specific sound APIs or whatever...

There just aren't many Mac gamers and the hardware is kind of expensive to buy and test on for most purposes in that case.