[theevilsharpie]

> Besides, the gaming industry keeps shooting themselves in the foot by only supporting Windows (Mac is a thing too). That is slowly changing, but so many game devs are drinking the Microsoft koolaid they don't even consider using another graphics API other than DirectX. Many other decisions like that as well.

The gaming industry is thoroughly multi-platform, and many games that are limited to Windows on general-purpose PCs aren't so because the require DirectX, since they've also been developed for Playstation where DirectX isn't a thing.

Support for Mac can be somewhat challenging, partly because the platform (including the hardware) is so different from other general-purpose PCs, and partly because Apple doesn't particularly care about backwards compatibility, and will happily break applications if it suits their interest.

However, a developer that doesn't support Linux does so because they don't want to for whatever reason, not because the technical bar is too high. With the work that has gone into Wine, Proton, and other Windows compatibility libraries these days, there's a good chance that a Windows game will "just work" unless the developer does something to actively inhibit it.

[spookie]

DirectX has such a pull for game devs Sony has made a so called PlayStation Shader Language (PSSL), made to be very similar to the HLSL standard in DirectX 12. Granted this was an effort to meet where devs are, given how difficult it was to develop for the PS3. But then again, that's where devs are.

I mentioned DirectX as a clear enough example, but there are other decisions just like it.

Hell, most studios use Unreal nowadays, it already has their own RHI (Rendering Hardware Interface) between them and the graphics API. It really isn't much effort to start new projects targetting Metal or Vulkan.

Some have noticed this section of the market, in which they can grow, like Ubisoft and Capcom (see their games on Mac and iOS) which is why I said it's slowly changing. And that demonstrates it really isn't difficult.

Funny note: Have heard from a bird that Ubisoft's many engines had Vulkan support so their games could run under Google Stadia's servers. As soon as that got killed so did those engine branches. This just shows it isn't difficult at all. And it isn't a surprise they also acknowledged this by now using Metal to reach Apple's users.