[TheTon]

I don’t agree. My point is their collective footprint in terms of the macOS API surface (at least as of 2019 or so) is pretty big. I’m not just speculating here, I work in this area so I have a pretty good idea of what is used.

[dagmx]

Could you give examples at least of what you think that big collective footprint might include?

Bear in mind that a large chunk of Mac gaming right now that needs translation are windows games translated via crossover.

[TheTon]

As I said in my first comment, it's at least Cocoa (Foundation + AppKit), AVFoundation, Metal, OpenGL, and then all of the lower level frameworks and libraries those depend on (which may or may not be used directly by individual games). If you want a concrete example from something open source, go look at what SDL depends on, it's everything I listed and then some. It's also not uncommon for games to have launchers or startup windows that contain additional native UI, so assume you really do need all of AppKit, you couldn't get away with cutting out something like NSTableView or whatever.

So my point remains, if Apple has to continue providing Intel builds of all of these frameworks, that means a lot of other apps could also continue to run. But ... Apple says they won't, so how are they going to accomplish this? That's the mystery to me.