I don’t think Intel v. ARM matters too much once the engine HALs support it natively, or through Rosetta 2. This to me doesn’t seem too bad.
The OS APIs and building an ergonomic experience is the challenging part. Supporting APIs is harder than it may seem. That’s graphics, sound, task scheduling and multi threading, I/O for both files and devices, and many more. All these things have different approaches on different OSes, as well as different limits of what is allowed and what is not. Different best practices and degrees of documentation, too. This all then needs to make for a good player experience and meet gamer expectations. It’s a Herculean task.
It is even harder, because many graphics APIs, for example, support different features. So either your artists must accommodate and create several versions of skeletal meshes, visual effects, and similar; or your engineers must develop new graphics technologies to compensate automatically. And if that didn’t seem hard enough, try recruiting from a pool of game graphics programmers for macOS without a hot six figures a year burning a hole in your pocket. Now consider this for other APIs, though they are often more standard and less challenging.
I could be wrong, but many corners are cut for platforms that don’t have that many players — you just can’t justify the costs it would take to do an excellent port. And that creates pretty deep and difficult to patch issues. The same is seen on games ported to Linux.
The OS APIs and building an ergonomic experience is the challenging part. Supporting APIs is harder than it may seem. That’s graphics, sound, task scheduling and multi threading, I/O for both files and devices, and many more. All these things have different approaches on different OSes, as well as different limits of what is allowed and what is not. Different best practices and degrees of documentation, too. This all then needs to make for a good player experience and meet gamer expectations. It’s a Herculean task.
It is even harder, because many graphics APIs, for example, support different features. So either your artists must accommodate and create several versions of skeletal meshes, visual effects, and similar; or your engineers must develop new graphics technologies to compensate automatically. And if that didn’t seem hard enough, try recruiting from a pool of game graphics programmers for macOS without a hot six figures a year burning a hole in your pocket. Now consider this for other APIs, though they are often more standard and less challenging.
I could be wrong, but many corners are cut for platforms that don’t have that many players — you just can’t justify the costs it would take to do an excellent port. And that creates pretty deep and difficult to patch issues. The same is seen on games ported to Linux.