The Apple Game Porting Toolkit

With the focus on Vision Pro at WWDC, the Apple Game Porting Toolkit is also an interesting new technology from Apple. It allows game developers to quickly get their games developed for other platforms (primarily Microsoft Windows) ported to the Mac. Game enthusiasts are playing with the new tools (that’s already been updated once since WWDC). Andrew Tsai has been publishing examples of this on YouTube with actual game footage and it is impressive.

The bigger question is whether or not Apple shortcutting the translation process will be enough to convince game developers to port their games to the Mac. To me, this comes down to Apple silicon. The M1 MacBook Air has to be the baseline, and if a developer can get good enough performance on that platform, I think several will make the attempt. There are a lot of M1 Macs going off to college and in teenagers’ rooms. This could be a bigger deal for Mac gaming than people think.