Yeah I started to read comments on other sites and theres a LOT of speculation on this. But the actual article is pretty small. Thanks for breaking it down even further.
The only one I know some people have is Switch2 from my friend group. And its mostly mario kart. They stopped playing after a bit so it will be interesting to see what will occur there.
Overall you dont buy the system for the system, usually you buy it for hte games. And like you said....if the games are not there (PS5 games vs say steam/pc) then people are not incentivized to get it.
Agreed, I dont think its a good idea to have ANY company own near 100% of the market with PC gaming. Can you imagine the DRM and copyright protections shenanigans you could pull if you were the only effective player? Valve is mostly benevolent....but theres always a chance it goes downhill with just one asshole.
I dont claim to be in the video game industry only a dev. And macs can be easy or VERY hard to develop under depending on the underlining tools. If they dont have them....you basically have to build them from scratch (like Expo/mobile development, brew custom mac specific libraries, gnu tools that use a language not supported, etc... etc... ). If they have the libraries already installed, and is supported by apple, it becomes a breeze and, best yet, they are better than windows at less breaking changes. Not security mind, but breaking program changes. Or at least it seems like it last 10 years or so.
The M1 Arch was a departure but not from their own tooling, just everyone elses. That from what I understand a lot of games stopped working right when the M1-3 became a thing in steam. But again someone else can correct me if im wrong. I saw the effects from a friend trying to get steam working on a newer macbook pro but I am again not an expert when it comes to the gaming industry.
The newer macs are also relatively in a state of flux with apple figuring out what works and what they want to invest in. Brew didn't work well for a good year after the M1 made its debut. I remember trying to get things working and it was a nightmare. It's still somewhat difficult to program for. And game devs often will do whatever it takes to release a game...which can include some strange code that only works on a blue moon or s very specific.net version.
It's getting better each year or so but I can't blame valve wanting to just skip all the ballony untl it's in a better place.