During WWDC today, Apple announced the latest updates coming to their line of products in both hardware and software. On the MacOS side of news, they revealed their next iterative update, MacOS Sonoma, and with it new and exciting features coming to gaming.
With advancements to Apple’s own Silicon chip, Apple announced a new Game Mode for MacOS devices, enabling graphic-intensive games to work more fluidly on their computers. As Apple describes Game Mode on their website, “Game Mode delivers an optimized gaming experience with smoother and more consistent frame rates, by ensuring games get the highest priority on the CPU and GPU. Game Mode also makes gaming on Mac even more immersive — dramatically lowering audio latency with AirPods, and significantly reducing input latency with popular game controllers like those for Xbox and PlayStation by doubling the Bluetooth sampling rate.”
Some of the games Apple highlighted included Resident Evil Village Winters’ Expansion, World of Warcraft, No Man’s Sky, The Medium, Disney Dreamlight Valley and more.
Alongside the new performance update for gaming, Apple has provided developers tools to better manageably port PC games faster than before and preview them running directly on MacOS before finalizing a proper release. Tools like these could soon end the near decade long division between PC and Mac gaming where a large number of games were simply unplayable due to Mac coding. The toolkit also could enable publishers like Xbox and PlayStation to provide game ports directly to MacOS computers. Apple has teased that more games would be coming to Mac platforms in the future.
Another of the highlights from the gaming side of today’s WWDC included a surprise appearance from legendary game designer, Hideo Kojima. Kojima was thrilled to announce that Death Stranding Director’s Cut would make its way to Mac later this year, stating that he was “blown away” with Apple for integrating his game and future Kojima Productions to the Mac. Originally released exclusively on PlayStation 4 in 2019, the game has made its way onto Xbox, PC, and now Mac.
Apple has slowly navigated their way into gaming in recent years, first launching Apple Arcade in 2019 to transform mobile gaming. For a $5 monthly subscription, Apple Arcade gives players hundreds of exclusive games without ads or in-app purchases. Arcade has included popular games for mobile, tablet and Mac players such as Dead Cells, Mini Motorways, What The Golf?, Sneaky Sasquatch, and more, with new games releasing each month.