After Monkanics’ first successful playtest, I’ve been thinking about where to port the game to based on the info I got from Monkanics discord members.
Firstly, Windows and Linux ports are stupid easy. Playtesters played and connected from both Windows 10, Windows 11, and Linux simultaneously.
Also something cool to note, one of my testers used Linux on their chromebook!*. That was crazy to me, because chrome OS really isn’t developed enough to run most games.
This means the Linux port can be a gateway for other incompatible OS’. Which is super cool.
But then there’s Mac. Oh boy, I’m never ever ever porting Monkanics to Mac natively.
Apple is such a closed environment that, for game developers, it’s not worth the outrages $100 PER YEAR. Like, what is that?! All that for a fraction of Windows and Linux players.
For Monkanics specifically, it’s not worth the effort. There was 1 Mac user on the discord, but they deleted their account for unknown reason.
So we realy have 0 Mac users. We got a Chromebook gamer before a Mac gamer. Which is insane to me.
What are your thoughts on Mac ports?
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Aspyr started out doing Mac ports for games, but they’ve pivoted to Linux like 15 years ago, if that gives you any info on the lay of the land for games. My studio has never done a Mac port in 13 years, but recently we do get Linux native requests specifically for better Steamdeck support.
Both Linux and Mac users can also fall back to wine/proton so Windows is a good bet at the very least for compatibility between all platforms, but a native port is nice to have. For Godot I believe there are very few dependencies so a Linux port should last for as long as libc is compatible, but using the most up to date Wine may change from week to week.
Steve Jobs will rotate in his grave, when he would hear about games on Macs. He hated games and was against games on mac, not serious enough for his hardware. I have never build anything for mac (with Godot), last time I have had to work on such a system was last century.
Colleagues on macs always seem to run into issues that are solved in a good old Linux distro.
Not that I’m any better, I suffer from windows 11 with my primary customers… No money for a “BYOD” to spare
At least there is wsl now.
Personally I always get annoyed by 
machines acting all intuitive, but really making things harder to find
In opposition to what they (the corporate classes) would have you believe, my Cassandra still says Linux and FOSS have the future and Steam Deck is a vanguard.