I am. I have no interest in getting a Windows PC just for gaming, so I make do with what's available (for the games that are not better played on my Switch anyway, it really is the ideal gaming device for me).
Sometimes it's a struggle to get it working, but the payoff of being able to play my strategy game or whatever on my same old laptop on the couch is well worth it to me.
Plus, sometime I'm amazed how well the games then run on battery and with only little fan noise at worst, despite Rosetta. Just yesterday I played XCOM2 at maxed out graphics settings for hours. (Partly because the DLC I played isn't on the Switch, and partly because I wanted to see what the game was like at full graphics.)
It’s clearly not every game, but it’s a lot of games (many gaming hours, if you look at it that way), especially when you consider there are many many games available that aren’t on that list and that some percentage of those other games are also supported.
Or are you conflating the concept of “interested in playing games” with the concept of “must play every brand new game”? I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people like me who are interested in gaming but feel no compulsion to play the newest hottest games that you need a top of the line graphics card just to be able to run. There are plenty of good and great games out there that don’t have such strict high requirements. Even when I had a “more suitable” computer, I didn’t feel the need to buy a super powerful graphics card just so I could play some games since there were so many good games that didn’t need that.
Yes - it's not a bad machine for people who want to play a few casual games. For example, on a whim I downloaded Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a pretty beefy game from about 5 years ago, and it runs on my MacBook Pro on maximum settings with no trouble. Similarly things like Cities Skylines, KSP, Minecraft and so on work really well. It's not a gamer machine, but can clearly handle mid-tier games.
I play a ton of stuff on my M1 iPad. My desktop is still an Intel Mac Pro, but I’ve played tons of games on it over the years. I occasionally play a AAA game on it when there’s a port, but those don’t interest me too much. I have Steam on the Mac and Apple Arcade on my Mac, iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. I tend to avoid Steam when possible because it’s a terrible application, but some games are only available there. Otherwise, I lean towards Apple Arcade because it avoids all the loot boxes, in-app purchases and other crap that makes games so toxic. I’d love for even more games to be available on Apple’s devices, as would others I know.
A platform that nobody develops for isn't really a good platform for gaming. And I don't see why developers would bother when Apple is just going to break compatibility for their games in a few years unless they keep updating it.
Apple doesn't just remove architecture support, they remove APIs too.
My last, and brief, foray into games development on MacOS was quickly soured by things breaking between point version updates. Even things as crucial and simple as pushing pixels onto the screen broke as Quartz APIs changed
That's generally true of any change that Apple makes. They telegraph the change directly, yet it's largely ignored, usually wilfully, and the caterwauling starts as soon as they take the action that they say they are going to take. Take the M-series transition. When M1 was announced (mid 2020), Cook said that they expected to complete the transition in 2 years. If you have a pre-2020 mac, expect the next macOS to be the last.
M1 Macs are cool and videogames are cool. I have bought exactly one game specifically because of Mac compatibility, so I doubt I'm the target demographic.
The only gaming I do on my M1 Mac is via Steam streaming from my PC.
I don’t really expect to change this, the setup works well for me - my gaming PC is connected to a TV and has a much higher TDP and more fans than my Mac (which has none, and will never have any.) The only games I stream/play on my Mac are those that aren’t convenient on a TV. (e.g. Civilization.)
It costs somewhat more to have two devices, but not as much more as one might expect, since RAM/SSD space/(maybe GPU?) are all much cheaper in a DIY desktop than in a Mac, so my Mac doesn’t need to be specced for games.
What would be great is for a MacBook to be able to run the game well (for playing remotely or airplanes), but when available have a local Mac Studio to improve the performance through streaming over wifi or something like it.
“Improving the performance” in an additive way rather than just entirely offloading the performance would probably be murderously difficult. It would be like SLI/Crossfire, but over wifi rather than a PCI Express bus.
Edge compute is ridiculously difficult, especially given how variable networking can be. Many game routines aren’t able to be efficiently asynchronous either.
The consistent support from a handful of major studios for the Mac platform suggests enough Mac users do play games to make those efforts profitable. I'm pretty sure the user base plays different games, on average, though. Going all the way back to the 80s, every version of Civilization and Simcity were ported, while FPSes have been more hit-and-miss.
The baseline M1 Mac Mini replaced my gaming desktop for a few months when it first came out. I've also used my M1 MacBook to play games like Factorio, Civilization, and Stellaris.
It certainly isn't going to be playing games at max settings, but it does a good enough job.
Why not? I got an M1 Max for the RAM, but the relatively powerful GPU is a nice bonus. It's also kinda natural to want to use a general-purpose device you already own for more purposes than you intended when you were buying it.
