> Dropping 32bit support is game-over for gaming on macOS.
No, it isn't. There were never any 32-bit x86 Macs with decent GPUs. Dropping 32-bit support only affects games that were already old enough to be commercially irrelevant or games that rely on unmaintained third-party middleware that never got a 64-bit port. Those don't add up to enough to be a major impact on the Mac gaming market. There are plenty of other factors that are much more important, such as Apple's abandonment of OpenGL and preference for Metal over Vulkan.
A huge amount of Indie games do not require a powerful (or even decent cpu). Many of them have Linux and Mac ports. Those are the same kind of games whose developers do not have a lot of spare resources to stay on the endless treadmill of deprecation.
It also kills any hope of wine powered support for proton in steam as many many windows games will be still 32 bit for a very long time (mind you, metal already had put a big dent in that).
Interestingly Linux users are indirectly getting affected by this: for many developers supporting Linux was just a byproduct of supporting macOS. As the latter is being dropped, support for the former is getting harder to justify. Luckily Proton seem to be a very viable alternative to native games.
Those are old games for the most part. The newest thing on that list appears to be from 2015, and it's a remastered version of games released in 1999 and 2003.
They certainly weren't making much money off these particular games even before Apple announced the deadline for going 64-bit. It's unfortunate and disappointing for customers who had already bought those games, but this deprecation didn't shut Aspyr out of much in the way of future sales.
But that's not what drives the market for Mac gaming. What matters is what kind of return on investment developers expect to get out of porting to macOS. They don't particularly care whether the port keeps working for four years or forty, because they'll make basically all the revenue in the first several months.
Now, if users become reluctant to buy Mac games for fear that they'll stop working unacceptably soon, that could have a meaningful impact on demand for Mac games. But even if Apple made it official policy that they would break games after four or five years, that wouldn't completely kill the market for Mac games. If Apple made it cost-prohibitive to get a game ported to their platform in the first place, that would pretty much be "game-over for gaming on macOS".
Commercially irrelevant for the game maybe, but not for the platform. If i can't play my old favorite games i am less inclined to buy a new platform. Or might move to a platform which supports those games.
Well, let's see. My main 3 purchase locations are Steam, Humble Bundle and GOG.com. I'd guess this is fairly typical, but anyone using other platforms feel free to add yours.
Steam: The Steam client is still stuck on 32bits. I'd bet it will soon be updated to 64bit, but it just goes to show that macOS is pretty low in the priorities of Valve. And if a company with the resources of Valve doesn't care, I can't see much motivation for the individual developers either.
Humble Bundle: I've went through the current and following Humble Bundle Monthly games. Windows Only: Call of Duty WWII, Crash Bandicoot Remastered, Spyro Remastered, Sonic Mania, Planet Alpha, Override-Mech City Brawl. Windows+macOS: Battletech, The Spiral Scouts.
GOG.com: There's already a 64bit DOSBox port—DOS–era games will eventually be supported. Windows–era games are gone—Catalina breaks Wine emulation and no announcement has been made for 64bit support by the Wine Team. For newer games, GOG.com will need new builds from the developers—doubtful if we ever get to see those, especially for indie games where developers don't have the resources to go back and port their released games. Newly released games are often Windows-only.
I don't know how you see this picture, but it looks pretty bleak to me.
The Steam client has been updated to 64 bit quite a long while before. But the in built updater seems to only fetch the 32 bit version. If you uninstall Steam and do a clean reinstall from Steam website, you will get the 64 bit client.
No, it isn't. There were never any 32-bit x86 Macs with decent GPUs. Dropping 32-bit support only affects games that were already old enough to be commercially irrelevant or games that rely on unmaintained third-party middleware that never got a 64-bit port. Those don't add up to enough to be a major impact on the Mac gaming market. There are plenty of other factors that are much more important, such as Apple's abandonment of OpenGL and preference for Metal over Vulkan.