Nat Brown leaves Apple.

Jimmyjames

Jimmyjames

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I just discovered that Nat Brown @natbro on various social media networks, has left Apple. A real shame as he was the main person pushing various aspects of the move to improve gaming on Apple platforms. He was instrumental in game controller improvements, GPTK, Game Mode etc. While it’s relatively straightforward to find good engineers, his statement about “pushing this particular rock" doesn’t fill me with confidence about gaming on the Mac.

I feel quite sad about this.
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Cmaier said:
someone left apple.

apple is doomed.
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They’re not doomed, but the message from his post is that he found it very hard work to advocate for gaming changes. As someone who doesn’t want to have to use more than one platform, it’s frustrating how little progress has been made. He championed more improvements in his time there, than everyone else.

So while Apple isn’t doomed, gaming on Apple devices might be. In terms of AAA games at least.
 
Yeah, this is one problem with large tech companies on the scale of Apple/MS/Amazon. Inertia gets to be a right pain. It’s easy to keep on a direction/vision that’s working or the org agrees is the way forward, but if you need to correct the ship in some way for a specific goal and the org just doesn’t prioritize that goal, it can feel Sisyphean.

I’m looking around for my next project at the moment in part of dealing with this myself. I was brought in to my current team for an effort that got defunded within a couple months, and it’s clear that the priorities of the org, and my expertise don’t align and it’s meant dealing with burnout for the first time in my career.
 
This quote from an Andrew Tsai stream doesn’t fill me with joy.
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Edit. There’s a lot more. And it’s pretty devastating. For me at least. I’ll add more quotes later.
video here with chat replay.
 
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More comments. Apologies for the messy nature of it. It was difficult to get the screenshots in time and the chat has gone now. Hopefully it makes some sense. He said he is pessimistic but not fatalistic.
The experience of trying to get gaming progress was very difficult it seems. They have no interest in a Proton like solution and no market to demand native games. Mac users simply dont buy games. It seems like belief has drained out of those involved. Very sad for someone like me who cannot or will not have multiple computers or consoles. I want one device which covers all bases. I have to give up that dream or give up using a Mac.
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In relation to the argument that increasing numbers of Macs will help

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casperes1996 said:
Arranging for Nat to be a guest on my podcast. Preparing interview questions if anybody wants me to ask anything in particular. If it’s allowed I’ll gladly link the episode when we release it.
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you have a podcast?
 
casperes1996 said:
Arranging for Nat to be a guest on my podcast. Preparing interview questions if anybody wants me to ask anything in particular. If it’s allowed I’ll gladly link the episode when we release it.
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That’s great! As I said previously, I enjoy your podcast.

I wonder how much he will be willing or able to talk. I would love him to elaborate on his views of just where he believes Mac gaming stands. With games like CP2077 and AC Shadows coming, I’d have thought we were in a reasonable position. It seems he feels differently.

What needs to happen to improve things for Mac gaming?
What would he have done but was unable to?
What is he most proud of while at Apple?
What can the Mac gaming community do (if anything) to help?

Less likely to answer, but I am very curious to know if Apple is paying for these ports or not?

I understand you may not be able to ask these questions so no pressure. It will interesting to hear him in any case. Any idea when it will happen?
 
Cmaier said:
you have a podcast?
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Me and a couple other people. Tends to mostly be Jon and me on the show these days but we're technically 5 people in total.

MacGameCast
Jimmyjames said:
That’s great! As I said previously, I enjoy your podcast.

I wonder how much he will be willing or able to talk. I would love him to elaborate on his views of just where he believes Mac gaming stands. With games like CP2077 and AC Shadows coming, I’d have thought we were in a reasonable position. It seems he feels differently.

What needs to happen to improve things for Mac gaming?
What would he have done but was unable to?
What is he most proud of while at Apple?
What can the Mac gaming community do (if anything) to help?

Less likely to answer, but I am very curious to know if Apple is paying for these ports or not?

I understand you may not be able to ask these questions so no pressure. It will interesting to hear him in any case. Any idea when it will happen?
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There will naturally be things he can't answer. I told him I'd give him a list of questions in advance although more could pop up as we think of it on the show and he should just feel free to reject answering whatever he can't, but he said he can talk about most things at this point as things are publicly out.
Will definitely touch on some of these subjects
 
casperes1996 said:
Me and a couple other people. Tends to mostly be Jon and me on the show these days but we're technically 5 people in total.

MacGameCast

There will naturally be things he can't answer. I told him I'd give him a list of questions in advance although more could pop up as we think of it on the show and he should just feel free to reject answering whatever he can't, but he said he can talk about most things at this point as things are publicly out.
Will definitely touch on some of these subjects
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Awesome. Really looking forward to it. I’d also be interested in your views on these topics if you have time here.
 
casperes1996 said:
Me and a couple other people. Tends to mostly be Jon and me on the show these days but we're technically 5 people in total.

MacGameCast

There will naturally be things he can't answer. I told him I'd give him a list of questions in advance although more could pop up as we think of it on the show and he should just feel free to reject answering whatever he can't, but he said he can talk about most things at this point as things are publicly out.
Will definitely touch on some of these subjects
Click to expand...
Definitely let us know when the podcast comes out. I don’t usually listen to podcasts but I’d like to hear this one!
 
AppleInsider wrote an article based on the interview we did! I feel like their citation was a little lacking; They did cite us, but a bit far in and not with quite as much emphasis on the source - but still, happy with the article. They focused a lot on one specific part of the conversation but you can tell they listened to the whole episode!
 
casperes1996 said:
AppleInsider wrote an article based on the interview we did! I feel like their citation was a little lacking; They did cite us, but a bit far in and not with quite as much emphasis on the source - but still, happy with the article. They focused a lot on one specific part of the conversation but you can tell they listened to the whole episode!
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I feel I heard this about Appleinsider before. Can’t recall exactly where. Nonetheless, good to have more awareness of the episode.

I’m only half a hour into the episode yet and reading the article, it seems to imply that the ports haven’t been paid for by Apple. I know there has been speculation that they did. Is your sense from speaking to him that it’s correct to say that? That is, they aren’t paying for ports?
 
Jimmyjames said:
I feel I heard this about Appleinsider before. Can’t recall exactly where. Nonetheless, good to have more awareness of the episode.

I’m only half a hour into the episode yet and reading the article, it seems to imply that the ports haven’t been paid for by Apple. I know there has been speculation that they did. Is your sense from speaking to him that it’s correct to say that? That is, they aren’t paying for ports?
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I mean, you have the source material - I wouldn't say he said Apple didn't pay for ports. Just that paying for ports will only get you so far, and that there's perhaps more or equivalent value in cross-marketing agreements
 
casperes1996 said:
I mean, you have the source material - I wouldn't say he said Apple didn't pay for ports. Just that paying for ports will only get you so far, and that there's perhaps more or equivalent value in cross-marketing agreements
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Ahh ok. I’ll finish when I get off work. Makes sense.
 
@casperes1996 Just wanted to say I finally had a chance to finish the episode and I really enjoyed it. Great job! Lots of interesting topics and insight from everyone and especially Nat.

I’m also a member of Andrew Tsai’s discord and Nat frequently posts on there. I have to say after some time reading his posts and asking questions I have two conclusions.

Firstly, Nat is an incredibly sharp mind with encyclopedic knowledge of much within the gaming world. He is also very generous with his time and a very patient person. Just outstanding all around.

Secondly, I think he may just not have been a good fit for current Apple. From reading his posts, it’s very clear he dislikes much about the current Apple os environment. He really dislikes Swift, with a passion. He called Metal a “cluster fuck”, and seems to think it’s beyond repair. He also feels that the plan of getting native AAA games on macOS is basically a futile endeavor and Apple should be focusing on getting as many games as possible, to allow the cream to rise.

I’m not qualified to judge the correctness of his views on some of these things. Certainly with regard to the technical views, although I will say that many just as technically minded people would disagree with some of them. So I suppose my view is now that it may not be such a tragedy that he left. Either for him, or for Apple.
 
Jimmyjames said:
@casperes1996 Just wanted to say I finally had a chance to finish the episode and I really enjoyed it. Great job! Lots of interesting topics and insight from everyone and especially Nat.

I’m also a member of Andrew Tsai’s discord and Nat frequently posts on there. I have to say after some time reading his posts and asking questions I have two conclusions.

Firstly, Nat is an incredibly sharp mind with encyclopedic knowledge of much within the gaming world. He is also very generous with his time and a very patient person. Just outstanding all around.

Secondly, I think he may just not have been a good fit for current Apple. From reading his posts, it’s very clear he dislikes much about the current Apple os environment. He really dislikes Swift, with a passion. He called Metal a “cluster fuck”, and seems to think it’s beyond repair. He also feels that the plan of getting native AAA games on macOS is basically a futile endeavor and Apple should be focusing on getting as many games as possible, to allow the cream to rise.

I’m not qualified to judge the correctness of his views on some of these things. Certainly with regard to the technical views, although I will say that many just as technically minded people would disagree with some of them. So I suppose my view is now that it may not be such a tragedy that he left. Either for him, or for Apple.
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Thanks for the feedback. Nat has also said he’s open to an episode two at some point :)

Definitely agree with with part 1 of your conclusion.
As for part 2 I don’t think I have seen most of the context for it.
I can say that I absolutely love Swift and think it’s among the most beautiful languages ever with an elegant design and a lot of low level power. It’s got a lot of shared philosophy with rush too. Unlike metal though swift isn’t your only option. You can program in all the languages that can emit arm binaries or have interpreters. I don’t see swift mattering so much to the gaming discussion. Aside from perhaps using it for the glue code that starts up the NSApplication and gets a window handle, there’s no expectation games will be written in swift. I assume C++ will be most common for engine code. And then the engine can ingest whatever it may. Like Unity can eat C#.
Metal is the only way to interface with the gpu so that’s a bigger deal. You can of course use something like MoltenVK but that still goes through Metal in the end anyway. I’m not knowledgeable enough in graphics stacks to properly comment there but from what experience and knowledge I do have I would say metal is definitely s bit behind DirectX and Vulcan but I wouldn’t think it unsalvageable. It has improved a lot from where it used to be that’s for sure. But there’s great potential in Apple defining their own shader language and graphics stack and not just implementing a standard like OpenGL especially with their own hardware. It does make adoption harder and I think Nat’s point that there aren’t that many really talented metal developers and most of the ones that do exist already work at Apple is its greatest weakness. The initial design of metal basically came from AMD’s mantle and is similar in nature to other modern graphics APIs.
From my talk with Nat my impression was more that the tech doesn’t really matter. Mindshare and game sales is king. The more success stories we have for major sales on the Mac encouraging developers on to the platform the more games there’ll be regardless of how nice or horrible the developer experience is. And I for one think it’s pretty good. Nat after all pointed out that the Nintendo switch developer experience isn’t that great but games are plentiful there.

For regular app dev at least I can say that in my opinion working with swift and apple frameworks is far far far nicer than Java and the Android app or windows and .NET with C# or Qt and C++. And while I know many disagree I’ll also take swift and cocoa touch. over react native any day of the week (or any other web tech for that matter)
 
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