With news doing the rounds about the latest update to macOS, it turns out they're finally admitting they're doing nothing with their support of OpenGL and it's to be deprecated.

See here, where it says:

Deprecation of OpenGL and OpenCL Apps built using OpenGL and OpenCL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal. Similarly, apps that use OpenCL for computational tasks should now adopt Metal and Metal Performance Shaders.

I've seen so many complaints about the poor OpenGL support on macOS for quite some time, so it's not exactly a surprise. It's going to be a shock for those game developers not using a pre-made game engine like Unity and the likes.

"This isn't a Mac news website" I hear you scream at your monitor. Yeah, I know. However, this could have a big impact on Linux gaming, for better or worse. It could lead to developers either dropping Mac support due to the small market share and not being worth having to learn another (closed) API, or it could mean them dropping OpenGL in favour of Metal and not doing Linux version for the smaller again market share.

Interesting times we live in. Thankfully, the big game engines will take away some of the pain for developers. My Twitter feed has been—colourful this evening when news of this came in. Here's some initial reactions:

Jupiter Hell + DRL - D**m, the Roguelike developer:

Jupiter Hell is the last game that I'll do that will have OSX support. https://t.co/662OLJ0hqj — Kornel Kisielewicz (@epyoncf) June 4, 2018

Defender's Quest developer:

If Apple thinks this is going to drive Metal adoption, they're nuts. All this means is "All aboard the Vulkan train!"https://t.co/szY0WuJ2Oz



(Or just ignore Mac entirely, as Apple itself is doing more each day themselves) — Lars Doucet (@larsiusprime) June 4, 2018

MidBoss developer:

Fuck Apple. If they insist on going this route I may just have to start exclusively shipping Electron web builds of my games on Mac to ensure things will keep working. Sorry for those of you on Macs but 2% of my games users is not worth implementing a whole new back end for. https://t.co/lPoqpwOL9n — 'Shark Hugs' Eniko (@Enichan) June 4, 2018

Starsector developer:

This would mean the end of OS X support by Starsector. Unless @LWJGL comes up with some dark magic? https://t.co/2RaKk0Q5fw — Alexander Mosolov (@amosolov) June 4, 2018

Maia developer:

I won't port thousands of lines of my engine to a non standard proprietary API. Neither will many other developers either on principle or due to OSX's tiny install base. Here lies the end of games on Apple's desktop platform. pic.twitter.com/nKUWiMKwDS — Simon Roth (@SimoRoth) June 4, 2018

The list goes on and on like that. What will be interesting to see, is if more developers who are building the tools themselves look to projects like MoltenVK to use Vulkan on both Linux and Mac.

I do have to wonder, if Valve knew this was coming and helped get MoltenVK open sourced to help for when this situation eventually came.

What are your thoughts?