Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference kicked off today and during the Keynote presentation they talked about the future of gaming on MacOS.

"Every mac in the [M Series] lineup can play today's most cutting-edge games" stated Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple. It's a bold claim and as someone that personally uses a Mac all day for work with the occasional bit of gaming, he's not wrong; The M Series chips pump out fantastic performance in games, and it's great to see the catalog of games available on Apple silicon grow.

Apple is looking to build a unified gaming platform across Mac, iPhone and iPad. Enjoy your games no matter what device you're using which is great news for those who don't have a Mac and desire the portability of their phones or tablets. A big part of this is the Game Porting Toolkit, which was originally released last year, and now is being updated to version 2 with improved Windows compatibility as well as shader debugging tools, giving game devs a better way of repackaging games originally created for PC.

The updated toolkit is allowing developers to maintain a common codebase for games which should make it easier for games ready for Mac to be also released on iPad and iPhone. Apple has clearly been devoting more resources into making gaming on Mac a reality over the past few years and it's really starting to show. Their newer generations of hardware are much more efficient compared to your typical PC running Windows which allows for more gaming portability, and for those that are on the Mac ecosystem for professional work, the need for a second computer just to play games is dwindling.

Apple also showcased several titles that are playable on MacOS, including the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows which will have support for MacOS on day 1. That support extends to Ubisoft's next-gen Anvil game engine, so we're expecting to see all future titles using it also come to MacOS and to take advantage of the Metal 3 graphics API.

We've also got Frostpunk 2 arriving in July, Valheim, Palworld, and World of Warcraft's next expansion coming to Mac soon. WoW isn't much of a surprise since Blizzard has supported Macs since the original game, but it's nice to see it make an appearance anyway.

A Mac purchase might not be for everybody, but it's easy to admit that seeing gaming cross boundaries is awesome for everyone. If you're interested, you can checkout today's keynote presentation.