Apple insist on having their own apis and they don’t maintain compatibility for older software for very long, these 2 facts explain things fine on their own. Game devs don’t want a major support burden, they’re happy to patch here and there but constant dropping of apis or even architectures is a lot to handle. The bigger impact is that macOS ends up with a lot less old games that still run, if you need a critical mass of games to become a gaming platform, that constant bleed of legacy games will always slow macOS down.
As for gaming specific features, Metal is a perfectly fine api whose only real problem is that it’s different from the other platforms. Maybe not the best, but certainly not terrible. They also have a really nice capability floor, it’s practical to make a modern game work on any Mac from the last X years (maybe the neo complicates that a bit).
There’s probably a few gaming specific capabilities they could improve on, mouse input especially, but that’s never been the real issue.
What fraction of game studios still even exist 10 years after releasing a game?
Also - I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that running DF through a terminal is (was...) possible if you're not using a graphical tileset (perhaps even with... ha)?
And I do use that option, as i said, for games that you play in finite sessions and that have a beginning and an end.
Also as I said, I don't use it for forever games (mmos or endless simulators like DF) by choice. My playing pattern for those is not finite and relatively long sessions. I fire them for a short break, do something in them, close them and move along.
If you have to turn on a separate box for that half your short break is gone with booting and shutting down. And you may lose interest before the other box is finished booting.
Same for running games under crossover. Start crossover - SLOOOW. Wait for the game to start through the layers of emulation - SLOOW. It's fine if it's a weekend and I want to play say Dishonored [1] for a few hours. It's not fine if I want to spend 20 min improving a build in Minecraft and then go do irl stuff.
[1] Dishonored is an example of the type of game I'd jump through hoops to play. I've always streamed it actually. No idea how it runs in Crossover.
Can't be too mad about it though, it was free back then too.
Tack on having to pay Apple to play in their shitty ecosystem and it makes complete sense.
Wine/proton as a gaming ABI/runtime is perfectly fine, Microsoft used to do a lot to maintain backcompat and that spirit has clearly distilled into proton: it even runs games Windows is unable to (most recent example of mine is Black and White).
If I were making games I wouldn't support it either. Apple does just about everything to not support backwards compat.