An Apple a Day Doesn’t Keep the EU DMA Away

As a distraction from the soap opera of will he/won’t he be leaving SMG, I thought it might be good to brain dump a few ideas about Apple’s recent woes involving the EU DMA and the US DoJ anti-trust suit.

Firstly, Apple looks to be stagnating. While it’s doing very well on the Apple silicon front, making impressive leaps in performance with each generation, the iPhone has started to feel less like a phone and more of a glorified Oojamaflip. Its cameras are undoubtedly brilliant, and a supporting operating system for managing photos, music and other consumable media – also brilliant. It runs third party apps that can extend the use of the phone to do practically do whatever you want it to do. Except you can’t.

It’s just not flexible. At least for developers.

The ecosystem is essentially a for-profit prison in which you’re told what you can and cannot do because security. But the truth is that when I’ve tried to find an app (that usually doesn’t exist – yet), I’ve come across loads of fake, duplicate, cheesy crap which could well be hiding all manner of things. I do not honestly believe as a gatekeeper, Apple is doing that good of job. Quality over quantity? Nope.

The main reason I switched from an iPhone 15 Pro Max to a Pixel 8 Pro is that the raw phone component of the iPhone is utter crap. It has the most basic call handling and filtering that I’ve come across. Third-party apps don’t help – and they’re restricted to what they can do. But the Pixel 8 Pro with Android 14 has more useful tools built-in that it doesn’t require any third-party utilities. It can call screen and transcribe, provide a visual display of a call centre to speed things up, and can notify you when a person has picked up the phone when on hold. It recognises business names and numbers, can filter known spammers and nuisance callers, and you can contribute to that by reporting numbers too. It can also transcribe voicemail, but EE doesn’t support it. Android allows for far more customisation, and makes repetitive tasks substantially easier.

The big bugbear that both the EU and DoJ have is iMessages. It’s an Apple-only feature, but the argument is that why should you have to buy an Apple to have its security functions. You could argue there are alternative options like WhatsApp, Telegram and others – but the point they’re trying to make is that you shouldn’t have to be limited by the hardware or operating system to be able to send secure messages (except when the government objects to it – oh, the irony).

I think it’s about time that Apple concentrated on making more of its services cross-platform – in the same way that Apple Music works on Android and Windows 11 (though the Windows 11 Apple Music app is buggy – it’s enough to make me want to move to Spotify, but Spotify has to do better in some areas first – that’s for another post). I can’t watch my purchased Apple movies and TV shows on my phone – I have to use a PWA (progressive web app) and that only allows me to use Apple TV+.

The only three things that I have which are Apple: iPad Mini 6, HomePod mini and the Apple TV 4K (64Gb). Everything else has recently been replaced: M2 MacBOok Pro was sold and replaced with a Dell Inspiron 16 Plus (highly recommended), the iPhone 15 Pro Max replaced with a Pixel 8 Pro, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 replaced with .. well, that’s a difficult one and again, will be another post – but essentially I’m sticking with the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar for now. I’ve replaced the AirTags with Tile Pro products.

Given everything that’s gone on in the games industry recently, Apple has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever making the Mac suitable for playing triple A titles. It is possible, but many developers aren’t going to spend limited development budgets on converting existing titles or establishing new titles for the Mac. Apple would need to essentially partner with or take over a game studio in order to establish greater dominance in that area.

Apple’s behaviour with Epic Games has been atrocious. I was highly critical of Epic when they deliberately broke Apple’s rules with Fortnite, but Apple has since behaved just as badly – if not more so – when it’s come to the DMA’s rules. All in the name of “security”. Security shouldn’t cost the Earth, for starters. I firmly believe good security shouldn’t be priced out the reach of the ordinary consumer or business.

It’s a complete mess, and it’s not hard to see why both the EU and the US DoJ have had to step in. The next few months are going to be interesting.

What a week!

I really rather hope never to go through another week like this again. But I’m still here. Everybody I know is still here. The world hasn’t exploded. Yet.

But in a week where not only is my employer is looking to restructure, the entire games industry clearly had the same thought. Bigger studios such as EA, Sony and 505 Games have all announced layoffs this week too. Last year saw around 10,000 made redundant from the video game industry and we’re already approaching around 7,000 this year so far and we’ve only made March. It’s absolute carnage.

Would I like to stay where I am? Yes, of course I would – and I will try to fight the good fight along with my colleagues to argue the point all of us are needed in the department. But at the same time I need to ensure that if things do not go the way I think they’re necessarily going to go (I’ve been through redundancy a few times already), I need to get a job lined up and ready to go.

Then we have the question: if I interview for a job and they like me, and I like them enough to leave SMG on my own accord – where does that leave my colleagues? Would they be safe because I’ve thrown in the towel voluntarily? What happens if one or more of my colleagues leave? I believe that could cause considerable damage to the company. Which is not my intent, since – as I mentioned in my post about first anniversary there – I work with some of the greatest people in this industry. I do not want to harm the company that has looked after me throughout the year, nor the people that remain there. But on the other hand, I have mortgage and many bills that need paying.

This is very complex situation – and as I’ve said, I’ve been through redundancies before. But not at this kind of scale or complexity.

But I am not panicking just yet. I have a couple of interviews lined up already and the CV is circulating nicely. At the moment, however, there are still unknown variables floating about. As Donald Rumsfeld once remarked:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones

Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense

And finally, I leave you with a video that makes me grateful for whatever time I may have left working for the company. Needless to say, I cannot comment on ANY of the content.

Happy 1st work anniversary…

.. meeeeeeee!

Today marks my first full year working for Supermassive Games. I didn’t think I’d even get to this point because I’d applied for the same job in 2022 and wasn’t sure if my Windows skills were up to par. I tend to go through phases where I feel much more like a Linux sysadmin than anything else. Now, I’d describe myself more as a tech generalist than anything specific. I try to be platform agnostic, but I do have a soft spot for Linux and macOS! So, I declined to go further with the original interview. However, I re-applied in 2023 and surprised myself by getting the job.

The one thing this job has taught me is that continually getting out of one’s comfort zone is a good thing. My Windows skills (in particular) are constantly improving, and I’m currently deep-diving into Microsoft 365 for fun and… a quiet life at work when people ask me about SharePoint and Teams! Just kidding – or am I?! As for my health, things are much easier now that I have to go into the office every day, which is doing me a lot of good. I think working from home does have its benefits, but I stagnated during the pandemic – not leaving my house for long periods – which definitely affected my health. Plus, there are some seriously cool projects that I’m getting to work on.

Then we’ve had people like Ted Raimi, Hideo Kojima, and Nicolas Winding Refn visit our office, which speaks volumes about just how much this company is valued by gaming and film industry professionals. Occasionally, when I’ve mentioned to random people who I work for, they’ve told me how much they love our games. And when I’ve played our games (The Quarry in particular), I’m astonished at just how brilliant they are, and that – along with Death Stranding – narrative-focused games have become extraordinarily entertaining for me and are now among my favourite genres. There’s definitely something in this whole cinematic gaming malarkey, oh yes. Oh, and did you know that one of the games we’ve developed for Sony is being turned into a feature film?

I feel extraordinarily lucky to work with an amazing team – all of whom are extraordinarily talented and hugely knowledgeable about their field. And friendly too. It’s a company that really does care for its employees and their well-being. Very rare for the creative industries. It’s also the company that made me buy and love the PS5. I really do think it’s an amazing console.

But it still strikes me as amazing that when I was working in the VFX industry, I worked on a film based on a computer game (Tomb Raider 2 and the Cradle of Life – with the fictional Laura Croft living in Guildford of all places). Now it’s vice versa (working in Guildford on computer games). Madness. But I like it!

Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut (Mac)

Now that Kojima’s Death Stranding: The Director’s Cut has landed on iPhones (15 Pro/Pro Max only), iPads (M1/M2 only) and Macs (M series), I thought it would be a good time to put the game through its paces on a high-end MacBook Pro (M2 Max with 32Gb RAM) and an M2 MacBook Air (24Gb RAM). But first, a word about the iPhone and iPad editions: make sure you get yourself a controller – because the touchscreen controls are insane. It took me five minutes just to get past the title screen.

Now, Death Stranding on an M2 Max with 38 GPU cores is gorgeous. It defaults to 60 frames per second, but I changed that to 144 to match my external monitor’s refresh rate and enabled very high graphics and models. The machine handles the game with absolute ease. I ran this at a 2560×1440 resolution (QHD) It pays every bit as well as the PC edition and it’s really nice to see a game like this run so well on a Mac.

Performance on my M2 Max is outstanding…

But the 15″ M2 MacBook Air didn’t fare as well with the same settings (obviously). Anything above Medium graphics/model settings will result in a horrifically sluggish performance regardless of frame rate.

But after some tinkering, I discovered the best settings for a 15″ MacBook Air M2 is to set the graphics level at Medium and make sure that you set the MetalFX mode, Temporal Upscale, is set to Performance. The settings I’ve used for the MacBook Air are show in the following screenshots.

But generally speaking, when you have the right graphics settings on the M2 MacBook Air, and after a bit of stuttering when the game starts, it all soon smooths out and it’s a very good experience. I managed to get a good hour’s gaming in without any issues. It looks good on the lower-end Mac, though expect the CPU to hit the near 90 degrees (celsius) thanks to the lack of fans in the machine.

It’s also a big beast, weighing in around 77Gb. On the 15″ MacBook Air, I had to enable Game Centre in System Preferences otherwise the game wouldn’t even load – it just sat there until I had to kill it off in the Terminal. So remember, regardless of whatever Mac you use: make sure you enable Game Centre before starting the game for the first time!

I think 505 Games have done an incredible job overall. A MacBook Pro with a good number of GPUs is recommended, obviously, but it’s good to know that the game runs well even on more limited hardware.