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MrDOStoday at 1:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

In 2004, sure, but Valve didn't (publicly) ship Mac OS X software before 2010.


Replies

hecifatotoday at 6:26 PM

I hear what you're saying, but keep in mind that Bethesda shipped Skyrim as 32-bit in 2011. It wasn't until the Special Edition release in 2016 that it was updated to 64. Now, obviously, we could chalk that up to it just being Bethesda.

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ajrosstoday at 4:00 PM

They didn't develop it from scratch though! The 2010 Mac HL2 binaries are a port of the existing 32 bit Windows product, with all the word size and alignment issues you'd expect for C++ code of that vintage. You don't magically wave a wand and expect high performance code to work when sizeof(void*) changes, and the effort to do that needs to be weighed against the perceived value and the size of the market.

Needless to say, annoying a bunch of HN nerds a quarter century in the future wasn't on Valve's radar. They just wanted some Mac revenue and picked the low hanging fruit.