Apple brought gaming up on the Mac specifically at WWDC 2022 which is a surprising development, and with a few angles.

First was Metal 3, which included Apple’s own version of DCSS – upscaling graphics in real time taking some of the pressure off the CPU and GPU but still looking great and keeping frame rates high.

The other thing was game controllers – as well as the ability to assign buddy controllers to help someone else control characters in a game, Apple has also added full custom bindings.

All of this works directly from the fully overhauled Settings app in MacOS Ventura, bringing the experience way closer to iOS and iPadOS.

So is this the first step for Apple to becoming a big player? Perhaps, but if nothing else it’s removing a huge stumbling block and making it more likely that Mac users have controllers ready to go for those games when they come. That can only be a good thing. One less obstacle.