Kojima makes surprise appearance on Apple stream to praise the Mac's 'rendering pipeline' and announce Death Stranding for Mac

Jul 02, 2023

A new Mac gaming push from Apple lured "diehard Apple fan" Hideo Kojima to the platform.

Did you know Hideo Kojima loves Macs? If your answer is "no, but that figures," we are alike in our perspective on the Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator. Kojima got to fanboy out a little on Monday by appearing on the Apple campus during its WWDC event to announce Death Stranding Director's Cut is coming to Macs later this year. He also pledged that future Kojima Productions games will be playable on Apple systems, too.

"Now we are entering a new era for gaming on the Mac," Kojima said, before going on to highlight the power of Apple's latest chips. "I was blown away by the power of Apple silicon and Metal 3, with its modern rendering pipeline, and the amazing graphical fidelity delivered by MetalFX upscaling."

I got a chuckle out of Kojima showing up on an Apple livestream to talk about how cool he thinks Apple's processors are, having clearly gotten a nice sack full of cash to port his games to the Mac. But also, I mostly believe him: Death Stranding was one of the first games to really wow us with Nvidia's DLSS upscaling, and according to Digital Foundry, MetalFX is quite impressive.

Kojima didn't specifically mention Death Stranding 2 is also Mac-bound, but he did close by saying that "This is just the beginning, and we are actively working to bring our future titles to Apple platforms." Death Stranding will be available to preorder sometime "soon."

Earlier in the presentation, Apple announced a new "Game mode" feature for Macs, which sounds just like the one Microsoft integrated into Windows years ago and we all promptly forgot about. Game mode gives games priority access to the CPU and GPU. More significant, probably, is that it offers reduced Bluetooth latency for controllers and AirPods so input and audio stay in tight sync. I don't know if there's going to be a quality or battery trade-off there, but Bluetooth audio latency can be a real buzzkill on gaming systems like the Switch, so it's nice to see Apple prioritizing it.

Apple also mentioned a new "game porting toolkit" to simplify the porting process, but to me that seems unlikely to move the needle much for Mac gaming compared to, say, what Valve's been doing with Proton to make Windows games run extremely well on Linux. Otherwise, as I assume it's done with Kojima, Apple will have to keep shelling out for games it really wants on its OS.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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