It would require Apple to stop being Apple. Give up their App Store revenue (Steam) and give up their proprietary 3D API in favor of a standard? Might as well ask for a Start button.
> Give up their App Store revenue
They are not giving up anything they currently earn, they would be adding sales of hardware and games.
They could make a deal with Steam or make their own steam and make it easy for Games to port their games to it. They could likely find some way to monetize this.
What are you basing that on? They’ve spent a lot of time talking about how optimized the hardware and software are for each other, why are you so sure that getting equivalent performance and efficiency would be easy? Consider how trash MoltenVK is compared to Metal. About the best you can say is that it technically works.
> not giving up anything they currently earn
That’s not how Apple thinks. If they cut someone else in, especially a behemoth like Steam, they’re signing away their ability to do Apple Arcade for MacOS in the future. Look at the whole Kindle vs Apple Books fiasco, they’re never going to let someone else in the pool again. They won’t even let the XCloud game streaming app on.
> never going to let someone else in the pool again
Then make a proper games platform that is easy to target for games that are already on steam.
Making sure their CPU/GPUs work perfectly with e.g. Steam and making sure that game studios are able to target Apple hardware would make a lot of difference for their appeal to gamers. Steam, of course, is also starting to work in Asahi Linux as well. There is really no good technical reason why that couldn't work on Mac OS natively.
Of course the same reason that this is a good idea also means Apple won't do it because they seem to prefer controlling their software ecosystem at the cost of failing to grow it. So Metal is nice but completely useless for gaming, or indeed most consumer focused use cases involving 3D (except for the Apple sanctioned ones). OpenCL/OpenGL barely work at this point. Forget about vulkan or directx. The whole AR/VR thing is perpetually not happening at all on Apple hardware. Until such time that they choose to release some Apple branded hardware for this of course. They are also not really investing in making their AI optimized hardware work for mainstream AI developers. Etc.
Anyway, Apple could make a really nice gaming focused console based on e.g. the mac mini. Not that hard. It would not require a lot of changes. Basically beef up the Apple TV UI, make sure games actually can be ported to it, and job done. Not that hard. But as long as their OS is locked down and developer hostile, none of that will happen.