> 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.
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.