A surprise definitely as one of the main Apple yearly keynote, World Wide Developers Conference 2023 or simply WWDC 23, where everything about the Apple ecosystem including development and occasionally consumer products announcements take place is happening next week.

It is expected that Apple will present what’s next for macOS, iOS and its derived watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS and all the tools for development and since 2020 with Apple renewal on making their own processor for its Mac computers, what could be next for Apple Silicon.

This long introduction is to have you in mind as one of the announcements expected with macOS in particular, was that gaming development has been one of the challenges when Apple dropped Intel in favor of their own Apple M1 and now M2 processor.

All because Intel-based development needed Rosetta interpreters so Apple M1 And M2 “could understand” Intel instruction built in current games as their Instruction set is COMPLETE DIFFERENT and this already affects performance because there is extra processing during the interpretation and the final instructions results.

So, Apple needs more developers to have games completely ported to Apple Silicon and avoid Rosetta.

With ALL THAT IN MIND and to my complete surprise, Hello Games announced that No Man’s Sky for Mac is now a reality and yes, designed from scratch to support 100% Apple Silicon using the Metal 3 framework or Apple’s answer to Vulkan and DirectX12.

It baffles me why Apple didn’t convince Hello Games to wait for WWDC 23 before relaunching the game on Mac’s Steam client but the good news is that the game is already crossplay and cross-save compatible and FREE for all that already paid for the game on Steam in Windows.

Introducing No Man's Sky for Mac!

Including seven years of updates and built natively for Apple silicon and i5 Intel Macs, No Man's Sky for Mac supports cross-play, PC-to-Mac cross-save, fast loading times using the Mac internal SSD and MetalFX upscaling for console graphics.

Download from Steam today (free to existing PC owners)

Coming to Mac App Store soon.

Expect fast loading times using the Mac internal SSD. Consistent performance across the full range of Macs is possible as we are one of the first titles to support MetalFX Upscaling (Temporal and Spatial). Metal 3 support allows No Man’s Sky to achieve console quality graphics whilst maintaining battery life on laptops and lower end devices.

Maybe a good theory that I can think of is that WWDC 23 could be the spot where Hello Games and Apple announce the availability of the game directly on the Mac App Store, which was confirmed today with no launch date.