Frictional Games Cancels Amnesia: Rebirth Mac Port

Despite their best efforts, developers Frictional Games have brought some unfortunate news. Theyre cancelling development on bringing their recent game, Amnesia: Rebirth, to the MacOS platform.

Announced on their developer site blog, they explain that various technical issues have proven difficult to work around, forcing them to cancel their plans to bring the popular horror sequel to Mac computers. It also means that the Mac version of their previous title, SOMA, will no longer function as intended.

Weve always prided ourselves with being able to supply our games on PC, Linux and Mac, but we have now encountered some serious problems with the latest versions of MacOS. Even though weve put in tons of effort trying to fix the issues so that SOMA and Rebirth supports MacOS we have finally had to give up. We simply cannot manage it.
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We are truly sad for those of you who have been waiting for this version to be released.
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Really sad news of course but we now feel we have exhausted all our options and will simply have to fold under these problems.

They explained the issues in greater detail. The first is centered around OpenGL, a graphical rendering system commonly used in game development. This system was deprecated in 2018 with the release of macOS 10.14. This led to increased difficulty in resolving any graphical bugs the games had.

The other issue was centered around how MacOS 11.0 and onward handles audio drivers. The current sound engine that Frictional Uses is third party, which confirmed that they do not intend to update to support the changes in macOS 11.0. As a result, theyd need to find and implement a completely new audio engine for their games in order to have any sound at all.

Mac computers are historically neglected in the gaming world. With Windows holding a strong domination in the PC operating system market, and Linux becoming increasingly common as a free, open source alternative, MacOS is finding itself becoming increasingly scarce. Since it has such a different infrastructure, many developers have a difficult time supporting the platform, lest they rely on a major game engine like Unity or Unreal.

We hardly blame Frictional for making this decision. After some point, Mac users will have to accept that their operating system just isnt very welcoming to the current video game infrastructure.