One of the benefits of transitioning the Mac over to use Apple designed chips is that it makes it somewhat easier for developers to build software that runs across all of Apple’s platforms. The uptick in console games being brought to the Apple ecosystem is a good example of this. We’ve seen a number of high profile games, like Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage release on macOS, iPadOS, and even iOS.

One AAA game that had been announced for both Mac and iPad at WWDC 2022 was No Man’s Sky. Since then, there’s seemingly been no further mention of the iPadOS version.

I emailed Hello Games a few weeks ago asking if there was an update on the status of the iPad version, but haven’t received a response. It would be disappointing, but not totally surprising if it silently was canceled.

The Effort Involved

In addition to the effort to port the game to Apple devices, supporting a touch-based operating system like iPadOS means the developers also need to build in support for touch controls. I haven’t played enough of No Man’s Sky to estimate the effort involved, but I’m sure it’s a non-trivial amount of work.

The other thing to consider is thermals. The thermal envelope of an iPad is going to be significantly smaller than that of any Mac in the lineup, including the MacBook Air. This, combined with being passively cooled, means that the CPU in an iPad chip can’t run as fast or for as long as it can on most laptops or desktops. Its possible that for such a large open world game, even the iPad Pro may not have enough sustained performance to run it well.

It’s possible these challenges were too much for the developers to overcome for what they saw as minimal benefit. There’s been speculation these console game ports aren’t selling well on Apple devices, and iPads would be a small sliver of an apparently already small number of sales. Maybe the port is still in development, and we’ll see it at some point. Either way, it’d be great if the developer could provide some clarity on the situation.