Transgaming Technologies and Mac Developers

ZerocarboN writes "With such current Mac publishers as Aspyr and MacSoft typically spending months to bring games to the Mac, Mr. State said: "We imagine that they are re-evaluating their business models. Our technology does revolutionize how games are brought to the Mac, which we believe will result in a paradigm shift in the Mac game publishing landscape." He added that TransGaming has no plans to license Cider to other companies, but "we are always open to discussion.""

Comments

Warning!

[0racle]

result in a paradigm shift

Nonsensical statements ahead.

Great!

[rhesuspieces00]

Duke Nukem Forever is coming to the Mac!

Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[mrchaotica]

There's also Crossover Mac coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.

Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE, but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.

Re:Transgaming is NOT the only solution!

[mrchaotica]

if sharing with WINE makes Codeweavers a technically better product, then your point may be valid

I'll wager that that's exactly the case.

More importantly, however, paying Codeweavers gets me a better bang-for-my-buck, because the work it funds will improve WINE for my Linux box as well. In contrast, buying a "Cider-ported" game won't do me any good when using WINE because Transgaming forked WINE before it became GPL. Whether they're complying with the legal requirements or not, they're still assholes for closing it and I refuse to support them because of that.

I also don't like Transgaming's business model, both for Cider and Cedega. I don't like Cider because I'd basically be re-buying most of the same technology for every Cider-ported game, and I don't like Cedega because it's a subscription (i.e., also re-buying it over and over again).

Not Good

[spykemail]

Honestly I take the opposite perspective on Cider - I think it's going to be horrible for the Mac gaming community. Now, as Apple's market share grows, instead of publishers beginning to consider making native versions (not crappy ports) of their games we're going to see everyone using technologies like Cider that reduce performance instead. I guess it's fine for older games but its advantage in terms of development time is offset by the fact that the latest games won't have "good enough" performance.

Re:Not Good

[spykemail]

What I'm saying is that Cider is a performance hit. It's great for ports, but it really can't be used for the latest and the greatest because you need native performance. I'm concerned that its existence will act like a cane that all game developers will lean on instead of deciding to actually make Mac native versions of their games (or even better, Mac only games).

Re:Not Good

[vegasmacguy]

Where the fuck do you Apple kooks get this crap! Apple's worldwide marketshare has been in a constant decline ever since Jobs took over.

Where do you get yours? Are you reading financial reports from 6 years ago? Apple has been in steady growth cycle for the last several years. They have consistently reported that 50% of thier sales or more were not previous Mac owners.

Apple Financial Results

Here's some more links on the subject

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/02/safari.popu larity.growing/

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun 2006/tc20060615_080175.htm

http://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/07/19.18.s html

Explaination of the Myth of Market Share (Google Cache)

Cider

[kevin_conaway]

Since the summary didn't explain what Cider is:

technology that promises to convert Windows games to Mac OS X on Intel processors without the need for the long porting process traditionally required to bring titles to the platform. The company said that it has already forged agreements "with a number of the top tier video game publishers" to bring many of their titles to Intel-based Macs "in the next few months."

Intel Macs market size?

[mbessey]

Okay, I understand that this guy's trying to sell the solution that his company produces. But it's pretty weird to say that these sorts of API translation technologies will be "the way" to bring games to the Mac when Intel-based Macs are a tiny minority of the total Macintosh user base.

I understand it's a lot less effort for the game developer to utilize something like this technology rather than porting the game to native MacOS X. But to the extent that game publishers claim that the Mac market is "too small" to justify porting games, I can't see how a small fraction of that too-small market is going to look any better.

I'm sure they'll claim that this is a zero-effort solution to supporting th Mac, and it's therefore 100% upside to add this in and get a few hundred sales to Intel-based Mac users. I'm sceptical that's really going to work out.

-Mark

not the silver bullet

[oliderid]

Take a look at their support forum. And you will see the problem.
It looks like transgaming needs to tweak its engine for every video games. When the game receives a patch, some of them stop to work and gamers have to wait another tweak from transgaming. It looks like a lot of users are frustrated.

Transgaming may dramatically reduce the time you need to port a Windows based video game to Linux and MacOSX but it isn't such a clean way yet. They do not provide a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0 framework.