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Claims of Apple Games Just PR Fluff?
GameSetWatch is running an editorial written by Alex Handy, the former editor of Game Developer magazine and a well respected figure in the games journalism business. Today he's discussing the recent show of support from EA and id Software for the Apple platform, essentially saying that he doesn't think much of it because it's all been said before. "We've been here before. I've been here before. Waaaaaaaay back in 1999, id was right there at MacWorld, with Carmack talking about how rad the OS was, and demanding that a multi-button mouse arrive. And this was Mac OS 9! People applauded. Those, like myself, who covered the Macintosh gaming world for a living saw a bright future ahead. EA wasn't there, but Activision was, and Aspyr was bringing Madden to the Mac anyway. MacSoft was bringing Unreal Tournament over, and StarCraft was still on the Mac, and still kicking ass. And then, nothing happened. There was a little while there when Mac game companies were expanding, and the best PC to Mac game porting house, Westlake Interactive, was barely able to keep up with all the demand for its services ... By 2001, the brief flash that was the Mac game boom was gone."
Um, may have missed a memo somewhere, but I thought PC still stood for "Personal Computer". I realize that people keep bastardizing it to mean IBM-Compatible, but still. It means what it means. So technically they are "Gaming Personal Computers", and Mac are still semi-firmly in that category.
If you are gonna go for the clever sarcasm, it helps if you don't sound dumb.
Just my $.02
"To Do Is To Be" - Socrates, "To Be Is To Do" - Sartre, "Do Be Do Be Do" - Sinatra
They demoed it at a MacWorld and everyone oooo'ed and aaaaaahhh'ed about it. The Microsoft just stepped in and ended that whole thing.
It'd be nice to get more native games, but with Parallels getting 3D, I don't think its really needed anymore. Why stretch the resources on already stretched game-teams to throw out yet another platform they have to test and bug-fix...making the game even later. Or do just like everyone else does, call the alpha of the game the beta-test, then release the beta as a final product. Only you have more platforms to do that with now.
I used to run PC games in Linux through WINE without much problems, I don't see why it can't be done for OS X either. Again, it'd be nice to have native games, but I won't hold my breath.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Perhaps the reason is even though the percentage of macs being purchased is increasing it is still a very small percentage of the overall PC market. Of those mac owners how many play games...probably a very small fraction. So a developer simply says given the small mac market, given the smaller percentage of that who will play games, and then given the even small percentage of those who play games buying my particular game, is the cost worth the potential profit. My guess is right now it is not.
I don't know if it will change anytime soon. No one says I want to play games now so I will buy a mac and hope in 5 years I have a huge selection. The market that does play games wants to now, not in a few years.
Even Adobe complains that Apple doesn't help them with speed issues when developing their software. So I can see why gaming on the Mac never really takes off. And Adobe helped Apple stay afloat in the 90's.
:/
However, there's one exception; Macs are now on Intel processors, and OpenGL is still relevant. BUT, most affordable Macs have weak video cards.
...Like the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and moon phases.
The Mac got a popularity boost in 1998 when the iMac was introduced and started selling like hotcakes. Games were made. Fun was had. A community formed. Then people kept using the same outdated iMac long after its gaming ability was rendered obsolete by modern games. Sure, some people upgraded to newer, better Macs and kept up with the games.
But over the last 8 or 9 years, the community has slowly faded, game ports have tapered off, porting houses have been dissolved and bought out, and the Mac once again sucks for gaming. But Macs are becoming popular again. Which means...
Games will be made. Fun will be had. New communities will form, and old ones will rise like the phoenix. Porting houses will be incorporated. Games will once again come to the Mac. And in 3-5 years, most Macs will once again be "behind the times" and "outdated" and "not capable of running modern games" and "unshaven and lounging about in their underwear all day waiting for that new version of solitaire with simians set alight". The market will once again ignore Macs as gaming machines. Analysts will call Apple "beleaguered" once again, just for old times' sake. And the cycle will begin again another 2-3 years after that.
Maybe this cycle won't dip as low as they once did, since the x86 allows for using Winelib (and it's bastard child "Cider"). We can only hope.
Hey pal, I play video games because I enjoy shooting my friends. If I were to do that IRL I would have many less friends and probably a jail sentence.
That just doesn't work well in my schedule.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I think calling them "Craptop" says it all. Not for Windows, but for your level of maturity. You can get work done on all OS's. It really depends on what work you want to get done and what tools/apps you prefer to use. At work, I get more done on various flavors of Linux. But that is because I am testing specific stuff that needs to run on Linux. If I am writing a paper or doing e-mail, I use Windows because that is what a majority of our 9000 employees use and it makes it easier to communicate. At home, I run Windows as well because I enjoy gaming and I can build a great machine much more cheaply than a Mac. We stick my mom on a Mac because that way she can do the least damage to her system. I personally don't do a/v editing and don't really see the attraction of an overpriced PC. If I did do those sort of things, I would probably feel different since I know a lot of people (including my dad) love it for those sort of applications.
But use what makes sense. This overwhelming bias for an OS is stupid.
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umm, *cough* Parallels adding 3D isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. At least, not for a long, long while. Firstly the 3D support is very primitive currently, Second, Gaming in Parallels would have a substantial performance hit, since they don't allow guest SMP, and they're having to virtualize the 3D API. To say nothing of the lack of support for shaders at this stage.
Re-read the post you replied to. He didn't say Macs were overpriced, he said that to get a gaming machine you would have to spend more than you do with a PC. That's true because they don't offer a machine for less than $2200 (sans monitor, minimum cpu config, minimum memory, cheapest bundled graphics, smallest hard drive, etc). The next step down is the iMac which ships with a single last generation graphics card.
If you look at what you get with Apple, they're generally at least market competitive. In the case of the Mac Pro, they're actually a price leader for workstation class machines (or were, haven't looked recently). The problem for a lot of people is that particular features are tied to higher base configurations regardless of whether you want or need them. A gaming rig is a good example, since the benefit of dual Xeons is pretty much nil. Laptops are another area. Want a 15" screen? You're talking $2000 minimum for an Apple instead of $800 for a PC with a comparable display. Yes, yes, the Apple configuration at that price includes likes of nice amenities - marginally faster processor, 2GB ram, 120GB drive, dual layer DVD burner, blah blah. That really doesn't matter if you don't need any of that, or if you're on a budget or only have a grand to spend.
That being said, I think the limited product line is actually good business strategy for them, for a number of reasons. The most obvious is cost - less to design, test, warehouse, support, etc. There's also protection of Apple's reputation as a premium brand. By targeting the upper end of each market segment, they foster an image of quality (even in the cases where they fail to live up to it). And of course there's the fact that plenty of people who would have been happy buying an expandable Core Duo machine or a 15" notebook with otherwise iBook specs but ended up buying a Mac Pro or Mac Book because they had no other option to get the feature they actually wanted.
I would not say it is substantially easier to port, just that the rendering part is much easier to port. If it is written for Direct3D, it sometimes means rewriting the underlying rendering engine. However, the rendering engine, while a major concern, was not always the biggest concern, and given how many other areas of a program had to be dealt with, even being the largest concern it could still be less than 20% of the project.
Other things to deal with included threading, system API usage, endian issues in file formats and poor coding, networking, user interface additions, memory management, sound.
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Even if it's only a small portion of the overall user base, there are still lots of people with the latest and greatest, high-end, pro Macs that are capable of running games well; unfortunately, it appears lots of them just aren't interested in games. A game whose system requirements put it easily within reach of hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of Macs out there in the installed base is still likely to sell only a few thousand copies; there are very very few games in Mac game history that have ever moved more than 10-20k units or so on the platform. IMG's Tuncer Deniz just talked about the realities of the Mac market a few days ago ("I remember one Activision executive yelling at me at E3 a few years back, "We sold 3000 copies of Quake III: Arena and you expect us to continue to make games for the Mac"?").
I think that for games to really flourish on the Mac will require Apple's involvement - not just in schmoozing with developers and providing them with various kinds of support, and of course putting out games-capable hardware, but perhaps actually evangelizing games to its own customers. Perhaps it should bundle more games on new Macs (and not limit bundled games to the "consumer" Macs), give games slightly more prominence in the Apple Stores, etc. Maybe they should set up a program to match ad dollars for publishers willing to put "For PC and Mac" at the end of their TV spots, or put profiles of new Mac games in the main column in the "Hot News" section of their site (or occasionally even link to them from the main page). It'd be cool if Steve Jobs featured games in his Stevenotes more often. Whatever it does, I think Apple should do something to help push games to its user base.