There’s no question that Macs are “better” than PC’s - it’s just that they’re cost-prohibitive for most home users. When it comes to raw performance and stability, Macs have always been ahead of PC’s, causing them to still have the reptutation of being the machines for audio and video work.
Why, then, have Macs never been gaming machines? It can’t be the price, alone - gamers will routinely spend three and four thousand dollars on Alienware PC’s for gaming. I think there’s also a “chicken or egg” argument to be had, becuase games aren’t “as available” for Mac - but are games less available for Macs becuase fewer people use Macs for games, or do fewer people use Macs for games because less games are available?
Beats me. I am a Mac and PC user (started out on PC, switched to Mac in 2000, still use my PC regularly). I don’t know the extended of history of Macs (I mean, I’ve read about it, but I wasn’t paying attention when it was actually happening), so I can’t really give you a cogent account of why things happened the way that it did.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Macs (especially the G5s) could hold up very well with the more exacting tasks, but for years now they’ve lost popularity with the gaming crowd. They’ve always been favored by the artsy-types (which I am one).
Trying to get a factual answer to this question, though, may be tricky. This is more of an IMHO question, I suspect. Because once you start getting the hardcore geeks on both sides throwing out numbers and stuff, the “facts” get kind of cloudy.
As I recall, Steve Jobs was against games. The idea was that Apple was trying to break into the business market, and the thought was that having games running on the machine would reinforce the already current notion that Apple computers were cute little toys for the home.
To my mind, downplaying games was most heinously dumb thing that Apple could have done, because even as far back as the 80’s, it was pretty clear that entertainment was the driving force behind a lot of computer purchases.
Even today, if I were running Apple, I’d be underwriting the porting of games to the Mac, because I suspect lack of good games is the primary reason that people choose PCs instead.
Because today’s games are prohibitively expensive to develop, approaching the budgets of motion pictures. Why should a software publisher spend valuable resources to support a platform with less than 5% of the market? Like viruses and spyware, games go where the installed base is. Mac = few games, few viruses, little spyware. Nobody cares.
From reading the computer gaming news, it’s apparent that most computer game developers treat Macs as an afterthought. The Mac version is always, always, always developed after the Windows version has “gone gold,” and it’s not uncommon for a game to never get a Mac version. As you say, it’s a small fraction of the home computer market, so the software developers say “Eh, we’ll put someone on it when we don’t have anything better to do.”
My hazy memories of the late '80s / early '90s are of Macs being a specifically business-oriented tool. PCs were an everyday item, alongside myriad other computers which also had the big games markets. PCs gained their dominant position from the consolidation of this market, and therefore the consolidation of these game enthusiasts. Macs never had a big games market.
I’ll bite my tongue and ignore the stuff about how macs have always been superior to PC’s. Suffice it to say I disagree, from the point of view of a seasoned developer who used to program primarily on macs. And anyone who thinks MacOS deserved to be called “stable” has a very selective memory.
One big reason game development happened more on PC’s is that games started to rely on high-performance graphics hardware more and more, and PC’s had tons and tons of really great aftermarket graphics cards available. High-end mac graphics hardware was not only not as good, but it was absurdly expensive. We’re talking about thousands of dollars for a video card simply because it could drive a 19" monitor at 24-bit color (and at a fixed resolution!). As a result, most casual mac users had stock video hardware. If you think “mac users” looks like a small target audience when compared to “PC users”, you should compare “mac users with really fast graphics hardware” to “PC users with really fast graphics hardware” in, say, the early 90’s. The mac market was miniscule.
Somewhere around here I still have a beta version of a RasterOps 2/64 NuBus card. Memories…
And to follow up to myself, after a while, the PCI bus started coming into use and the promise of graphics cards that worked on both mac and PC was born, but it took a really long time to deliver on that. For years, there would still be a “mac version” and a “PC version” of the same card (with different firmware), and the mac version was still quite a bit more expensive due to lower volumes. I think this is a lot more even now, but there still might be issues getting OS X drivers for your card of choice.
And the fact that DirectX is so firmly established is probably a benefit to PC game programmers, too. I’m not sure what graphics subsystem you’d use for high performance on OS X. It’s either QuickDraw3D, which has a relatively small base of people who know how to program it, or it’s something like OpenGL, which means mac programmers had to learn a new graphics subsystem when they switched to OS X.
Actually, for a very long time, Macs lagged well behind PCs in processor speed, which is key to playing cutting-edge games. During almost the entire G4 phase of the Mac platform, for instance, Macs relied on two processors instead of one to even be in the running against wintel machines in terms of raw performance, and virtually no game developers took advanged of multiprocessing. Also, one’s options, as far as what GPU you can use, are severly limited on the Mac platform. Only now have the G5 towers achieved parity with top Wintel performance, but in the middle-range, PCs still rule in terms of speed for the price. Nobody buys dual Xeon towers or G5 towers, which cost about $3k, just to play games. The iMac G5 is a very nice machine, but it’s got a second-rate GPU for gaming purposes. Macs just aren’t the platform of choice for games.
I can’t cite, but this is my memory of reading various Mac histories, i.e., Finagle’s got it right. Why hasn’t it taken off recently? Eh, I have access to most of the “good” games, albeit a bit late.
I resent that Macs are for creative people; that they’re for leftists; that they’re for tree-huggers; that they’re for liberals; that they’re for hybrid vehicle drivers. I’m an engineer. I’m a states-rightist. My man won. I have the biggest non-truck gas guzzler I could get. I’m an expert in Windows, and don’t do bad in Linux. I’ve actually put thought into my OS of choice. We’re not all just misguided hippies for God’s sake.
I don’t think MAC’s have the edge anymore, and have fallen behind. The only way they can be somewhat competive is by adding multiple processors to try (and fail) to match a PC’s single Intel or AMD CPU.
That out of the way I think it is based on 2 things:
Games, true games, were born on PC’s. They were text based, so the early mac (apple) had no advantage. Then the installed base in PC’s just kept it there. I remember that about 85%+ of the computers run windows, 5% Mac, 5% Linux, 5% other. These numbers are aproximate and from memory, but the 5% MAC and %5 Linux (plus or minus 1%) is dead on - from a cnet artical - you can search for it if you want, I don’t. So it just doesn’t make sense to make a Mac game. Now with the performance edge going to the PC, it’s a no-brainer (not that is was b-4).
Nope. Apple IIes and Commodores (and a few other forgotten brands) were the home computers of the day. Infocom, for example, ported Zork to the Commodore 64. I remember flight simulators for the IIe back in '80.
And text-based games are trivial to port (Zork ran on PDPs and mainframes first).
No, I’m pretty sure that it’s Apple’s fault. They were hell-bent on breaking into the Enterprise market and dropped the ball on entertainment. And you rarely go broke selling entertainment to the masses.
One possible additional explanation is that Apple was pretty late getting color into the Macintosh and it was pretty expensive when it arrived. Meanwhile, the PC had crummy CGA graphics, but it did have color.
Actually, mac versions are pretty rare now. Top-selling games can afford to do so since there’s not much market glut [that is, mac people can’t be picky] but no one bothers to port the smaler games, even if they are just as good. What this means is that most of the big names get there, but only 6 months to a year later.
I’ve heard from a Gamestop employee that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo make some sweet deals to get that shelf space, actually.
To clarify what you are saying: some (but not all) of the big successfull games get ported over to Mac as they have the budget to go after that last 5%, and the cruddy small games that do not sell never make it to Mac. Good games are rare, so Mac game titles are rare.
As a Mac user and a gamer I will agree with that. But, as I do not have the time on my hands that a 17 year old has, that doesn’t bother me too much. Why waste my minimal time with the marginal games? As long as Blizzard keeps making mac versions, I’m good to go!
As to the OP, I would say that the answer is price. While some gamers buy pimped out machines for thousands of dollars, that is not where the base of the market was. The base of the market 10 - 15 years ago when trends were forming was games for teenagers going on their parents’ machine. The parents, blinded by foolish choices they saw at work by IT departments more concerned with their own comfort level than with the increase in productivity macs would have brought their casual users, bought PCs. So the game base was PCs. And really, for a while there in the 90’s, Apple was blindsided by a version of Windows that actually worked, and they really fell behind.
I so not want to make this a Mac vs. PC thread, but gosh, anyone that still f*cking refers to a “Mac” as a “MAC” is just too stupid to know better. Actually, that makes it easy not to divert this thread – I don’t need to waste my breath explaining to the deaf. So, never mind.
Kids, play nice. None of this Mac vs. PC crap here. If you feel that one is better then the other fine but the Mac/PC flame was was old in the by 1990.
Back to the OP. There are a few reasons. The main one is that Apple, I think in the mid '90s, thought that the only way to make it in bisness was to leave behind the ‘toy machine’ mentality so they stopped courting game developers. By the time they realised that this was a mistake it was too late. It’s a shame because the games I can get for my iBook run great, even though it’s only a 1ghz G4 (only? I remember when 16mhz was fast as hell)
I’m a huge Mac fan, but I think there was a long dark period during the G4 phase where Macs basically stagnated performance-wise. Motorola pretty much broke Moore’s Law, and not in a good way. Up until a little over a year ago, Macs couldn’t even make proper use of DDR ram because the frontside bus was so slow (maxed-out at 167 MHz). And, as mentioned above, GPU options were severely limited. Game developers didn’t take advantage of SMP, so you’ve got at best a middle-grade GPU plus a CPU that Intel and AMD chips can run circles around, for about a grand less per box…well, if you can get it to work, the PC is going to wipe the floor with the Mac. Only now, since the arrival of the G5 processor, is the performace disparity being sucessfully addressed. The price disparity is pretty much permanent, as Apple likes its margins. Gamers don’t care about how great OSX is anyway, they want cheap speed and variety for variety’s sake. Whether Apple execs wanted to court game developers or not is pretty much moot. With a sub-5% market share, there’s not much to court with.