Jeez, yeah, how could I forget the Marathon series. The whole reason Mac gamers were so bent out of shape about u$oft snatching up Bungie was the great line of games (released Mac only or simul. for PC and Mac) that came out of their outfit. Oni is another 3rd person that had the anime-lovers going ga-ga.
Word is only wannabee gamers buy Alienware crap, if you’re really into gaming you build it yourself and if you’re a nutcase like me you mod the hell out of it too!
Careful shopping will net you a good gaming maching for less than $1000, Steve and Co. can’t touch that.
No argument there. I kind of wish we Macaholics had similar options; but it would come at the price of ease-of-use and compatibility, so, IMO, there’s no perfect world.
Well, we did have similar options, about eight years ago. They were called Mac Clones. And I bought one, and it was the best Mac I ever had.
And although it was an unpopular decision at the time, the decision to end licensing of clones was indeed the right one for Apple. Before OS8 came out, APPL was trading at about $12 a share, and the everpresent predictions of the imminent demise of Apple were starting to rise to a shrill roar. (Although they had over $5B in cash reserves and were in good standing credit wise, their market share for the most profitable hardware was being “pirated” by the clone houses like PowerComputing – the maker of the clone I bought.)
Then they yanked the clone license, released the iMac and then the iPod, and now look… APPL is trading at near $100 a share and the iPod and iMac are the shizzit with the next generation of computer buyers.
Gamers? Really, power gamers are the niche market now. And as someone else pointed out, they tend to assemble their systems from components because it’s far cheaper than paying Dell or Alienware for a high end machine, and besides, it requires constant upgrading to keep it a high end machine…
As for the evolution of the PC as a gaming platform, over the mac it’s really simple:
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Early on, mac games were “too difficult” to port from the PC was because of the API overhead necessary for Macintosh that wasn’t necessary for DOS.
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When the windows API became a necessary evil, the market share for Wintel boxes drove the equation.
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Porting windows 95 games to Mac system 7 or 8 games was not straightforward for several reasons, including but not limited to: fundamental differences in the API, the single video buffer architecture of the Mac (compared to dual video buffers for the PC), and most egregiously, no true multitasking built in to the Mac OS.
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It’s much easier now that the Mac is based on a Unix kernel, but there are still technical challenges that make a game premiere on Mac like World of Warcraft a rare and wonderful thing.
Really, the challenges for writing a game on Windows and writing a game for mac were completely different. The mac had a horrible multitasking environment and a very strict API. Windows had to run on any of a virtual infinity of hardware configurations and had horrible real-time I/O support.
OK, that was the long answer.
The short answer, and the right answer, is that the reason it’s difficult is so that only the good games get ported to the Mac.
Wow, I’m having trouble coming up with a worse way to start a GQ thread…
FWIW I’ve been in the game industry for almost ten years and got my start as a programmer working with Macs in the late 80’s
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In the pre-Windows days if you just wanted to hack something together it was easier to “get down to the silicon” with a DOS box than with a Mac. This biased many early garage developers and hobbiests against the Mac – even ones who had previously been developing on Apple II’s.
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In an effort to prove that the Mac wasn’t a toy, Apple actively discouraged game development on its platform.
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Around '95, Microsoft introduced DirectX, a game development API that made it much easier to program games under Windows. They actively began pushing the PC as a gaming platform. Apple didn’t fight back.
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As PC’s got larger marketshare, economic incentives kicked in. It takes roughly the same amount of time to develop a game for the Mac as for the PC, but the PC has a much larger install base.
And games companies don’t really care how good or bad the platform is, all they care about is how much time / money they’ll have to spend to get a game running on it, versus the number of copies they expect to be able to sell. Even though the Mac market size is small, Blizzard makes a pretty good profit off of Mac sales because a much higher percentage of Mac owners buy their games, in part because there are so few good games out there for Macs.
Not true, sorry. First, some games are released simultaneously (kind of blows a hole in the “always” theory). Blizzard, for one, has started developing the Mac/PC versions simultaneously and releasing them on hybrid CDs. They are not the only ones doing this, though it is not the norm.
Second, most PC developers do not do their own Mac versions. Though again, there are exceptions (like Blizzard). For the past few years, Westlake has been THE porting house used to take the PC code and convert it to Mac code. Though once founder Glenda Adams left and went to Aspyr, it’s changed. Aspyr frequently licenses A and B list games, then ports them in house. They start work while the PC version is in development, but can’t finalize the game til after the PC version goes gold and it can still take several months.
Lastly, as a HUGE Mac fan, even I have to agree they are not always superior machines. OSX is an amazing OS, but us Mac gamers took a speed hit compared the same processors in OS9, which is simply more optimized, though OSX has made huge improvements since its launch.
And whoever said this before was right: Macs were coming into a market where business was THE thing, and Jobs was very afraid of the Mac being seen as a toy, so he actively tried keeping games to a minimum. Huge mistake. Heck, I remember when Apple and Microsoft were the same size, and Apples were the computer to have in the home. C’est la vie. I’ll stick with my Macs for my own reasons (I use both Macs and PCs), but greatly prefer the Mac. And luckily, the Mac game market has been going through a huge resurgence of late with more and more A-list titles coming to the platform, even if they are a little late. Check out insidemacgames.com for regular news on this stuff, it’s a great gaming news site.
The biggest gaming company for Apple computers, as well in software overall–is Microsoft.
Microsoft, despite owning 10 percent of Apple, is slightly more interested in developing game software for the XBox and the Wintel market.
Cite? Because I believe that is wrong. They do make games for Apple, that’s for sure, but I think at the moment it’d be hard to top Aspyr for sheer output. They’ve done everything but corner the Mac market in the past 3 years.
Other players: MacPlay, MacSoft are still making games, but not nearly as many. Blizzard, of course, but they release a new game every 2 years period.
Strictly quantity wise, I’d have to say Aspyr all the way.
List of their games (some are PC, most are Mac, they are all listed):
http://www.aspyr.com/noframes.php/games.php/complete/
OK, I need a big fat cite for this statistic. Last I heard, Microsoft bought 150 million dollars worth of non-voting Apple stock in '97 and has since sold it. Even if they haven’t sold it, Apple’s current capitalization is something like 26 billion dollars.
Bah, Steve Jobs was against games on the Apple and Mac because he kept getting pwned while playing Ultima and Pong. Bitter dregs. Plus I think Photoshop is a great game although some parts tend to confuse me.
Poor taste in humor aside, if Jobs really wanted his computers to be seriously considered as a business machine, how come he didn’t take into account “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy”? If someone uses a computer a lot at home (games) and at work (work) then they’ll have more of a knack to use the machine in addition to broadening one’s skills (dickering with drivers, etc). A Mac on the other hand is built primarily to do work. It doesn’t have that little edge of “Once I’m done gaussian blurring this tube of toothpaste and eps it, I can unwind playing Half-Life 2!!!”
Also stating Macs are better than PCs or vice versa is troll bait. You are not your computer. You are not your operating system.
Because “All work and no play makes the CEO, by extension, the corpporate purchasing managers, happy.” You’re overlooking the historical fact that the PC took over not because it dominated the home market (clever Charlie Chaplin ads aside), but in the corporate market. Once the PC became the de facto standard in the office, it began taking over in the home. Then, once it had already become established, the market economics took over.