The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for November 2011 231
Bethesda took advantage of the Video Game Awards this weekend to announce the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, titled Skyrim. The game is planned for November 2011, and a teaser trailer has been posted on the Elder Scrolls website. Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine.
Re:New game systems please! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows-only game? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all.
Don't use all-quantors, it makes it trivial to prove you wrong, because a single counter-example suffices.
I am a gamer, and there is no non-Mac computer in my home (anymore).
(although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig)
Which 0.0001% of gamers own. You, sir, are stuck in the 80s, when one needed a university degree to be a gamer because one pretty much had to build ones own machine and the global gaming market was a few million bucks. Today, "gamers" includes most of the population and I dare to say the top-50 or so games run perfectly well on a 5-year-old machine because they are called FarmVille and the like. Maybe WoW is on that list somewhere, but very likely it's the only game on that list requiring a 3D graphics card.
There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version
True, most Mac users use BootCamp to run windows on their Mac for gaming purposes. For a "I want this" game, doing only a windows version will work. But, honestly, most games are in the "looks nice, maybe I'll take a look" category. If they are available for the Mac, I will buy them (I've bought quite a few indie games for the Mac, for example). If they are windows-only, chances are that I'd rather visit torrentz.com than Steam. And if it's not there, I'll probably forget about it. If you can't be arsed to make the game for my system, then I can't be arsed to get out my wallet.
Or, as someone else put it nicely - would you rather have 0.1% of the 90% market share, or 10% of the 5% market share?
Re:Windows-only game? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that Steam for Mac was released this year, and is already up to nearly 5% (given that Steam for Windows has been around for much, much longer), even when the library of Mac-compatible games on there is still not growing as quickly as it really should [the majority of games on the service are still Windows only, the Mac library is small but growing] (although Valve are porting their own titles as quickly as they can), I think that your numbers actually say the opposite of what you are saying.
"Bleeding edge" performance doesn't matter to as many people as you think it does - while there is a lot to be done on OS X in terms of gaming performance (the GPU drivers were really the biggest hit, and those have come on considerably in recent months), an OS X system will run most modern games just fine if they meet the specs - at least comparably to a Windows box.
I don;t want to be tweaking my RAM timings to get an extra 2fps out of Crisis, I just want to kick back after working and play a game now and again, crucially without having to reboot my machine into Windows for the convenience factor.
Not all "Gamers" are using liquid-cooled, overclocked, fan-heater-sounding rigs to play games - I would wager that most gamers are not like this any more, since the hardware pretty much caught up to the software in most cases - by which I mean, the games look good enough and play well enough on high settings on pretty modest hardware (cost wise) these days. You don;t need to buy a $600 GPU or a custom 15 fan case any more.
Any Mac bought in the last couple of years is going to have pretty decent hardware from a gaming perspective - ok, not cutting edge, but then most turnkey PC setups are not cutting edge either. Last year's iMacs were shipping with Radeon 4670s and 4850s, and the current ones have 5670s and 5750s (standard on the 27" and better specced 21.5", 4670 on the base one). They're not going to win benchmarking tests by any stretch of the chalk, but they're not miles behind any more, and the drivers are much better.
I'll follow up with a stat of my own (although will be difficult to back up as it was from the most recent Keynote - 1 in 5 new PCs sold in the US is a Mac - that's a growing market. Your argument is that since Mac is only at 5% on Steam (despite only being available to Mac for about 6 months, and still in its infancy) that there's no need to target Mac gamers - the same could have been said for designing websites that do more than just target IE, back when it was 95% of the browser market. Who needs Firefox?
Mac users have been crying out for game developers to release things on their platform for years - they are a captive and willing audience. Blizzard has been making hay on it for some time, and so were Bungie before Microsoft bought them out and took over the franchise that was supposed to be Mac-exclusive (Halo) and made it their Xbox launch title. Given that the Mac OS X user base is growing year on year, and has been since it came out (and that the numbers just cannot be old users upgrading - the base is very definitely growing quite rapidly) it only makes sense to target the platform for games, especially since the primary difficulty (the PPC architecture being different from x86) is now gone, making porting easier.