Why Apple Should Port Games 848
DanTheMan writes "For every great game there is for Mac OS X, there are at least two for Windows. It's sad, but it's a fact. This article proposes a solution, and it's for Apple to port games. By the way, since the XBox 2 will use the PowerPC G5, it shouldn't be that difficult to port future XBox games to the Power Mac G5 and the iMac, both of which are 64-bit now. Would you buy a Mac if you could play Counterstrike Source and Half-Life 2? What other games are missing from Mac OS X?"
No because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No because... (Score:5, Interesting)
I tend to agree and in that same line of thought, what about Linux? Supposedly Linux now outnumbers Macs on the Desktop and the cost of Linux is even lower than Windows. With the things that x.org and friends are doing, is there some technical hurdle that opengl et al cannot compete on? It seems to me that Linux would be a better target financially as it is exhibiting growth in the market place unlike the number of Macs being used which has somewhat stagnated. Just a thought.
Re:No because... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, very much so. Nvidia and ATI refuse to release full featured OpenGL drivers on the linux platform. DoomIII runs about 20% slower on linux because of nvididia drivers, ATI cards won't even PLAY doom3. UT2k4 is on linux, but it rusn slower because yet again, nvidia's poor quality drivers.
Ati BTW doesn't even have released versions of opengl drivers for linux, so they are even farther behind.
So far today, the only games coming out for linux are the ones who have authors who write cross platform games anyway. You won't start seeing ANY type of reasonable effort put into porting to linux from other game manufacturers until there is a reliable and fast driver for both ATI and nVidia cards.
Re:No because... (Score:3, Interesting)
The last round of drivers from ATI finally included PCIE support, so I'm able to do 3D on the X600 that came bundled with my sys
Re:No because... (Score:3, Informative)
Have you read recent benchmarks? GCC has been rapidly catching up to the intel compiler. It's not there yet but the days of GCC getting trounced in performance are over. As far as doom3 goes, the SSE assembly hasn't yet been ported (according to anandtech), so that could account for a decent performance difference.
Also, I know that most games bypass X
Maybe you're running
Re:No because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Show me proof.
Check your facts (Score:4, Informative)
Liar [steampowered.com]
Re:Check your facts (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I've got a 9800 in my gaming system and put a 9700 in my fiance's, so both systems are counted towards ATi. Would I say they're good cards? No. Would I buy ATi again? No. Owning ATi has been nothing but a pain. Drivers that don't work in games, have anomolies in some, crash on others. I shouldn't have to roll back a driver to play a game properly.
This round I'm going back to nVidia.
Re:No because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No because... (Score:5, Insightful)
The question therefore is that if this were the case, and the games available on both platforms were the same, would you switch from using Windows to getting a Mac?
Re:No because... (Score:3, Funny)
I would swap OS from say windows to Linux but I don't see the point I swapping hardware it costs too much. Macs (sadly) are for the rich and the fashionable
Sure you would (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to have a desktop PC, on which I played a lot of games. Then I got a Powerbook. After that, it was Game Over, so to speak - how could you go back to using Windows after using OS X for a while? I was tired of the video card upgrade treadmill anyway, and decided that for the majority of my gaming needs I'd just buy a console.
That has worked out very well. If you think about it, how many great titles have been released for the PC that are not also around on the console? Most game development energy focuses on the console world now, so if you are any kind of gamer you have a console anyway. And more than ever truly great games come to the console first and the PC second.
It's true that Doom 3 and Half Life 2 are the major exceptions to this point. But although I'll not be able to play HL2 come launch day, I probably will within a year when the console version is released. And in the meantime there are a slew of equally compelling games for the consoles - like Halo 2 of course which I feel has a storyline (or at least a backstory) to equal that of HL, or GTA (whcih will come to the PC eventually), or a number of other AAA titles coming out this Christmas season. Both Doom 3 and HL 2 are holdouts from an earlier time, how many more spectacular games will we really see come out for the PC first?
The author of the first post makes a great point. I have seen countless posts saying the only thing holding them back from getting a Mac is games. But to those people I would say, buy a few consoles, get keyboards and mice for them to make FPS's tolerable, and drop the monkey that is your PC.
RE: switched despite the games (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No because... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of this has been that the people writing the games probably knew one platform well, and there were tremendous technical hurdles to get the games going on the other machines. While there are still technical hurdles, I would think that there are less of them since the same graphics chips can be bought for multiple platforms now (not that I actually know anything about this). So, it might be interesting to see more of the business case for how many sales it takes to recover the R&D of game porting.
Re:No because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Superior? At what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. With the advent of always on connections, the existance of worms began an increase the likes of which has never been seen before. Taking a windows PC and plugging it into any network connection that isn't behind your own firewall runs the risk of an infected computer in 5 minutes or less. To safely surf the internet on a PC you need at least, a firewall, virus scanner, ad aware or similar program, and a decent popup blocker. To do the same on a mac, you just need, well, a mac.
Now, you may argue that having virus protection and ad aware is just a minor step that users should know anyway, and I would say that indeed they should know it, but why waste system resources on such things?
Is a Mac 'superior' at sending/recieving email? No.
Again the answer is yes. A windows PC by default would download and activate embedded programs and files in emails, causing mass spreads of viruses. Again, further indoctrination of users to safe habits is always useful, but once again, the mac doesnot run these by default, and even if it did, it couldn't execute them.
Is a Mac 'superior' at performing standard office taks? (Make a spreadsheet, text document and so on.) Again, no.
This is once again another yes answer. Behavior on macs is very consistant through all applications, and simple basic features of the mac are shown to increase your effectiveness. It's probably not a largely noticeable difference in the application itself (infact I would argue that there's little difference if any there) but a system which lends itself to easily and effectively getting work done out of the box will shave time off of your activities.
Even non-professional and professional photo editing can be performed very adequetely on a Windows Based PC.
The key word here is adequetely. With a mac, it can be performed well. Infact, all the basic tools are included with the system, not only Photo, but video, DVD production, music production, all part of the basic tool set.
Sure, you might see some speed increase for some photo editing tasks on a Mac, but from what I have seen, shaving 10 seconds here and there, upwards of a minute here or there, means nothing to *home* users.
You underestimate what time means to a home user. Every 2 seconds wasted searching for a feature that isn't where it's supposed to be, every minute spent deciphering an error, every 30 seconds spent doing a mindlessly repetative series of steps that should be automated is a large chunk of time, and that time adds up to frustration.
There is a reason people beyond just geeks are beginning to seek an alternative to windows. It's no longer just "the way computers are" Computer users are beginning to realize that we can do better.
Re:Superior? At what? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Is a Mac 'superior' at surfing the Internet? No.
Yes. With the advent of always on connections, the existance of worms began an increase the likes of which has never been seen before..."
And at the same time, nearly every IE plugin is unavailable for Mac. There are hundreds, nay, thousands of sites that don't render correctly in Safari. Standards be damned, browsing the internet on Mac can be an exercise in frustration.
"Is a Mac 'superior' at sending/recieving email? No.
Again the answer is yes.
Re:Superior? At what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, this is a logical fallacy. If that was truly the case, then we would be constantly hearing about how inecure the Apache web-server is, since it is used to run more web-sites then any other web-server. However, Microsoft IIS is the most cracked web-server even though it serves less then 25% of the web-server market.
The rest of your response, minuse the fanboy reference, if spot on.
Re:Superior? At what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well certainly. And you shouldn't have sex without protection, that doesn't mean I'm going to go knock up a hooker.
If your right, and the Mac does become more popular, these unprotected people are going to be firing viruses around just like their unprotected PC counterparts. It c
Executive Summary to All the Posts in this Thread (Score:3, Funny)
No it isn't.
Yes it is, you douche.
No it isn't you, cock-smoker.
Yes it is, you retard.
No it isn't, you sphincter pimple.
Repeat endlessly.
Re:Superior? At what? (Score:3, Funny)
(Grammar Nazi Alert)
see, when apostrophes get outta control like that ("I really like mac's") I can't help but want to put a noun in to finish out the sentence. "I really like Mac's COCK" was the first one to come to mind.
(and I was willing to just let it go as a typo, but ya did it twice, and "Mac's COCK prices are just too high" was just too good.)
I find any discount Scottish pornography, I'll let you know.
Triv
What the Mac REALLY needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Halo was originally going to be a Mac-first game. Bungie was originally a Mac-only developer, and they cranked out some great stuff. Marathon was the best FPS for the longest time, and it was Mac-only. So it was with much weeping and gnashing of teeth as Mac gamers watched Bungie get assimilated by the MS Borg Cube, and then watched as Halo came out for the Mac platform, dead last. Sigh...
Having Apple get involved with porting games is not a bad idea. Apple definitely needs to start throwing some money at game development. The only problem is that they would be taking money away from other Mac development houses that specialize in porting Windows games. It would be better if Apple would emulate MS and snatch up a few up-and-coming game developers, and start cranking out their own line of games.
At this point, that's the only way that Apple is going to get Mac-first and Mac-only A-list titles.
Re:What the Mac REALLY needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, if they get in the game market, the ISVs who currently port and make games might just say "fuck it" and throw in the towel. MS can get away with having an independent game unit because of the vast market for Windows games, but I don't think Apple has that luxury.
Finally, the fact is that developing great games takes a huge amount of time and money, and without the potential to sell copies to 90% of the market, I think game development would just be a money pit for Apple.
The chief problem I think Apple faces is getting more developers working on their platform, and if Apple itself keeps sucking up more of the same dollars, then developers aren't going to write for the platform.
Re:What the Mac REALLY needs... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What the Mac REALLY needs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Games are a wholly different beast. If there are two different FPS games that hit the market in the same quarter, they are not necessarily competing. If both are A-list games, then the serious game consumer is likely to buy BOTH games.
And let's face it, the Mac games market isn't anywhere NEAR saturated. A-list Mac games hit the market so infrequently that there is plenty of room for Apple to serve up a lot of quality titles without squeezing out third-party developers. I would even go so far as to say that they would be doing Mac game developers a great service, because they would be advancing the Mac as a games platform, and thus more gamers would buy Macs, and thus more games in general would get sold.
Re:No because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that or "I had disposable income but it wasn't enough for the iPod and nice earphones."
Setting all that aside, shouldn't the developers be porting the games? Maybe Apple's strategy should be to somehow offer a subsidization of the work involved porting new games to an unpopular platform?
[+5 Cynical] (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think people go to starbucks to look cool? Do you think people use the headphones that came with their iPod because it's more prestigious than upgrading? Grow up. Most decisions people make follow the path of least resistance. What you fail to realize, is that people with disposable income have a different path of least resistance than you do.
If you made six figures, didn't have any children, and didn't know or care much about coffee, why would you make your own just to save $1 a day? If you buy an MP3 player to play over compressed hip-hop mp3s and you don't know/care about what audiophiles think, why would you do research to save $20 on headphones? Why would someone spend $3000 on a mac and hook it up to a Sony monitor just to save $100?
Yes, style makes the sale, but convenience, and indifference keeps them coming back. I can only guess the moderators chose Insightful because there was no moderation for Cynical.
the ports are about will (Score:2)
such reasoning always exists with gaming systems though.. "why can't they do blablabalba".
Fallout fromt he early days? (Score:5, Insightful)
if you want a gaming machine get a ps2 or xbox (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:if you want a gaming machine get a ps2 or xbox (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:if you want a gaming machine get a ps2 or xbox (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:if you want a gaming machine get a ps2 or xbox (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't be silly. There's a lot of games that are great on a real computer but suck on a console eg most RPGs, most strategy games, most first person shooters in fact everything except platform games and fighting games.
There are two games currently I would like to see on the Mac: Rise of Nations (which is on it's way) and Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War which is a surprisingly excellent RTS (surprisingly because I find Warhammer miniatures a real turn off).
You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like it's a piece of cake porting Windows games to Linux on the x86?
Re:You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Informative)
The key issue for porting Windows XP to another platform is the availability of PPC970 compilers. This is still a bit of an issue, but Microsoft does in fact employ one of the best non-multiprocessing compiler development teams on the market and has managed to make excellent compilers for x86, StrongARM/XScale, MIPS, Hitachi, and others. 64-bit Power PC should be quite simple compared to some others. Also, since Apple has released source to their 64-bit GCC, the basic PPC970 optimizations should be readily available to borrow and Microsoft can focus on further optimizations.
So, let's think for a moment what it would take to port a Windows based XBox game to the Mac OS X PowerMac G5.
First, the game would have to use a Windows emulation layer, or reimplement all the DirectX code to OpenGL.
Second,
Third, all Windows API code will need to be ported to Carbon or Cocoa. Maybe they can use Qt or something else to make the job a little easier.
Audio code will have to be ported from DirectX to CoreSound or another tool kit.
Or... wait....
If they port from XBox 2 to Windows XP, they keep Direct X, Direct Sound, Direct Show, Windows API,
There's no difference between porting from XBox 1 to Mac OS X and XBox 2. In fact, it's probably the same.
Porting from XBox to Windows makes sense, but really, who would bother porting from XBox to OS X when the Mac market just doesn't pay for games anyway. (It costs a lot more to port to X unless you used OpenGL than you can possibly profit)
Re:You have got to be kidding me (Score:4, Informative)
I was going to post along the lines of what you said. Thank you...
Interesting to see that your post is already modded down. Either people don't get it, don't want to get it, or maybe just because you forgot the mandatory MS bashing requirement and didn't put a 'M$ Sux' at the bottom of your post. lol
Anyway, whether people like it or not, your post is on track, this guy must be on crack to think that games would any easier to port to a Mac just because the new XBox hardware is similar.
And the scary sub context of all this, the original post is nothing but a plea for Games for the Mac, without realizing that Apple doesn't have a great graphical performance architecture for gaming. Apple, the mother of consumer level graphical computing, and they still have nothing for providing high end gaming performance.
People used to make fun of Microsoft when they wanted OpenGL to be more hardware optimized, and ended up going their own road with DirectX because of the OpenGL group's reluctance to implement many of the DirectX abilities.
Now you have Windows that has a way for games to access not only video, but all multimedia aspects of the hardware in a way that is hardware independent, but yet has a very small performance hit if any, anymore. And so people are still using Windows to play games on because of its great gaming performance, to the level that a console even came out of the great performance DirectX and Windows coupled with hardware allows, the XBOX.
And now you see other OS developers and companies still trying to emulate or recreate a set of technologies comparable to DirectX.
And Apple hasn't even as been so bold to create a DirectX technology for OSX, instead they are leaving it to OpenGL, which is only a video solution, that still lacks many of the hardware optimization concepts that are in DirectX.
I wish I had mod points this week...
Re:You have got to be kidding me (Score:5, Insightful)
DirectX for OS X (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.coderus.com/
This has been out for a while, for porters only granted; but that is a big step.
MacDX = DirectX for Mac OS (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.coderus.com/ [coderus.com]
So things might not be as hard as they were in the past
Porting isn't that easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people think that just because two platforms run on the same processor that porting things between them is "easy". I can guarantee that the OSs used to run the two platforms are nowhere near the same, not to mention the graphics/sound/networking/etc subsystems.
Re:Porting isn't that easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Porting isn't that easy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Porting isn't that easy (Score:5, Funny)
For evaluation only, nothing else *cough*
Re:Porting isn't that easy (Score:3, Funny)
Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
had to be said... (Score:3, Insightful)
I always tell friends : buy a mac, and with the money saved by not paying the MS tax, buy yourself a 199$ PS2 for gaming
Re:had to be said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Their default hardware is overpriced and underspec'd for gaming.
Sure I can see that there may be some of you for whom gaming is a distraction and you would like to use your Macs for gaming... but for gamers who take things pretty seriously we just want as much bang for the buck as is possible... Mac hardware hardly provides bang for buck.
That's not Mac bashing, it's just how it is.
With PC peripheral
Re:had to be said... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also with respect, Macs are not overpriced, this has been argued many times here in the past. It's only overpriced if you don't pay for your software on x86.
Re:had to be said... (Score:3, Funny)
I know, my dual proc G5 PowerMac is just *so* underpowered. Frankly I'm surprised that I can even boot my machine up before it's time to go to bed.
Re:had to be said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:had to be said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:had to be said... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:had to be said... (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
What does this have to do with anything? How much game code does this person think is CPU specific? Most of the problem with porting games to the Mac is that APIs used (e.g. DirectX) don't exist on the Mac. The only assembly code a modern game is likely to contain is targeting the GPU, not the GPU (and even this is more likely to be written in a higher level language now). Everything else will be written in a language that can target any CPU, as long as the required libraries exit on the target platform.
Re:Wrong! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sigh... How many times do I have to say this? (Score:5, Informative)
DirectX compatibility is only needed if you're simply recompiling for a new target. Most games abstract out the DirectX layer for their engine so they're not dealing with it directly (You'd be stupid to do anything else, really...) therefore it's only a small effort to provide a comparable OpenGL specific layer. Once you've done that, that's one less thing. Typically, most games are using FMOD, Miles, or SDL/OpenAL for their sound. That means the sound is taken care of. It's a minimal effort to make a version of user input code for SDL (your Linux and MacOS X choice...) to replace your DirectInput code. There's several cross-platform choices for network support and while it's an effort to make something work as a replacement for DirectPlay code, it's been done (I know, I've done it myself and helped produce a minimal wrapper layer to allow several pieces of code simply recompile for Linux.) What you speak of simply isn't really much of an impediment for anything except the smallest development studios producing valueware as they're coding strictly to DirectX because it costs them nothing at all.
The biggest impediment for most studios, typically, for going to PPC is that most games make assumptions about the order of bytes, etc. that are far, far removed from best practices. Assumptions that make for difficult migration of code. The same goes for going from 32 to 64 bits- many developers do things like assume pointers are the same size as ints and proceed to interchange them liberally.
If you're making a game for PPC64, those impediments go bye-bye for making a MacOSX game- and since MS is going to probably be suggesting that the games be made available for XP on x86, the code's probably going to be endian neutral as well.
Would I buy one? (Score:5, Funny)
No, I already bought a mac for its existing great games. I've nearly completed Photoshop CS. The end guy is hard.
Easy to port? (Score:3, Funny)
My Cisco PIX firewall runs an Intel Pentium, I think porting PC games to it would be still be fairly tricky. Anyone want to lend a hand showing me how to overclock a serial port?
In the case of HL2, a port would be too much work (Score:5, Interesting)
While the HL2 leak had support for OpenGL rendering, the current version of CS: Source does not even allow you to choose that. You're probably looking at a near-total rewrite if you want to run HL2 on another OS that doesn't support MS' APIs.
Re:In the case of HL2, a port would be too much wo (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to say the Mac porting community is just lazy or anything.
Re:In the case of HL2, a port would be too much wo (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that you post this on Slashdot, a community not terribly behind Mono (.NET on Linux). The two problems behind coming up with something like this are
Plus there's other things - like how installers for DirectX video card drivers are Windows specific, or the fact that the consensus is to come up with or enhance native cross platform alt
Open vs. Closed (Score:5, Insightful)
I think porting games to OS X will do little to convince gamers to move to that platform. I think one of the biggest reasons that gamers prefer the PC platform (other than the vastly superior game library) is the open nature of the hardware platform. Upgrades and additions are easily made, if a gamer wants to go out and buy the newest ATI or NVIDIA card they can just do it, no need to buy a completely new iMac or expensive upgrade through the Apple store.
More importantly, if a gamer wants to get a new motherboard or processor it is just as easy, this simply is not possible with the Apple platform. And there is choice in the PC market, Intel v. AMD, NVidia v. ATI, and the gamer makes the choice not Apple.
Despite the superiority of OS X, and I would say that most Windows users would not deny this, Apple simple is not a good platform for gaming. If gamers want a closed system that they have to buy a new one to upgrade (i.e. iMac) they will be way better of with an XBOX or PS2 or other console system, it certainly will be an order of magnitude cheaper. The open hardware of the PC platform just appeals to gamers and their custom-loving, fastest-craving attitude.
Re:Open vs. Closed (Score:5, Informative)
The reason I'm considering is I can't really upgrade the motherboard without needing new RAM, procs, etc. anyway, Unless this isn't the case on the PC-side, that's my definition of "a new computer".
Unless you're talking about a model that begins with a vowel, Apple's desktops are pretty upgradeable.
Re:Open vs. Closed (Score:3, Interesting)
Er...it kind of undermines your argument to mention this example, since both nVidia and ATI release Mac graphics cards. And swapping one for the other is just a matter of opening up the case and doing the exchange.
We're talking G4/G5 desktops here, of course, but then you can't upgrade Windows laptops either. And while you're quite right that you can't upgrade an iMac, you can't exactly upgrade many of the Media Center set-top type. So your argument kind of falls over when you realise that b
Feh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple may do well to provide assistance to these shops, but frankly its own resources are stretched too thin already. Why do people have this blind and absurd obsession with everything being made by Apple, anyway?
Apple won't port games. (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition, not every "great game" released for Windows should come out for the Mac. Many games actually aren't that great. They just suck. Mass porting games won't help. The Windows world is big enough that somebody will buy whatever crappy game you throw out there, but the Mac world isn't.
That said, if a game is good, and the developer knows it will be good, they have two options: port it themselves or have someone else port it. That this doesn't happen more often, to me, means that the PC developer just doesn't care and isn't interested. Porting houses, depending on how they get paid, would be all too happy for more work. If they get paid by commission from the original developer, take it on. If they get paid through game sales, it's in their own best interest to only port the games they think will sell.
In order for a game to be most successful on the Mac, however, it should come out the same time the PC version does. This more than anything else is what will make the great games on the Mac work, for both the game and the Mac.
macs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I see a lot of comments already about how the Macs cost a lot..
Let me pose this question to those people then - with the recent changes [pcisig.com] in the industry, who is really paying more? The Mac users or the Windows users? Any high end card nowadays comes in PCI Express, which almost certainly requires you to buy a new motherboard, and possibly a new processor, on top of that $200-$400 card. Gaming definitely knows how to suck that money out of your wallet quicker than any Mac will.
Windows users are allowed to play more , but we pay the price for it. I suppose it's a necessary evil in order to enjoy gaming [halflife.net] at its finest..
Re:macs.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and still carry the same hefty price tag..
However, the industry seems to be pushing their PCI-X cards, so that they can :
a) Pump the industry up, sell more chipsets
b) Sell more cards, specifically with their SLI implementation you can find here [nvidia.com].
Which basically means, more $$$ out of your pocket to keep up. The SLI looks promising, and delivers numbers to what you'd expect using 2 PCI express video cards at once. And I understand you don't -have- to upgrade to the PCI-X, but when we're talking about games, every little bit counts. Most of these brand new spanking cards see PCI-X first, and are trickling down to AGP now. I believe the industry will shift from AGP to PCI-X just like it did when the AGP slots were first introduced. It sure as hell is pushing for the change.
Re:macs.. (Score:4, Funny)
Look at it this way... you can spend $2500 on a respectable gameing PC or you can spend $1700 on a decent Mac and $150 on a PS2. Then you have a decent computer, a decent game system, and $650 to spare.
Foxtrot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Foxtrot (Score:3, Informative)
Although, today's Foxtrot [ucomics.com] is even more apropos, because now Jason's porting Half-Life over to his iFruit.
The future... (Score:4, Insightful)
#1. they would strong arm their competition into oblivion.
#2. They would use their own proprietary hardware to ensure they keep their market share.
#3. Their new product development would mimic Microsofts. Now they are forced to develop, to keep their niche. When they have 90%, they wouldn't be forced to keep their niche.
There are tens more I can't think of off the bat, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
I may look stupid, but I'm not.
Re:The future... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The future... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The future... (Score:3, Insightful)
So what I just heard from you is to choose whatever quality minority solution there is, thereby helping to prevent anyone from having a CLEAR majority. Which is why I'll choose Apple for now, because IMO Linux-desktop isn't quality yet, and MS has the clear majority.
I do respect your point and your logic. I just don't see the threat as imminent.
Port Xbox2 games to Mac? Just buy an xbox. (Score:5, Interesting)
I found that I saved a lot of money (Score:3, Insightful)
porting would not be easy (Score:3, Informative)
Other Companies Do Better at Porting. (Score:5, Insightful)
But all this talk presumes that, in order for gaming to be successful on a Mac, that (1) the Mac itself has to be less expensive, and (2) that the game must arrive on the Mac at the same time as the PC version, if there is a PC version.
First off, people don't buy Apple products because they are cheaper, but because they want a certain quality of machine.
Second, the Macintosh installed base of computer is around 15-25% (don't confuse this with marketshare, which is the total percentage of Macs sold in comarison to the rest of the computer market). That means it's impractical to make a game that is Mac only or works immediately on a Mac unless you have a great gaming team that knows how to make things port well. Some companies, like the team that put together Neverwinter Nights, made the game data so portable that Mac users had installed the 2 game expansions using the PC/Linux versions before the Mac versions of the expansions arrived 2 or so months ago.
Third, I'd rather let the PC users be my beta testers. There are hundreds of new games in the PC market, and most of them are crap. The games that rise to the top typically do get ported to the Mac, if they weren't on a later deploy list already. And take heart, the time that a PC game is ported to a Mac is much, much less than, say, 9 years ago. I might have to wait about 3 to 6 months for a popular PC to make its Mac debut, Usually, the wait is worth it as any game-stopping bug is squashed before I see it, and the game plays wonderfully on my computer.
Some games are slow to port, like Halo, Splinter Cell, and Battlefield 1942, and some great games were never ported, like Half-Life. But overall the Mac gaming world has profit and gives those who do play a world of pleasure. However, don't buy a Mac to play the latest games--the market just won't accommodate.
ok cut it out! (Score:3, Informative)
OS X is based on unix and linux is based on unix. That DOES NOT mean that any application can be ported on way or the other. Please stop making the stupid argument that it is enough that apple could just recompile itunes for linux. That also includes saying that any game can be simply recompiled for OSX. Similarly, just becasue Xbox 2 will be based on a PPC970 that does not measn that a developer can easliy port any game to OSX. There are things that need to be considered like platform specific LIBRARIES.
Please please stop making such stupid statements.
Shorter list... (Score:4, Informative)
What other games are missing from Mac OS X?
Wouldn't the shorter list be "What games aren't missing from Mac OS X?"
They've got Blizzard, id, and Bungie Studios (kind of) making cross-platform releases a priority... other than that........
Oh yeah... porting's a piece of cake... (Score:3, Informative)
<rant>
...all you have to do is click the "Magically Change DirectX Applications To Run Under Mac OSX" button in "FairlyLand Dev Tools", and the magical porting pixies will do all the hard work...
Give me a break. This guy obviously has no concept of how to port applications.
See, the one thing (that I can immediately think of and that supports my argument :P) stopping a flood of games appearing on Linux, Mac, et al is DirectX. You get DirectX running on Mac, and Bob's your third uncle twice removed.
Of course, this would be nigh on impossible... DirectX is pretty damn huge, and you can't simply wrap a DirectX interface around OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, etc. (for example, OpenGL uses right-hand aligned polygons, DX uses left-handed... or the other way around).
No, the real trick is to get developers to stop using DirectX in the first place. If they started using OpenGL, OpenAL, and other cross platform libraries, this problem wouldn't exist (at least to a large degree). Then, it would simply be a matter of compiling the game for each platform you wanted to support.
Pretty much the only developers that still use OpenGL seem to be small independents, and id. Oh well, thank $DIETY for John Carmack for keeping GL alive and kicking...
</rant>This is more complicated than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an urban legend that Apple has a zero-tolerance policy for games. If you're an Apple employee writing a video game in your spare time, that's grounds for dismissal. Rumor is that this is not enforced, but still in the employee manual (or stone tablets outside 1 Infinite Loop or something).
This is probably not true, but it says a lot about the culture at Apple. Games are not in the business plan. At all. Since the Apple II was so wickedly ahead of everyone else in terms of game capabilities, a lot of people saw it as a "game system" or...well, a toy. Funny how that sort of thing blows up in your face, huh? So there's a historical bias against it at the upper levels. It's a flinch reaction. Several layers of upper management are going to have to retire or die (or both) before this attitude changes.
That being said, this article is pitching a silly (and unoriginal) idea. It's hard enough trying to evangelise the Mac to game publishers, but it gets even harder when Big Publisher starts asking the very legitimate question: "How come Apple put time, money, and manpower into porting Half-Life 2 and wants me to shoulder the port for my own title?"
A fair question, to be sure. Other results would be less concern at the original gamehouse for portability (we'll let Apple fix that) and the choking off of the few companies that are actually doing this today. Oh, and we haven't even gotten to the "could this even be profitable for Apple" question yet.
That being said, here're a few things Apple CAN be doing:
1) Get more developer relation people that do nothing but deal with games. These are the people game developers call when they need something done...OS bugs that need someone to fight for developer priority, hardware access, questions about marketing your product and general connecting of the right people. They also go to game developers/publishers to pitch the Mac and encourage them to see a profitable business model in Apple's platform. Apple used to have two of these people working this job. They now have one. I would bet that they'll have zero before 2005 is over. I suspect that the position is the red-haired stepchild of the company. I respect Rich for every day he gets up and continues to choose to go to work.
2) Backport OpenGL fixes. Apple's GL team is top-rate, but once they are working on a new release, you are out of luck. This is company policy, not the GL team's fault. Let me illustrate this for you. Right now you might be desperately trying to get a game running for Christmas, ported from a DirectX9-based game, and lo and behold, you find that a Pixel Shader you moved over to GL_ARB_vertex_program triggers a kernel panic in OSX. You get the team to look at it promptly, thanks to that one devrel soldier who's still standing, and it gets fixed, but the fix is rolled into Tiger.
Well, Tiger's not shipping for 6+ months, and you ain't shipping this Christmas. And when you do ship, you'll be telling a bunch of people that you need to buy a 150$ upgrade to the OS to play. This is more acceptable for Big Name Games, since somehow people will swallow this, albeit unhappily, when it's UT2004 or World of Warcraft. Will they swallow it for an indie game that's a 15 dollar, online-only purchase?
I'll be fair and say that, as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Mac users upgrade to the latest OS anyhow, because generally the MacOS upgrades have been significantly compelling. When I screw up a Linux build in the year 2004 and a game stops running on a Red Hat 6.0 install from 1999, I get angry email. When ut2003 required people to upgrade to Jaguar, I never got a single bug report or complaint. Figure that one out. Still, if there is no upgrade path at all, you're timetable gets screwed. Put that shit in Software Update, Apple!
3) Give out free hardware, and give it out gratuitously. The Games Department (t
Why Linus Should Port Games (Score:3, Insightful)
Quality vs quanity (Score:3, Insightful)
Also because the Mac hardware platform allows fewer permutations than a PC, when I spend my tiny gaming budget on a product, I'll have a greater assurance it'll work. I gave up PC gaming because I was sick of fiddling with drivers, patches, and so forth.
I'll give you that Mac gaming is not for the hardcore. But it's good for the three-games-a-year-because-i-have-a-job-or-a-kid-
Release timing (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple isn't a gaming company and it is a bad idea for them to port games. However they do have resources for gaming developers and they work with the likes of Aspyr and Westlake to port games.
However gaming isn't the cure for Apple's market share woes. Mac gamers can get a cheap PC or a console to play non Mac games on. That is what I do, though I do buy the Mac game ports so that I support the mac gaming community at the same time.
Apple's main push is in usability and productivity of the computer user, the area where they shine and that is where their main focus should be. They can continue to make porting games easier for developers, but they should do no more than that. The developers can take Apple's help or they can sell less games. It's their choice.
The Mac and Multiplatform Games (Score:3, Insightful)
As I'm sure most of you suspect, porting to the Mac is not as easy as "make", even assuming a similar arch to the Xbox2.
The reason developers opt to make their games portable to multiple platforms now is that they want $8M to make their game instead of $6M, and the only way the publisher will approve it is if the developer commits to a multiplatform release, so that they can see more sales.
The Mac game market is still very small, unfortunately, so it doesn't qualify as a viable platform for the publishers. And although the similar endianness of the Mac does make porting easier, it's not a single platform, but a collection of similar platforms, which means you're signing up for a customer support headache, just like you are with the PC. The additional customer support costs, the differing marketing channels and strategies, the inventory mgmt, and sales effort of maintaining an extra SKU, are usually sufficient distraction to knock down a Mac port proposal.
But that's not the whole story. It turns out that Mac owners suffer from accute good taste, which has something to do with why they've historically paid a premium for a pretty, inferior computer.
Only since MacOS X emerged from an awkward puberty has the Mac become a pretty, superior computer to the PC, but it turns out that Mac owners are still the cause of some aesthetic grief. If you do a straight port to the Mac, instead of adding the features and looks that Mac users insist upon so that their Mac apps feel Mac-y, then you get panned in reviews.
I agree with another poster's comment that Apple should either do the ports or fund developers to do ports. I think this would be good for them not only because it would bring more games to the Mac but because it would viscerally illuminate to them the annoying demographic and business side-effects of porting to the Mac, and going through it enough times might inspire solutions.
Sadly, I've recently asked after this, and they are not interested.
On the bright side, they are aggressively going after the top-20 PC games and making sure they get ports. This is smart but not brilliant. Brilliant would be creating incentives for developers to maintain Mac portability from the start.
For instance, I've often thought that iTunes, had they not signed multiple deals with multiple devils to launch it, could be the solution to the distribution dilemna for unsigned composers. If Apple made a similar online distribution store for Mac games, where the developer/publisher could enjoy massive margins that put the retailers to shame, this could be the cookie developers need to pull the trigger.
Pulling that particular iTunes-y solution out of my bum probably too early in the morning w/o sufficient coffee, but my point is that Jobs certainly has the scratch, balls, and brains to make it an attractive platform, but it isn't quite there yet.
Gamers: Gullible Consumers (Score:3, Interesting)
For the money one blows on an insane gaming rig, and constantly upgrading that setup, he/she could just buy a top of the line Mac and possibly a couple consoles along the way. Keep in mind that Mac will probably last a minimum of 5 years without any major upgrades; longer if you upgrade the GPU, CPU, and other things. I don't see my Quicksilver going anywhere any time soon.
Re:Before this is modded down... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can buy a 1 Ghz G4 eMac for $550 on sale from Apple, and it will perform just as well as your $500 PC on the games.
Where are you buying? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:exhibit "A" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:to be honest (Score:3, Insightful)
Drastic oversimplification! (Score:3, Insightful)
Consoles suck for FPS games. Try sniping a guy a virtual mile away on a screen that is TV resolution, or using an analog joystick to strafe/dodge while firing and changing weapons.
Consoles suck for realtime strategy games. Try using your analog joystick to box a bunch of troops to send to a target. Try using it to select different groups of troops.
For all these, a mouse/keyboard combo is way better. And although consoles may work with those items, the games really a
Re:Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Still too expensive.... (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, despite the fact that you can get a 1.8 ghz g5 for $1500 now (screen included if you get an iMac), and a g4 for about the price of a similiarly-equipped PC, I believed in this logic too. Especially since, as a Mac owner, I had dreams of "buying a new PC" to mean "buying a new mob
Re:How will that help ANYTHING? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Mac isn't nor will it ever be, a "gaming paltform". I buy Mac games: I have an unopened UT:2k4 box sitting next to me =) I'm not even going to bother installing it... I'm too busy playing Tribes:Vengance and DOOM3 on the Win2k box I build myself just to play games.
OS X is an amazing platform for just about everything. But,
Re:Wow.. this is an old topic.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are confused, Grasshopper. Macs are about 20% of the installed userbase. You are quoting sales figures but calling them installed base figures. People keep their Macs longer than PeeCees (and when they sell them, they fetch higher prices on eBay).