I remember when the game first came out for Mac and I was surprised at the announcement, because it seemed to me that I'd already played the game. Then it hit me -- it was a time when I was writing a few cross-platform Internet books and I had both a PC and a Mac on my desk at once. When that happens, I tend to do more gaming -- blowing off steam when I'm trying to rip through chapters of a book -- and I'd actually gone to CompUSA and bought myself a copy of Goldeneye for PC. (Usually I just download demos and play a level or two...around that same time I remember playing the first 60 seconds of Starsky and Hutch over and over again.)
So when the announcement came around, it was an odd feeling for a 15-year Mac/snob/veteran -- it was exactly the feeling that PC gamer/snob/types must get all the time when they see a big-time Mac game release. "Been there, played that."
I imagine a few companies will continue to offer some Mac games -- particularly card games and 2D shooters that can be played in a Mac window when you're supposed to be working, but it seems like it'll be a hard sell to get companies to continue to port high-end games -- those with movie ties-ins, serious Doom-style action and so on -- to the Mac OS when the alternative is to simply release the Windows version and tell Mac gamers that the cost is a copy of Windows XP Home or whatnot. Even dual-booting wouldn't be that painful for gaming, although it may not be necessary with Parallels and similar solutions that allow Windows and Mac OS X to run side-by-side.
Yeah, there are still a lot of G4 and G5-based Macs out there, so maybe it'll be a viable market for 6 months or so. But on the cutting edge of gaming, the ports...in my guestimation...are history.
2 comments:
First, Windows is the legacy layer. People can boot into it if they have BootCamp, but who's to say that they want to? Really, you are talking to people who want something that just works. Having to fiddle with Windows is like putting on chainmail and going swimming -- it doesn't just work. And what about newbies? They may not be familiar with Windows and they don't want to be. Companies that cater to the Mac experience won't make games that run in Windows only.
Second, games that rely upon Windows don't get to leverage the kewl, neat stuff that Apple is putting into their OS. As Apple pulls ahead in the OS race, that means games will look lamer and lamer as the years go by. No game developer wants to be stuck with the losing horse, and Windows is already entering its long twilight decay.
Third, don't discount the wave effect. The younger programmers are already using a Mac for development and this will spill over to games. You're seeing a massive uptick in the quality and quantity of code made for Mac. The excitement is there and now the inertia is there. A new wave is cresting and its not spilling ashore on the Windows island.
Perhaps you're right, although it seems like the model in the gaming industry has been to build the game to run on PC (or simultaneously release to game boxes) and then hand the code over to a Mac house to do some porting. Mac-first gaming based on the kewl code in the OS is a nice thought, but it hasn't happened yet...everything nice an exciting about the Mac (or about PCs) has been driven by the dynamics of the software markets that serve them. For instance, Quark can't manage to pull out of the Mac market (despite the occasional threat) because servicing the Mac platform is an important part of what a publisher *has* to do in the dead-tree publishing space.
The economics of gaming don't seem to be changing just because the timetable for Vista is set back...some of the most fun APIs in the world for gamers were on Silicon Graphics machines in the early 1990s and yet economics (the fact that few enough game buyers had Silicon Graphics machines) dictated the way the gaming market went.
Maybe we'll still see ports of *huge* games that develop a long term following, as well as Second Life style intefaces. But for the run-of-the-mill shooter, driver or movie-tie-in game, I think the game publishers will say "you want to play Wedding Crashers 1.2? Then buy Windows XP Home and install it on your MacTel."
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