5 ms·

I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Ma

I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Mac OS only license) despite being a fairly avid gamer (and game design major) and using Mac OS as my primary OS, because buying a Mac game means that I've effectively tied my purchase to a weaker gaming platform. I think this is part of the reason for the high rate of piracy of Mac games. I would love not to have to reboot into Windows to play games but the reality is that there are a few problems with Mac-only games: 1. They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. Many of them will either a) not run due to OS version incompatibilities or b) run poorly due to being PPC-only and running on Rosetta. If you're lucky there will be a Universal patch, but due to the small market, they often don't have parity with the Windows version in terms of patches. For OS 9 (or earlier) games, you're SOL. Its far easier to run a DOS game on OSX with DOSBox than even a much newer OS 9 game. 2. They are overpriced. Well, okay that's not fair. They don't have a big enough market to benefit from the kinds of bargain prices that PC games get down to, even only 6 months after release. The exceptions to this are games that are released in a Windows/Mac combo SKU, but these are rare (The Sims 3 is a notable recent-ish one). 3. I might actually want to run the game on Windows some day. As someone who flits back and forward from one OS to another, owning software that's locked to one platform is annoying. Free software covers me for a lot of things, but not for games. At least with a Windows copy of a particular title, I can run it with a Wine-based wrapper (there is a dedicated group of people at http://www.portingteam.com/ http://www.portingteam.com/ who release customised Mac wrappers for individual games, and they work pretty well). My hopes for the SteamPlay feature of Steam for Mac are very high. It would mean that I could buy new games to play on my platform of choice, with the knowledge that I can always take them back to Windows if things go south. I'm just hoping that more developers get on board. While it's unlikely for the moment, if other developers/publishers were to honour previous Steam purchases of Windows games with their Mac versions, they might actually have a decent library of SteamPlay titles on the release of Steam for Mac.

tomjen3 16y ago
I doubt that is much of a problem for indies: most of the open source game engines run on both direct x and opengl, so all you need is mac to test on.
- mambodog 16y ago
  The point I was trying to make was more along the lines of: "If you want to sell me a Mac game, be sure you're selling me a portable multi-platform licence for that game". I guess I wasn't exactly succinct.
xenophanes 16y ago
> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch. Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.
- duskwuff 16y ago
  The Castle Fight crashiness appears to be the result of a file format hack the map author's used to "protect" the map -- custom unprotected versions work fine.
  - xenophanes 16y ago
    Cool. What hack? The only ones I know about are replacing some of the world editor files with zero byte files, and moving the jass file into the scripts directory. But I'm pretty sure those are mac safe. BTW I played Castle Fight under the name curi.
    - duskwuff 16y ago
      I'm not clear on the details, but there's some information on the map forum: http://eeve.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3560 http://eeve.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3560 If I had more spare time on my hands, I'd try to figure it out by disassembling those map files and comparing them. But I don't, so I won't. :)

tomjen3 16y ago

I doubt that is much of a problem for indies: most of the open source game engines run on both direct x and opengl, so all you need is mac to test on.

mambodog 16y ago
The point I was trying to make was more along the lines of: "If you want to sell me a Mac game, be sure you're selling me a portable multi-platform licence for that game". I guess I wasn't exactly succinct.

xenophanes 16y ago

> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch. Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.

duskwuff 16y ago
The Castle Fight crashiness appears to be the result of a file format hack the map author's used to "protect" the map -- custom unprotected versions work fine.
- xenophanes 16y ago
  Cool. What hack? The only ones I know about are replacing some of the world editor files with zero byte files, and moving the jass file into the scripts directory. But I'm pretty sure those are mac safe. BTW I played Castle Fight under the name curi.
  - duskwuff 16y ago
    I'm not clear on the details, but there's some information on the map forum: http://eeve.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3560 http://eeve.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3560 If I had more spare time on my hands, I'd try to figure it out by disassembling those map files and comparing them. But I don't, so I won't. :)