Are Mac games about to die?
Apple just announced that they are going to officially support dual-booting to Windows on the new Intel Macs using somftware they call Boot Camp, in beta now.
This strikes me as a weird choice; Apple seems to always veer between being a software company and a hardware company. Their OS is really nice; I thought they had mostly settled on software. Now comes this… there’s still a fair amount of software that is available for Mac that isn’t available or as good on Windows, but honestly that amount has shrunk dramatically over the years (I started using a Mac in 1989, but drifted away in 1996 or so, when all my work was on PC; Kristen is still on a Mac, however).
On the other hand, maybe they figured it was a matter of time until ways to boot Windows on Intel Mac hardware were widespread, and they might as well provide a seamless, sanctioned solution.
But it certainly seems like another nail in the coffin of people making Mac-specific games… those are exactly the sort of application that it doesn’t really make sense to invest in porting.
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Next, a less positive (for Apple) perspective on Mac games from Raph Koster,recently the creative director at Sony Online Entertainment and key player behind EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies MMORG’s –“Are Mac games about to die?”: This strikes me as a weird choice; Apple seems to always veer between being a software company and a hardware company. Their OS is really nice; I thought they had mostly settled on software. Now comes this
s great news for education folks who are looking for the best of both worlds! The only drawback? OS X users /will/ need to be very careful of the virii and spyware on Windows boxes now!!!! Edit:Raph Koster asks: are Mac Games going to die? I say: probably.
I really don’t use my iMac for gaming at all, except may for Warcraft if my PC is tied up doing something else. Mac-only games have never seemed to me as as a big selling point. 🙂
I think that Boot Camp will just be another useful tool/toy for current Mac users to run whatever windows-only applications they might need, and may be the extra push needed for already prospective Mac-buyers to go ahead and purchase that iMac or Macbook Pro. Your average computer user will still be purchasing the ultra-cheap Dell for home use, and hardcore gamers will still be on consoles or PCs.
Two ways to look at it. If it sells more Macs, then the market for MacOS will grow. The Mini is well-positioned as a media center type of system, such that if a family is considering a high-end console or a low-end computer … xBox versus Mini, right?
Then, unlike PCs, Mac hardware is more standardized, Mac software is probably a bit easier to program. So, in the short term, yeah, less need to support MacOS. But since the Macs come with OSX, and Windows technically costs a few hundred extra, as the Mac userbase grows, Mac OS on a limited platform range, competing with the high-end console market, looks a lot better than the same hardware running any number of pirated, hacked, bleeding versions of Windows.
In the end, I think the basic calculus will be more Mac users == more demand for Mac software. But yeah, in the short term, some companies have even less reason to port their less impressive titles to Mac, as the Mac community can still get at them.
Also, I mean, the second Apple went with x86 hardware, you knew people were going to figure out dual-booting. Better Apple should monetize this feature / threat.
Interesting times. I keep wanting a Mac more and more. 🙂 In fact, my main reservation about Macs has been no games … now I can have my Mac and dual boot into the cruddy OS too! 🙂
I think this is a great move by Apple. There are a lot of people, I know a few myself, that would love to buy a Mac but will miss the games too much. Hell I finally moved to all Mac last year, and the main thing that I had to come to terms with was the fact that I’d lose the majority of the games that interest me.
If this becomes a serious thing, in terms of full support of gaming (drivers, etc.) I’ll sell my current dual-1.8 G5 and get the Intel version when it is available.
I actually think this will hurt OS X gaming more than it’ll hurt the other software. As a Mac user and a gamer I know I will be WAY more tolerant of booting to Windows to run a game than I would be for any other application. Why? Because a game takes over the whole system UI, and therefore I don’t have to deal with Windows except to launch the game. For anything else it’s OS X or it better be required for work.
So it’ll hurt OS X gaming, but it’ll be a tremendous boon to gaming on Mac hardware. I can justify getting whatever they replace the Power Mac with (Mac Mac Pro?) since it’ll work for both gaming and video editing. I don’t think I could justify the expense for just one of those uses though.
For me, the question is why is there still people making Mac-specific games?
I’ll risk an answer here. Because they like (and often love) Mac. There you have why it was doomed from the start. I might be in love with old text based interface for games but if I try to use this as a living, I will never do as good as anyone else just for the fact that the audience is not there.
For me, it always comes down to “what’s the best tool to achieve what I want?”. If I want to make big hits that a lot of people will play, it’s obvious I’ll use Windows or a console like Playstation or XBox. Just like security specialists will use Open BSD, Linux or whatever to build firewalls. Just like graphists will use Mac.
The same goes the other way. What is the best platform for me if I want to play games. Mac just isn’t the answer. Not because this is not good but because there’s just more games for Windows.
Of course, many people can’t afford 2 platforms, one to work and one to play. They must then ask themselves, is it more important for me to have a Mac to work or to have a Windows to work AND play?
I think Boot Camp will allow a lot of Mac users to finally get a taste of games they couldn’t play before.
As for me, I’ve been wanting a Mac for a long time at work for numerous reasons. But the fact that I work with Microsoft .NET prevent me from it. Windows is still the best tool for me will remain the only platform I use because of this.
Actually, I think the message is very clear.
That’s a deal with Microsoft. Jobs openly tells Gates: “See, we are not a threat; your OS can thrive on our hardware.”
Hence, Apple can keep recovering a share of the market.
I just ordered a MacBook Pro to celebrate! 🙂
It does seem like every time Apple changes anything, a bunch of prognostication comes out about how it will spell the company’s doom. Personally, I’m of the opinion that this actually strengthens their position. It, along with other things Apple has done recently (competitive pricing with other equivalently equipped systems; investing in quality high end components), makes the hardware more appealing to a broader segment of the population. It serves as a snare for those who have those few apps they simply must have that are (currently) only on Windows (games, for instance), but the reality is that having to shut down one system and start up another is still more of a pain than people really want. If people end up doing most of their productive work in OS X, ultimately they are less and less going to want to have to stop what they’re doing and swap over. This trend (which is hardly a leap in logic) will hopefully motivate developers to start considering Mac or hybrid development.
Honestly, I think one of the biggest hinderances to Mac game development are the developers. Let’s face it, despite the theorists and small minority of actual innovators, we as a group are pretty set in our ways. There have been massive advances in ludological theory, but we stick to genre stereotypes; there have been major advances in programming languages and techniques, but we stick to three decade old systems and methodology; there has been significant examples of success through originality and innovation, but we continue to pitch safe bets. Game development hasn’t advanced on the Mac OS because 1) developers haven’t bothered to HONESTLY evaluate it (easily half the people I spoke to at GDC honestly still had an image of buggy, slow OS 7 used in junior high at the mention of Macs); and 2) Apple has realized that they simply don’t even have a toehold on that market, and have done diddly-squat to encourage game developers to include the platform (as one of several examples of this: nearly every major market segment Apple targets has an “evangelist” at Apple who focuses on gathering market data and opinions and promotes their needs within Apple… there is no games evangelist).
At the same time Apple’s move to Intel hsa made porting games to the Mac a little easier. I would normally be the first to point out that porting an application between architectures is not nearly as hard as porting between completely different APIs, but in my experience of writing games based on portable APIs, most of our porting issues have been with the difference in endianness on the Mac. Now the Mac is little endian just like pretty much every other common computing platform, and all those problems go away.
A Mac user who has no use for Windows other than games is still faced with having to pay up to one hundred dollars for a copy which serves no purpose other than to enable them to play games, which may be enough of an insentive to choose native Mac games. Or they may just “borrow” a copy of Windows like so many people seem to.
The Mac market is an important one in the downloadable games space. Over at indiegamer.com I’ve seen numbers that show conversion (demo to full version) ratios to be much better on Mac than on Windows. I don’t think this move will hurt those numbers too badly. As long as indies keep putting Mac versions out there, Mac users will continue to buy. I’d be much more willing to boot into Windows for Oblivion than I would be for Bejeweled.
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As a developer, I calculate that a Mac port costs me $N, and will produce incremental revenue of $M. If M > N then it’s a reasonable business decision. Usually, M > 2N in order to port.
However, I must now take into account the fact that X% (50%?) of Intel-Mac users will have a dual-boot Windows system. This means that my incremental revenue, M, is now OldM * X = OldM/2… In other words, my incremental revenue for porting to MacOS has halved.
I follow the same thinking with Linux, where (I’d guess) most Linux desktop installs dual-boot with Windows, so there isn’t any point porting to Linux.
Note: There is a positive feedback cycle here, so more and more Macs will have Windows installed, which means that less software is written for MacOS, etc. This is especially true for full-screen games.
What? Nobody has called Apple “beleaguered” yet? Come on, have some sense of tradition! :>
The Apple non-casual games market is pretty much dead as it is. I don’t see this as changing that one way or the other. I also don’t see many Mac users being willing to reboot to play a game–my PowerBook is rebooted about once every two months, if that. I have no intention of ever dual-booting a Mac to Windows.
It’s a matter of the re-publisher decideding whether there is an audience for said game on a mac and how the game was made… can anyone say DirectX? There’s a reasona lot of games can’t be easily ported to Macs.
You also have to take in to account the anyone who wants to dual boot legitimately has to buy a legit copy of Windows, which isn’t a cheap investment depending on what you do… MOST computer users use their computers as internet terminals and word processors and maybe occasional financial users and casual gamers. Is it really worth spending $125 bucks for Windows? Nah. If you’re a hardcore gamer and play alot of PC games, sure it might just be worth it.
I think the bigger problem isn’t whether PC games will be ported, but whether there will be PC games aside from a single shelf taped to the back corner of an EB next to secondhand PSX and Dreamcast games… :\ If there aren’t enough games to port, then yeah… there is a problem. 😉
You don’t forsee MAcs coming with the dual boot as standard and pre-installed? I do.
And i welcome it, actually. The less platforms we have to develop for, the less people will write off indy software because “there isn’t a Mac version”.
Reboot to play a game? Easier to fire up a console. I curse the frequently poor handling of alt-tabbing from games in Windows enough already.
If Mac’s aren’t enough of a market to port for (i.e. you write them of as customers), then you’re probably not missing out much if they write you off as a gaming option.
Hrm. I’m a Mac user. One of my first questions for anyone who wants to develop my (paper) games digitally is “Will you support Mac?”
But my concern here is for my fellow Mac users, not the Mac itself. The Mac *hardware* isn’t hurt or deprived by a lack of Mac games. It’s just hardware.
If Boot Camp actually works, and lets Mac users play their choice of Windows games, then OSX gamers are actually much better served, right? They have a much wider choice of games to play, and they become better integrated into the digital gaming community. Or am I missing a point?
One more related link:
HL2 on an Intel iMac – Video in Quicktime and on YouTube
It plays better than on my PC. 🙁 ::sigh::
My guess is that:
1) Apple will sell more Macs because of this, maybe even 2x as many. With this change, my next computer might just be a Mac because (a) they’re good hardware, (b) they actually look good, and (c ) having a mac might be useful for compatability testing of my software. (Item (c ) is unique to my concerns.)
2) Fewer applications will be written for OSX, especially applications that tend to take over the whole computer (like games). In the long run, this could hurt OSX.
One other thing…
Once Macs are Windows compatable, a lot of stores that only carry PCs might also start displaying Macs. This would create increased exposure for Macs, since (at least here in Darwin, Australia) Macs seem to be pidgeon-holed into Mac-only botique stores.
I know this is naive of me to ask, but I do so in an academic sense. Why develop games for the Mac at all?
The business side of me suggests that porting games to the Mac is pretty pointless. Macs, if I have my data correct, have about a 5% share in the PC market. In turn, the PC market share in the game space is around 25%, with consoles eating the rest? The caveat is 5% of 25% is a small clientèle to base funding (porting) a game off of.
Casual games can be ran on JVMs. Additionally, I would think that most Mac users have cash liquidity to buy a console, or a licensed Windows copy to play games that are only available on the PC. Developing exclusively for the Mac market, considering today’s cost concerns is simply not possible.
I understand that great games have been made on Macs before (i.e. Maxis) and we can learn from what Apple does in design innovation. J Allard carries around a Powerbook to this day (so I’m told). However, I just don’t see enough of a market for developing games for the Mac.
I think, on the whole, that from a development angle this is probably a good thing.
BSD/OSX (same thing, different Window Manager) and Windows are actually getting closer over time and this means that, apart from anything else, MS are likely as a software company to begin to actively support Mac hardware. If Apple end up as a pure hardware manufacturer, i wouldn’t be surprised.
Seriously, this is just an extra platform for MS to sell to, and the “free” preinstalled OS (BSD, freely downloadable anyway for x86) won’t be much more of a challenge to them than Linux already is.
On a second front, we have moves afoot via the Mono project and other worthy causes which accelerate the convergance in development platforms. That’s .NET, JVMs and others.
I doubt it will take too long with MS supporting Mac hardware for an implementation of DirectX to be hacked together (maybe two, three years?) supporting OSX and Linux.
When we then consider the performance levels of Managed DirectX (maybe a 1% drop in framerate from raw DirectX if the programmer actually understands the base level and not just the interfaces) and add this to the fact that XBox 360 supports MDX games, we’re eventually looking at a scenario where one size code may actually fit all machines.
It’s what ANSI C should have been.
And from the perspective of an indie game dev attempting to include all possible markets, that would be amazing.
I would really love to see some commercial-grade numbers on what Mac users represent as actual purchases (regardless of their official demographic). The shareware numbers according to Indiegamer are pulling 55-63%+ as Mac users, with a higher rate of actually buying the game (conversion).
How much impact do Mac gamers have on commercial hybrid games (to be distinguished from ports)? I haven’t been able to find the numbers (and don’t have time right now to wade through old company investor breakdowns which mmmmay include that sort of information), but I think it’s fairly telling that the Myst series, a consistently hybrid game, managed to do very well in a genre that tends not to… until they made a version that was PC only (Uru). They went back to being a hybrid game for End of Ages, and the series once again did well. Blizzard games have consistently been hybrid, and they’ve consistently done well at market, against sometimes very stiff competition.
Of course, this makes me selfishly happy. I’m all for anything that lets the two of us play multiplayer games together, with B able to keep his Mac, and me able to keep my PC. He has Virtual PC — AutoCAD runs great on it; NWN choked.
I personally feel this is the wrong move for Apple. Their continued focus on hardware is where I think much of their limited success has come.
Hardware design and manufacturing is most often not a high margin opportunity. What has been high margin for them though has been the software and concepts they have developed and licensed over the years. There’s also the innovation they bring in general. I’ve always considered them something of a mass marketable Think Tank of innovative ways in which to work with technology and content. iTunes/iPod is just the best example of that.
Supporting the Windows OS basically calls into question their support for Mac OS X. Why bother? If I’m one of the traditional Apple supporters like Macromedia or Adobe, I’m going to really question whether I need to even bother dual-coding. For Fonts? Yea, that matters to an extremely dedicated core of creative professionals in the world that perhaps makes this move somewhat academic for them. But for the rest, it’s basically saying that you can buy a Mac or a PC to do the exact same thing.
Now, there’s a few people that truly do buy their computers based on the aesthetic of it. But is that going to push the Mac marketshare over their 5%? I highly doubt it. If looks counted for enough in terms of the purchase, the rest of the industry would have adopted it long ago.
Computers are not purchases one makes lightly, at least not on the mass scale.
So I don’t consider this the end for Mac games. I think it’s the beginning for Mac gamers, but a slow slope to the end for the Mac OS X. Which is a shame. I’ve used enough of Vista to see the obvious inspiration, but without Apple pushing the agenda of innovation, MS is free to go back to ignoring the conventions of basic approachability.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Apple thinks offering dual-boot machines (as was tested yesterday from what I’ve read) is a way to convert people to Mac OS X. I doubt that, since the breadth and depth of tools are just deeper in PC land (and I say this as someone who uses both all day long). But I could be wrong about the value of that too.
Word on the street has been somewhat counter to what your desires are. I’ve been reading that Apple is considering a full switch to a Windows OS for some time. If I can plop the tin-foil hat on for a second, this was move was planned 10 years ago when Gates’ invested heavily in Apple. They are all rumors, but I can’t escape the history of Apple.
Apple is an INNOVATIVE company, and we all thank them for it! Some of the best games in the last 20 years have been developed for Macs. This kind of thing happens quite a bit though. AT&T had Bell Labs, Xerox funded PARC, etc.
Apple accepting Windows isn’t altogether a bad thing. The current battle isn’t over software, but (as someone else gracefuly pointed out) over entertainment solutions. iPod vs. Xbox is the next battleground. Hopefully, Apple can gain some ground to keep its innovations going!