No games for the Mac and gaming micro-content
When you tell someone you're buying a Mac and they throw the No_Mac_Game FUD in your face, they're being lazy. Someone, somewhere, at some time, told them that "Mac Games Suck" and that's simple idea to remember. FUD paints a world of black and white and the good news is it's all gray people.
Rands In Repose: Silver Bullet: No Games for the Mac
I thought this was appropriate since I am (still) enjoying World of Warcraft. Pretty much all of Blizzard's games are cross-platform, and usually ship with one set of CDs as well. Actually, the guys at Electronic Boutique where I bought the game almost didn't want to sell it to me when I mentioned I was playing on a Mac.
I don't care to get involved in the FUD one way or another -- if I was really interested in playing games I would get an Xbox or a PlayStation.
Something else that I wanted to point out was the other company referenced in Rands' post: Bioware.
Their main products are based around the DnD role-playing system -- they've used it to development the fantasy-based Neverwinter Nights as well as the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. But both are platforms (with NN being more of one).
Neverwinter Nights ships with full development tools. You can make your own modules, including full scripting abilities, your own persistent servers, etc. etc. Every pen-and-paper RPG playing nerds fantasy.
And now Bioware has opened up a store. Small, high-quality, very inexpensive modules that you can play after you've finished the main "game". This goes beyond mods or add-ons for other games -- these modules are completely self-contained, and need only the original platform purchase to enable people to start playing.
Theoretically individuals could start charging for these modules as well. Gaming micro-content, which has been out of reach because of the now millions of dollars that is required to develop (and more importantly, market) a game.
I see modular sales like this as being another valid business model vs. online games like World of Warcraft that charge ongoing subscription fees.
Interesting times. I'm off to go summon some demons with my gnome engineer.
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for now mac is great for retro games and casual gaming ( http://www.macgamesandmore.com ) where oftentimes you can only find these games only for mac and not pc. there are hardcore gamers with macs but people often complain about a lack of a-list games. if people are wanting more game choices for the mac, i think they'll eventually get them especially with the news of the intel chip
inclusion.
Same thing to a much lesser degree.
You might be able to say the same thing about the PC and consoles, but you can say it about any platform, yet it is still truer for the Mac much more than any of them. The only reason XBox got to have one of the biggest games of all time this year is because Microsoft forked out the cash, which is pretty much standard practice, but of the top 3 games, only one by coincidence happened to come out on the Mac. The only reason why Halo 2 ever came out on XBox first even when Microsoft owned it is because Microsoft is creating an artificial supply of the game. With Halo 2, Microsoft would put it out for whatever platform it was seeing the most competition in, and that definitely won't be the PC any time soon, so it is only due to direct intervention, and not marke demand, that there is no PC version of Halo 2 yet. And isn't it ironic that the original game, destined to come out Mac-first, came out last for the Mac out of the three platforms it could reasonably be expected to be released for? I wonder if Bungie was ever all that keen on being a Mac-first company, or if it was just a tactic to stand out from the crowd and get the emotional Mac crowd talking the game up to separate themselves from having to compete with all the PC companies.
As for the more bugs argument, I heard that about Halo for Mac. The biggest bug the Mac has is that most of the great games never come out on it. The thing about consoles is that they are cheap, you can own both for about $400, about the price of one when they originally came out, so how valid is separating the platforms out discretely? Who should represent the base denominator: PC user, PC user with PS2, PC user with XBox? This is just as much a point about the Mac market: nobody will ever set the Mac market as the base denominator, because every other platform would beat it in comparison.
The Mac has games, and has good ones, the biggest games generally come to the Mac at one point or another, but only the biggest games come to it, and even then that isn't always true. When will Half-Life come out for Mac? Mac users are only lucky that World of Warcraft came out, but how many of them have the hardware to drive it? There are a bunch of Mac issues related to gaming that make it a decent platform but only for a few games, and even then there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Mac games do suck though. ;)
Well... I have to disagree. After playing XBox and PC games, it's clear that the biggest Mac games are good ones, same as on PC, but the overall selection is severely lacking. Blizzard is one of the few examples of a good Mac company. Bungie used to be, but now as a Microsoft strategic asset, Bungie has turned from a Mac-first company into a never-Mac company. It is a shame Apple never recognized Halo for what it was, it might have done for the Mac what it is doing for the XBox, and would have been a better company if they had remained indy or owned by Apple.
The other big game: Half-Life 2. Nowhere to be found on Mac. Battlefield vietnam: Nope. Rome: Total War: Nope.
Compare any game release list on any platform to the Mac and you will see the difference. Games come to the Mac after PC, which might as well be the deal breaker. Compounding latency in development plus greatly reduced bottom line and interest translates into Mac games with more bugs, come out much later than PC games, and cut the legs out from a great majority of potential winners. I remember back when I used to be a Mac advocate that we had examples like Duke Nukem 3D as games that sold so well on their first day for the Mac that they recovered their entire development cost. We never see that kind of marketing anymore. The year of Apple as the gaming platform was 1997, 1998 with the Radeon 128 and the John Carmack presentation. Since then, Apple has done squat to improve the gaming landscape, and the iPod won't do it. Most promising possibility doesn't even ring as a possibility: PPC-based XBox and PS3, no way either Sony or Microsoft will allow a console emulator to run on the Mac.
From the source article: A
From the source article:
And note how I said in my post that I would get an Xbox if I was a hard-core gamer.
"translates into Mac games with more bugs" -- right, this is *exactly* what we are talking about. This is utter nonsense.
The premise is that there are *no* games for the Mac (and then other FUD like you just stated). Not true. You buy a Mac because you are buying it for getting work done, graphic design, etc. It also happens to be possible to play some great games on it...and the XBox is there waiting for you if you want more than that.