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Exclusive Games for Mac??

-Noodles

-Noodles

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 18, 2007
126
0
With Mac gaining market share particularly amongst younger consumers, isn't it about time we have a halo or something of our own?

As much as the old guard loves to rail on about how these machines are not meant to be a gaming platform if mac intends on attracting youngsters and keeping them for life they need to attack on all three fronts of the youth market - movies, music, and ahem* games. When, if ever will they stop playing follow the leader in the game dept. and start a revolution of their own. I realize in the short term this is sort of a pipe dream but long term this is as fundamental as music or movies. I'm not asking for a parade of hits but one exclusive game for the mac that shows some sophistication and innovation would do a world of good for their image in this area.
 
Direct X 10 ensures Cider is not the future.

Cider was dated when it was brought to the Mac because of the Direct X 9 nature of it.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the OpenGL support in Leopard is ahead of Direct X 9 visually.

I think TransGaming Inc have also stopped Cider development and are working on Cedega.

Cider in my opinion allowed EA to make a quick buck from Mac users at premium prices, and which was essentially just Windows games rebranded with an API wrapper.
 
Whitesnake said:
Direct X 10 ensures Cider is not the future.

Cider was dated when it was brought to the Mac because of the Direct X 9 nature of it.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the OpenGL support in Leopard is ahead of Direct X 9 visually.

I think TransGaming Inc have also stopped Cider development and are working on Cedega.

Cider in my opinion allowed EA to make a quick buck from Mac users at premium prices, and which was essentially just Windows games rebranded with an API wrapper.
Click to expand...

Ahah! My suspicions were correct in that Battlefield 2142 is running in Cider. ( I previously thought it was Cedega)
 
This has been discussed lots in the past...what it comes down to is, making a AAA game costs stupid amounts of money, and Apple is the only company who'd conceivably ever do such a thing, except they're not into gaming at all, which means it's not gonna happen. Sorry.

--Eric
 
Whitesnake said:
I also wouldn't be surprised if the OpenGL support in Leopard is ahead of Direct X 9 visually.
Click to expand...

You wouldn't be far wrong. Leopard supports OpenGL 2.1 which is the latest version of OpenGL (the version 3 specification is due out soon but I doubt Apple will support that until at least 10.6). It is as good as DirectX in terms of graphics.

In fact I really don't understand why people moan about Apple supporting OpenGL when in fact it really is a very good graphics API.
 
Eric5h5 said:
This has been discussed lots in the past...what it comes down to is, making a AAA game costs stupid amounts of money, and Apple is the only company who'd conceivably ever do such a thing, except they're not into gaming at all, which means it's not gonna happen. Sorry.

--Eric
Click to expand...

I don't mean for mac themselves to develop it so much as get someone who could in the way that microsoft got bungie to make halo which I believe only cost a couple million at the time to develop. It could be initially offered to the mac platform and eventually be released on other systems.

Again as I said I realize this is a pipe dream in the short term. I was more interested in what others think of the long term future as apple gains younger consumers and whether this is something they can really afford to over look for much longer.
 
-Noodles said:
I don't mean for mac themselves to develop it so much as get someone who could in the way that microsoft got bungie to make halo which I believe only cost a couple million at the time to develop. It could be initially offered to the mac platform and eventually be released on other systems.
Click to expand...

It's been quite a few years since Halo; budgets are much higher now. Third parties aren't going to be able to come up with huge budgets, which they won't make back. It will lose money if it's only on the Mac platform (and if they wait until later to release for other platforms, it would be too late since they'd be out of business). That's why only Apple would do it, because for them it would be a marketing expense, and they could afford to take the loss. However, since Apple isn't interested, like I said, it's not gonna happen....

--Eric
 
Yes as I said I'm not arguing that it will happen. I'm asking if it should happen. I am fully aware that apple has no interest in gaming -it's painfully obvious and undisputed.

In the past the mac user base was mostly a professional crowd. Given that this is changing to a younger demographic, the question becomes can or should apple ignore this aspect of its business and repeat its same strategies. This is what is of interest.
 
On the tech side of things, I'm wondering about the ease of porting an opengl based game that say apple developed to direct x platforms vs the current difficulty of porting those directx games to apples opengl setup.
 
The main focus of Macs is home users. This has been stated by Apple reps including Steve Jobs many times. Creative professionals are #2. This being the case, it has been very foolish of Apple to avoid spending money on game development. They have the cash - gobs of it. A few million dollars is small change to them. In the past this was not the case and they had to choose their battles and spend very carefully. This meant that games got sacrificed for development in other areas. Now with most other media types almost fully exploited, games deserve more attention. Some token efforts have been made but nowhere near enough.

To be fair, Microsoft has made huge investments in games over time with only a few titles that really made any profit. However, it still made sense to spend money on games as a strategic move. Experience with Microprose helped lead they way for DirectX development which both assisted developers and got them used to programming in a certain way which later made development for the Xbox easy since it was essentially an Intel PC running Windows. All this helped set them up for success with the Xbox 360. But that never would have happened without spending huge amounts of money on Bungie and the Halo games. If they can even come close to breaking even in the long run they will have won because they protect the viability of Windows and DirectX.

Apple apparently decided that the competition was just too fierce and gave up. What a shame.
 
-Noodles said:
On the tech side of things, I'm wondering about the ease of porting an opengl based game that say apple developed to direct x platforms vs the current difficulty of porting those directx games to apples opengl setup.
Click to expand...

It would be harder going OpenGL -> Direct3D. Mac porting houses have libraries that automate the Direct3D -> OpenGL process to a large degree, so it's not usually a big problem.

However, it's not really necessary in the first place, since OpenGL exists on Windows and some games use it (though mostly just iD with Quake, etc.). A much bigger problem would be the use of OS X-specific technology (Cocoa, Core*, etc.). It's not actually that hard (relatively speaking) to make a game generic enough so that it's easily portable, but it has to be designed that way from the beginning, and you lose the ability to easily use OS-specific features in that case.

--Eric
 
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