Poll: Should newer games be developed for both PC and Mac at the same time?

[New Troll]

Smart people don't buy boats to drive down the road. Those same people shouldn't buy Macs for gaming purposes. Sure you can "get it to work" but it's better (not to mention easier and cheaper) to either just buy what you want to begin with or get both to cover the different situations.

 

[Floppertje]

If you want games on your Mac, you either use bootcamp or you're out of luck. Apple should've invested more in videogames back in the day, it certainly hasn't hurt microsoft. I think if they had, the PC market would be split far more equally between the two.

 

[fix-the-spade]

I'd like to get an opinion from my fellow escapists, should developers bring their games out for both systems first, or focus purely on the PC version then bring out a Mac version later on when the games been out for a while. (apologies for poor phrasing)

Big problems with Mac development.
1) Macs acount for roughly 15% of the market at the moment.
2) Mac hardware is horrible. The very top Mac pro comes with one or two HD5870 graphics cards, which was a mid range card in 2009/10. The average iMac, relies on it's integrated GPU. As far as games go, that's the market scuttled right there. Relatively hardware light stuff like TF2 is fine, but forget BF3 or Skyrim on that set up, even the very top Mac Pro can barely run BF3 if you bootcamp it to Windows.

Not really a goer for most PC games.

 

[Something Amyss]

Hey, if they can do it, why the hell not? But I don't think they're limiting their audience in any practical sense right now, and I'm betting the major reason is the lack of a gaming audience on the Mac.

I don't really know how much effort it is, but the fact remains it's more effort and money for an extremely diminished reward. I can see why they don't bother, even if a few Mac users are angered.

 

[Caiphus]

The April 2013 Steam hardware survey seems to suggest that roughly ~3% of the PC (?) gamer community are Mac users. [footnote] http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey [/footnote] Hell, Windows XP alone seems to have double the market - although I'm not sure how ready some of those computers would be to play new games - and developers have started dropping support for it.

As many others have pointed out, it would be nice if developers did port games to Macs, but they can hardly have some moral obligation to do so when the customer base is so small.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

First off, Mac is an operation system and PC is a computer. PC vs Mac is about the equivalent of a pickup truck vs a vehicle. Anyway, no. Just because a game is developed for Windows, doesn't mean it needs to be developed for Mac, too. It is up to the developers in the end. If you want to play PC games, it is better to get a PC with Windows. Just like how if you want to play FPS games on a console, it is better to get a PS3 or 360 and not a Wii/WiiU because more FPS games are designed for PS3/360.

 

[Souplex]

Developing for computers wastes valuable resources and just means the game will lose sales to piracy.

 

[saintdane05]

We want Mac ports? But you're not giving it to us?
Okay then.
http://portingteam.com/files/

We'll just do that.

 

[loc978]

Boot Camp [http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/] is your friend (and Grub [http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/] is mine)... just saiyan.

None of the poll options cover my opinion on this one, though. Game development has no catch-all answer... it really depends on the game. As many have said, games that are built to run exclusively on Microsoft DirectX/DirectDraw rendering are a pain in the ass to port over to Linux (which is what Mac OS X is... just a shell over a modified Linux kernel).

However, lots of popular game engines can run on OpenGL, which makes porting them to damn near anything much easier. Even Unreal 3 has seen a port to Linux recently... and lots of new indie projects are being released for multiple operating systems... so there's hope.

 

[RicoADF]

I've recently been looking for through steam for some indie games that my friends and I could play but I keep running into the same problem of finding a game that would be a really great time but it only having been developed for PC, limiting how many of us can play. Now I understand the concept of getting a game out for PC first as it's a more common system for gaming then eventually getting out a Mac version much later in the dev process after you work out the bugs from the PC version but even if the ratio of PC gamers to Mac gamers is 50:1 (not an actual figure) you're still limiting your audience and it means that situations like mine come up frequently enough for it to be an issue. I'd like to get an opinion from my fellow escapists, should developers bring their games out for both systems first, or focus purely on the PC version then bring out a Mac version later on when the games been out for a while. (apologies for poor phrasing)

Unfortently it's not that simple, your talking about practically remaking half the game for little gain in sales. For starters the game engine will need to be adapted to work on OSX, which is a very different OS to Windows and is far more like Linux in how it works. Then they need to change the way the graphics are rendered as that direct X 11 we love that gives us shine and pretty graphics isn't on OSX (it's owned by Microsoft they wont allow direct x on OSX), so they would have to go to OpenGL (which is a great option but still takes time and most devs aren't as use to it. Once that's done and they have the game running it then falls onto the graphics card manufacturer (I think macs use Nvidia) to update drivers for this use (assuming the hardware is powerful enough to do it) ..... the list goes on.

 

[Nowhere Man]

I use a Mac and there's not one game (on Steam anyway) that I've had any issues with running. Just got Bioshock infinite and Tomb raider recently and they run quite well under high to ultra settings. That being said, I had to partition my drive using boot camp and install Windows 7. Now whatever games aren't available for Mac I install on my Windows side (I have Steam in both partitions one for Mac one for Windows). This set up works quite well for me but it does suck that there are barely any Mac ports so I got over it long ago and this is the solution for it.
I'm also looking forward to soon building my own pc dedicated to just gaming.

 

[Vivi22]

For big AAA developers, sure, it would make sense to make a MAC version at the same time as other versions to some degree, since you're already likely developing for some platform that has to use a variant of OpenGL anyway, assuming you want to make the effort to go after Mac and Linux systems to begin with anyway.

But for indie devs? I'm going to have to say that making a Mac version while making the PC version may not make any sense for them. It's a tiny market and they're often limited both in cash flow and man power. Developing the same game simultaneously for multiple systems simply isn't that feasible when the primary system with the largest market share is so different from the others. You're basically doubling the workload in a lot of development areas and for what? An extra 4% of the market? Simply not worth it as an up front expense for a lot of devs. Now once they release on PC and start making some money it may be worth it, and they'll certainly have more ability to do it, but I wouldn't say doing it before is the best idea.

Moreover, if an indie dev was going to go back and release on another platform after Windows PC's, Linux systems would be a better choice anyway. The market size is somewhat comparable to Mac OSX, but Linux users have repeatedly demonstrated that as a percentage of their total user base they are just plain willing to spend more. They spend more on indie bundles than the other two major OS groups for example, and there's definitely a desire amongst Linux gamers to get more games that support Linux natively, whereas I doubt most Mac gamers really give a shit after years of Macs getting diddly for games.

 

[Snotnarok]

No, macs don't make up a large enough portion of the market to justify it and it's Macs fault it doesn't work that way.
Apple is VERY restrictive and screws over developers for their devices. They stopped Nvidia from making updates for their systems so they could do it instead..okay that's brain damaged. And apple doesn't try and be more compatible with other platforms so it's more of their fault.

"But Snot that must be hard" you say, well probably not given that Macs are made of the exact same guts as a PC, intel processors, nvidia vid cards, toshiba or seagate HDDs there's nothing different hardware wise it's just software.
So if you want to blame someone it's not the devs, it's not steam, it's apple.

 

[Lilani]

It would be nice, speaking as a Mac user. I wouldn't have so much need to partition my drive and dual-boot, and then have to keep the stupid Windows side going with constant virus and invasive OS updates, and defragging and whatnot. Compared to the Mac, keeping Windows operating smoothly feels like the difference between babysitting a teenager and a 2-year-old.

But I can understand why most devs and publishers don't aim for the Mac market, and I'm not too bitter about it. You don't miss what you never had, and I knew from the start investing in a Mac was going to make gaming more difficult.

 

[loc978]

No, macs don't make up a large enough portion of the market to justify it and it's Macs fault it doesn't work that way.
Apple is VERY restrictive and screws over developers for their devices. They stopped Nvidia from making updates for their systems so they could do it instead..okay that's brain damaged. And apple doesn't try and be more compatible with other platforms so it's more of their fault.

"But Snot that must be hard" you say, well probably not given that Macs are made of the exact same guts as a PC, intel processors, nvidia vid cards, toshiba or seagate HDDs there's nothing different hardware wise it's just software.
So if you want to blame someone it's not the devs, it's not steam, it's apple.

...actually, the blame should probably go to Microsoft for standardizing and monopolizing DirectX. But of course they guard that source code with the fury of ten thousand petty-minded lawyers (despite the fact that it's been cracked and working fine under other OSes for years... you just can't develop with it or the copyright hammer comes down).

 

[ResonanceSD]

Nope, waste of time and resources for very little benefit.

 

[mitchell271]

Most games can run on Mac. There's an entire community at [a href="portingteam.com"]the Porting Team[/a] dedicated to making Wine/Cider ports for games. It proves that not only is there a decent sized market for it, but people want it enough to port it themselves! It even shows that porting isn't hard! The FarCry 3 Wine wrapper was up 3 days after the game came out and based on the reviews it runs fine on hardware like a 2011 13" MacBook Pro.

C'mon dev's/publisher's, at least hire a couple guys to make good Wine ports for your games because people want it and you make more money this way.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I use a Mac and there's not one game (on Steam anyway) that I've had any issues with running. Just got Bioshock infinite and Tomb raider recently and they run quite well under high to ultra settings. That being said, I had to partition my drive using boot camp and install Windows 7. Now whatever games aren't available for Mac I install on my Windows side (I have Steam in both partitions one for Mac one for Windows). This set up works quite well for me but it does suck that there are barely any Mac ports so I got over it long ago and this is the solution for it.
I'm also looking forward to soon building my own pc dedicated to just gaming.

I have the same setup.

Also any and all computers are PCs

 

[Nowhere Man]

Also any and all computers are PCs

Very true. I Just fell into the bad habit of categorizing computers as either PC or Mac out of pure laziness.