Aspyr to Drop Game Support for Snow Leopard as OS X Mavericks Launch Nears

MacRumors · Sep 7, 2013

Mac gaming publisher Aspyr has announced on its blog that as of the launch of OS X Mavericks later this year it will begin phasing out support for running titles on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which includes future patches for existing games as well as any upcoming titles that the company plans to publish for Macs.

The company has also stated that older titles that receive updates or patches may stop working on systems running Snow Leopard altogether.

This means all future releases of Aspyr games, as well as any patches and updates for existing Aspyr games, will no longer be supported on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard); in some instances, older titles that receive updates or patches may cease to work on OS X 10.6. To continue to play the latest Mac games, we recommend upgrading your computer or operating system to the latest version of OS X.

Aspyr also stated in the post that 8% of its existing audience is on Mac OS X 10.6, down from 16% in January. Recently, the company has published games such as Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands 2 on Apple's platform. According to a report from yesterday, Apple is targeting a late October launch for OS X Mavericks.

Article Link: Aspyr to Drop Game Support for Snow Leopard as OS X Mavericks Launch Nears

jav6454 · Sep 7, 2013

Kind of blows for older Mac users.

pgiguere1 · Sep 7, 2013

Playing older (PowerPC) games and newer ones will now be mutually exclusive. I wish you could still install Rosetta, even if it was optional

.

Hastings101 · Sep 7, 2013

oh well, lately I've given up on gaming in OS X anyway; it's just ridiculously better in Bootcamp. I'll always keep Snow Leopard installed for the PowerPC support though.

HiRez · Sep 7, 2013

Doubtful users who cannot even install Lion would have a good experience on a new game anyway. And I doubt Aspyr wants people playing their games at 8 fps, it's going to lead to bad reviews and dissatisfaction. With new versions of OS X now being priced at around $20, there is little reason for users with newer machines not upgrading. You can argue it's a problem, but people who have very old machines or are too cheap to upgrade to a more modern OS are probably a small percentage of users, and not the kind of users Aspyr is going to want.

Asuriyan · Sep 7, 2013

HiRez said:
Doubtful users who cannot even install Lion would have a good experience on a new game anyway. And I doubt Aspyr wants people playing their games at 8 fps, it's going to lead to bad reviews and dissatisfaction. With new versions of OS X now being priced at around $20, there is little reason for users with newer machines not upgrading. You can argue it's a problem, but people who have very old machines or are too cheap to upgrade to a more modern OS are probably a small percentage of users, and not the kind of users Aspyr is going to want.

While I, as a power user, would personally switch to Mountain Lion in almost every scenario I can envision, your assumptions that Snow Leopard is inherently inferior or faulty - or that every user who remains on Snow Leopard does so because they have no choice - are fallacious.

Snow Leopard is among the most stable and polished operating systems released to date and a user who chooses to remain with proven technology over new versions with dubious benefits could likely make a good case for their reasons for doing so.

Yamcha · Sep 7, 2013

I think its about time to upgrade, performance wise theres no excuse, feature wise, sure snow leopard has a really great implimentation of expose, but to stay alone for a couple of features may not be worth it anymore, especially now if you're a gamer..

Ultimately you will have to upgrade your Mac eventually, and there will not be a work around for new hardware as it will be unsupported..

Personally I love Snow Leopard, but like many people most of my problems have been solved with Mountain Lion and Mavericks.. So id say upgrade if your system supports the OS.

----------

Stability wise to be honest none of my Macs using Mountain Lion ever crashed, same with Snow Leopard. Maybe it varies with system but ive never really had stability issues..

Asuriyan · Sep 7, 2013

Yamcha said:
I think its about time to upgrade, performance wise theres no excuse, feature wise, sure snow leopard has a really great implimentation of expose, but to stay alone for a couple of features may not be worth it anymore, especially now if you're a gamer..

Ultimately you will have to upgrade your Mac eventually, and there will not be a work around for new hardware as it will be unsupported..

Personally I love Snow Leopard, but like many people most of my problems have been solved with Mountain Lion and Mavericks.. So id say upgrade if your system supports the OS.

----------

Stability wise to be honest none of my Macs using Mountain Lion ever crashed, same with Snow Leopard. Maybe it varies with system but ive never really had stability issues..

I've never had issues with ML or SL either. Lion was a pain in the ass, though.

Shookster · Sep 7, 2013

I'm a software developer and most of my customers are on 10.8 but a sizable number are still on 10.6, so I can't ditch it any time soon. It's about 60% 10.8, 20% 10.6 and 20% 10.7.

Schranke · Sep 7, 2013

some thimes i think that Aspyre dosen't even support games for mac... look at how long the freaking update to borderlands took

macnisse · Sep 7, 2013

Really like snow leopard and will keep a laptop (or VM) with it for a looong time to come.

Icaras · Sep 7, 2013

Schranke said:
some thimes i think that Aspyre dosen't even support games for mac... look at how long the freaking update to borderlands took

Very true.

macs4nw · Sep 7, 2013

Shookster said:
I'm a software developer and most of my customers are on 10.8 but a sizable number are still on 10.6, so I can't ditch it any time soon. It's about 60% 10.8, 20% 10.6 and 20% 10.7.

MacRumors said:
...Aspyr also stated in the post that 8% of its existing audience is on Mac OS X 10.6, down from 16% in January..

Article Link: Aspyr to Drop Game Support for Snow Leopard as OS X Mavericks Launch Nears

Just curious how you gage that with some degree of accuracy? I'm not doubting you, but we see two different percentages above. While that discrepancy could quite possibly be correct, I still wonder how you arrive at those percentages.

darijoe · Sep 7, 2013

Asuriyan said:
Snow Leopard is among the most stable and polished operating systems released to date and a user who chooses to remain with proven technology over new versions with dubious benefits could likely make a good case for their reasons for doing so.

Is Mountain Lion dramatically less stable than Snow Leopard? I have not noticed much of a difference. Then again, I am only judging from my experiences.

Krauser · Sep 8, 2013

darijoe said:
Is Mountain Lion dramatically less stable than Snow Leopard? I have not noticed much of a difference. Then again, I am only judging from my experiences.

I had a retina MacBook 15 for a bit and, while the defects physically in the machine were my reason for returning it, I noticed more issues with the ML than I did with SL. Not horrible things, just more overall slowdowns, lockups in certain apps, and app crashes. Also, even on my 5 year old aluminum MacBook, SL seems to run/animate/perform quicker than ML did on my retina for the time that I had it. Plus I just prefer SL by a long shot. It's clean, it's unobtrusive, the gesture support/way things were set up is more conducive to working than ML is (I'd rather have a swipe be 'clear desktop' than 'launchpad' like it is in ML any day of the week), and it's just an overall better environment if you ask me. The Rosetta support is just an added bonus.

Ddyracer · Sep 8, 2013

Well, chaps, hopefully mavericks will be the new SL, or half as good. I am a little confused here however. If snow leopard is dropped what about lion? Is it the next minimal requirement that you need for aspyr games?

Or do you have to upgrade every year in order to play the latest releases like the quote from the article suggests?

roadbloc · Sep 8, 2013

This shunning of backwards compatibility is one of the many things that makes gaming on Macs and OS X lacklustre compared to Windows PCs.

runeapple · Sep 8, 2013

Krauser said:
I had a retina MacBook 15 for a bit and, while the defects physically in the machine were my reason for returning it, I noticed more issues with the ML than I did with SL. Not horrible things, just more overall slowdowns, lockups in certain apps, and app crashes. Also, even on my 5 year old aluminum MacBook, SL seems to run/animate/perform quicker than ML did on my retina for the time that I had it. Plus I just prefer SL by a long shot. It's clean, it's unobtrusive, the gesture support/way things were set up is more conducive to working than ML is (I'd rather have a swipe be 'clear desktop' than 'launchpad' like it is in ML any day of the week), and it's just an overall better environment if you ask me. The Rosetta support is just an added bonus.

I don't think that's an OS thing, my 2010 MBP 13" base model(4GB ram) laptop running ML animates a million times better than my top of the range 2013 retina MBP 15" (16GB ram) also running ML. I think it's due to pixel pushing but it is ********** annoying!

UltimaKilo · Sep 8, 2013

I have to agree, Snow Leopard was one of the best OSX releases in recent years. Though Lion was faulty and nowhere near as stable or efficient as Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion has since closed the gap. If you're unsure about upgrading to Mavericks, you should get yourself Mountain Lion, it's a fantastic OS.

Greg. · Sep 8, 2013

As a Snow Leopard user, I've held off Lion and Mountain Lion as most of the updates seem to be designed for iOS users. As an Android user, I don't need iCloud, iMessage, notification center, game center etc - and it's disappointing that these are the main features advertised - I use my computer for work, not a Facebook machine. There's no feature I feel like I'm missing at the moment, yet if I upgraded I know I'd miss SL features like expose and Rosetta support. I will say Mavericks does however look to be a step in a right direction, so I may reconsider upgrading.

iSayuSay · Sep 8, 2013

Lol and they say Microsoft is suck on legacy software.

Even XP has been being supported for 12 years and run most modern apps just fine

Who has bigger balls now

Risco · Sep 8, 2013

iSayuSay said:
Lol and they say Microsoft is suck on legacy software.

Even XP has been being supported for 12 years and run most modern apps just fine

Who has bigger balls now

Microsoft is ruled by business, Apple is ruled by the consumer.

jlnr · Sep 8, 2013

The yearly release schedule for OS X is such a mess. IMHO 10.7 and 10.8 should just have been different point versions of the same OS to reduce support costs. Now devs are in the Vista-esque situation where more people use 10.6 than 10.7.

dark knight · Sep 8, 2013

iSayuSay said:
Lol and they say Microsoft is suck on legacy software.

Even XP has been being supported for 12 years and run most modern apps just fine

Who has bigger balls now

i think they supported XP for so long because the next releases were so poor - genuinely.

Mountain lion is really great, hoping for the next point release soon and that Mavericks will only improve on things ^^

ValSalva · Sep 8, 2013

jlnr said:
The yearly release schedule for OS X is such a mess. IMHO 10.7 and 10.8 should just have been different point versions of the same OS to reduce support costs. Now devs are in the Vista-esque situation where more people use 10.6 than 10.7.

With the way Apple has treated Omni Group and paid upgrades one could argue that 10.7 to 10.8 to 10.9 have all been upgrades. By Apple's strict defintion of upgrades Mavericks should be free

That would help adoption of 10.9.

Aspyr to Drop Game Support for Snow Leopard as OS X Mavericks Launch Nears

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