It seems like apple hates gaming....

It has less to do with Apple as a company and more to do with Apple as a community. It's not cost effective to basically write a new game from the ground up (port it) to sell maybe 5,000 copies. PC games can sell a hundred thousand. In fact OSX is much more conducive to porting and Apple works a lot closer with developers then any time in the past.

 

Well...Apple did release 10.2.6 just so UT2003 could work. That seems pretty nice of them to me.

 

You cannot expect Apple to bend over for all the gaming companies out there, they are the ones who need to actively write and program the games to run on the Macs and have an interest in giving the Mac community their gaming fix, not Apple.

 

If SJ started pushing gaming I think it would kinda backfire. I mean the community already complains bitterly about wait times between release and port. He'd be setting himself up for a fall.

Plus, not all the machines apple sells are really game-worthy. I got a latest/greatest 17 inch imac last fall, but when I downloaded the JKII demo and the WC3 demo, it choked. Of course, it was my first Apple machine and I didn't know the rules yet (pro vs. consumer), but I'm still kinda disappointed, ya know?

 

Apple is actually improving GPU drivers for games, over at MacOSrumors they were saying the new GPU drivers in Panther push 10-20fps out of all cards. And like Powerbook G5 said, its not apple who's making games. Alot of developers don't want to develop for the max because they can make 80% more sales with a PC version. Although there are so great companies , like Aspyr who bring mac users 50% of games. And Apple has praised them for that, even steve did it in one of his keynotes on 2002

 

I don't really care about current games on mac. I only play oldskool stuff that either runs on os9 or my SE/30 (hehe, check out Macintosh Garden), or the stuff of my youth on Amiga and C=64 emulators...

for games I suggest that you either build yourself a PC (if you want to be on the safe side and play everything) or wait a little bit, since most of the good/really successful games also get a release for mac os...

vSpacken

 

Gamers use PCs.

Game companies know this so they make games for PCs and not macs.

If apple got more market-share then maybe the game companies would start making the games for mac too.

For apple to get more marketshare they need to lower prices, and make macs more affordable because, let me tell you, they aren't....

scem0

 

I want Apple to make their own game which uses all of the Mac's capabilities to the fullest. Make it use Altivec, and maybe make it 64 bit for the new G5. Get a game out there are show people it is not simply that macs are slow to run good games but rather lousy ports that take too much time and are never worth it.

 

I still don't understand why anyone (except the rich, but chances are if you're hanging out in forums all day.... anyway... ya.) would spend $3000+ CDN for a gaming machine, regardless of how many [good] games are available.

An xBox is less than 10% of the price, and you can "stick it" to Gates at the same time: afaik they're still not making money on them.

Anyway. If anyone can explain to me, like I'm a 3 year old why you would spend so much money to play some games, I'll give you a big wet smooch.

 

Well Apple didn't make it but QuakeIIIArena is just such a game. It was very well optimized for the PPC chip and also took advantage of Altivec and Dual processors. On a top of the line Mac QuakeIIIArena runs pretty much near the same max FPS as it does on a top of the line PC.

 

Apple does not exactly hate gaming

To say that Apple hates gaming is to ignore facts like OpenGL's integration in OS X and the force feedback support the Mac got last year. Short of becoming a game publisher what more do you expect Apple to do?

Gaming on the Mac is a niche part of the overall games industry but it is here to stay. After all, even Mac users want to play Quake sometime.

 

Okay, I have in my house:

- An XBox.
- A "gaming" PC (dual Athlon MP 2600s, Raedon 9700)
- A G4 (1.4Ghz, 20" studio display).

You'd think, based on the above comments, that the mac would never get used for gaming, but that turns out not to be the case. Some games (Warcraft, Warcraft TFT for instance) just look so great at native resolution on the big studio display that I spend tons of my time playing them there.

Games that run great on my G4 at native resolution:
- Warcraft(s)
- Black and White
- Neverwinter Nights

Games that need me to shift over to my PC:
- UT2003 (it really is too slow even on a fast mac)
- Counterstrike

Games that make me break out my XBox (attached to a Sony 42" Plasma Display):
- Football (the NFL 2003 by Microsoft is the best so far)
- Star Wars KOTOR
- Halo

Still - even with the Xbox support of hi-def TVs and a very nice display, it always feels like I'm using a toy when I play on the console. Sure, Halo's a great game, but when was the last time you put up with anything running at 640x480 on a computer? The resolution of consoles is just too shallow to make for a great gaming experience.

YMMV

 

When I am home, I use the family PC for any PC games I buy out of impulse, but I agree with getting an Xbox, or a Gamecube...there are some seriously kick ass games on these game systems that are literally built just for games, so you don't have to worry about getting blue screens of death, getting a worm virus, having to reformat or defrag or reinstall anything...you just turn it on and play away. You can get a kick ass system for like $150 and all the "hits" are around $20-30 and then the regular price for newer releases. I've found it to be a pretty nice solution, and since I'm at college with two other roommates, we end up with an Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, Dreamcast, N64, SNES, and NES...it's amazing what ebay and some scholarship refund checks can do for you when you need your gaming fix.

PS- SNES rules them all.

 

Its not apple's fault that they don't have directX in OS X. Ask MS about that one and you have your answer why there aren't so many games for Apple.

 

I think that has very little to do with it. As with everything in life it's all about the money or in this case the total lack of it in selling games to the Mac community.

 

I read a great editorial... I think it was on OSnews.com about what's holding Apple back from gaining marketshare. They flat out said Games. Computer gaming is a huge industry that Apple should not simply ignore. The article went into how the porting industry works for apple gaming companies like Aspyr. When you port a game it costs about 15-20% of what it would cost to create the game. So really, you wouldn't have to sell all that many games to make a profit. I want to say the article said about 771 sold would break even.

Apple should consider buying MacPlay or Aspyr to get into the porting arena to put PC and Mac gaming on the same page. Apple could put forth more resources than these smaller companies. Eventually, Apple should start releasing their own games when marketshare picks up. It would be really cool if Apple made good games but released the demos for PC. At the end of the demo it says "ONLY FOR MAC."

 

We don't have viruses, and we don't have games, for much of the same reasons.

You sum it up well: money talks. +-3% Marketshare = leftovers and crumbs.

 

Well I think MacSoft will be bringing a lot more games in then ever before and way more then Apple users are use to. They are under new management by the guy who use to head up Bungie. Since I mentioned Bungie we use to have a company that had games that said Mac only that made PC games envious then MicroShaft bought them out.

 

It's especially nice of them, considering that they broke the drivers early on in 10.2.x, fixed and re-released them in 10.2.5 and 10.2.6.

If Apple were more consistent, they would have more of a gaming market. It took them a while to get Game Sprockets together. By the time they'd gotten some developers interested, they dropped them.

As Mac game buyers go, there are fewer game buyers than there are pirates on PCs. If MS ported DirectX to Mac OS X today, there still wouldn't be many games because there aren't many people buying them. (Software houses have emulated the important DirectX calls to make porting easier.)

How many of those millions of Macs are being used to create posters and billboards and multimedia? How many are being used in schools? It's unlikely that those will never play games.

I believe that we'll see more converts buying Macs to play games in-between doing something more creative but it's not as though any Apple machine will ever be the ultimate gaming machine--that would be some game console.

 

I have to admit I find it highly ironic that the Wintel people can, sometimes in the same breath, criticize the Mac for not being a decent enough gaming platform and then call Macs overpriced "toys". Yet those same dedicated gamers will drop thousands of dollars to get the ultimate gaming rig: basically a big expensive toy.

But at the same time, gaming is one of the major reasons that people buy computers, right up there with Internet connectivity, digital media, and *gasp* doing actual work. And people mostly will want one machine that'll do everything they might want to do on it--that's why email appliances have largely flopped.

The interesting thing is whether this will continue to be a vicious cycle--less games leads to less Macs sold leads to even less games--or whether Apple will manage to tip marketshare up enough to swing the cycle the other way.

 

I'm just happy that Sim City 4 is on the Mac because I've played it out to death on our Dell system and would love to be able to play it when I leave for college.

 

Well, like Scem0 said...apple needs to do its part and raise the market share more than .3 percent a quarter...lower the prices.

 

The thing I never liked about gaming on computers is that I have to deal with installing, keeping up on maintainence, and patch updates and all that...then being confined to the computer chair and playing on a 17 inch screen...whereas on a gaming system I have my 32" tv and all I have to do is put the disc in and turn it on. For this reason and the pure cost difference, I am typically happier with my Xbox and Gamecube and use my Mac for everything else.