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Longtime Mac Developer Ambrosia Software Cuts Staff, Still Open for Business

I don't know why they never ported Aperion to iOS, I would have been happy to pay for that (even after buying the old pre OSX version) and I'm sure it would have sold well.

They had some great stuff but it seems like it was mostly years ago and I just haven't heard much from them lately. Shame, but if they weren't releasing much, it's hard to blame outside influences.

Based on their arcade game genre you'd think Ambrosia would be an shoe-in success for iOS gaming.
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This. Seems like the iOS explosion was the perfect opportunity for them to finally make it big, and they just didn't do much of anything.
 
Parystec said:
This is what happens when we race to to bottom on software pricing and everyone else thinks software is free.:(
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I'm not sure that explains the situation here. The company seems to have project management issues. For example, it never rewrote Snapz Pro so that it could sell it in the Mac App Store. I switched to Snagit when I bought a new Mac. I also bought Piezo from its competitor Amoeba in the Mac App Store, which works fine for my occasional sound recording needs (3-4 times per year).
 
I started with Maelstrom and it was really well done, but I wasn't a big fan of Asteroids.
Chiral was a really interesting concept I played for a while.
Aperion was the one that caused my grades to suffer at school. Although I loved that hookah smoking pentipede seeing him meant it was time to go back to studying.
Swoop was a time sucking black hole that similarly caused my grades to suffer.
Barrack was OK, but didn't hook me.
Escape Velocity didn't fit my need for quick distractions so I never played it.
Avara wasn't my thing either.
BubbleTrouble was cute, but I couldn't get into it.
Harry the Handsome Executive was a big let down.
That pretty much marked the end of my relationship with Ambrosia. I did try Aperion X, but it wasn't quite the same game I remembered and I wasn't the same person.

In all those years I think I only paid for one game. I apologize to all the people, past and present, at Ambrosia for enjoying their work for free. Today I can afford to buy games, but don't have the time to play them.
 
swarmster said:
A lot of people like to say that about the current marketplace, but it isn't really true, especially on Mac/PC. There are tons of games like Minecraft, FTL, Torchlight, TrackMania, Serious Sam, etc that make lots of money either independently or through Steam selling for $10-25. You really think a new Escape Velocity with Steam Workshop support wouldn't sell like hotcakes at a moderate price? People would go nuts.

You'd think the rise of Steam and the Mac App Store, making it easier to pay for their games, would be a boon if anything. It seems more like poor management (or lack of internal interest?).
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The key is that no matter how many games you buy, you could still buy more. Very few games are completely identical with one another, and certainly games like EV Nova don't exist... It would sell. Only us old Mac users really know about Ambrosia's games. If they reintroduced them (or remade them) I'm certain they would make bank. I somewhat doubt it'll happen after all these years though.

I'm just waiting for them to be bought out. Blizzard could work wonders with the EV Nova plot. Just imagining it makes me giddy. :p
 
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petsounds said:
Seems to me that they have just kinda stopped innovating. Their product lineup is about the same as it was a few years ago. It's a shame all their games are now puzzle games; they made some great action and strategy games (Maelstrom, Escape Velocity) in the 90's. I'd hate to see a software company with such a great Macintosh heritage go under.
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Most of those games were actually developed by third-parties, and merely published and distributed by Ambrosia with their shareware code and sometimes internal libraries or help with porting from Windows. Escape Velocity Nova, for example, was the work of Matt Burch and ATMOS Software. Another high-profile example would be Introversion Software using Ambrosia to publish a lot of their ported games on the Mac. Nowadays, digital distribution is fairly easy through the Mac App Store or Steam, so 3rd party developers have a lot more options. 10 years ago if I was an indie developer looking to publish a game on the Mac, Ambrosia would be at the top of my list. Nowadays, I'd probably go completely solo with my own website or use the App Store, and do 100% of my own marketing. The in-house developers being let go now mostly worked on Ambrosia's utility programs.

ConCat said:
I'm just waiting for them to be bought out. Blizzard could work wonders with the EV Nova plot. Just imagining it makes me giddy. :p
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Oh geez, that would be awful. I seriously doubt it would happen anyway. I'd rather see a lot of their old games go open source if they were to shut down for good (which isn't happening yet). Notably the Ares developer released his code a couple years back, resulting in not one but two successful fan projects to port Ares to OS X.
 
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Would be....

a miss and I will be sad if Ambrosia get out of bussiness. Back in the time, I was fond of an array of games made by Ambrosia: Barrack, Escape Velocity, Apeiron....and dont forget Snapz Pro....

Really sad news indeed.


:):apple:
 
Sad but expected. I love Embrosia Soft. But frankly they missed the train when it comes to iOS. All their games are fantastic but why did none of them appear on iOS? How hard is it to port a game? You have the sprites, the sounds, the engine, just do it people! EV, Bubble Trouble, Apeiron, Harry, ... The list goes on! Not long ago I noticed a EV clone on iOS. It got game of the week!!! Looks almost shot for shot identical!

My take on this? They must have gotten scared of the pricing on iOS. Typically, Ambrosia games used to sell for $30 a pop on desktop. No one can charge that amount on iOS, although the volume is much larger.

Sad day.
 
Ah, Apeiron. Those were the days when mushrooms used to burp.

Made me laugh everytime. :)
 
I bought their Snapz Pro X and it was terrible compared to Camtasia or ScreenFlow. Maybe that's why they're going out of business.
 
This is disappointing news. I really enjoyed a number of their games back in the '90's and was really hoping for reboots for many of them. I'd love and IOS or OSX version of Barrack!
 
sillypooh said:
Sad but expected. I love Embrosia Soft. But frankly they missed the train when it comes to iOS. All their games are fantastic but why did none of them appear on iOS? How hard is it to port a game? You have the sprites, the sounds, the engine, just do it people! EV, Bubble Trouble, Apeiron, Harry, ... The list goes on! Not long ago I noticed a EV clone on iOS. It got game of the week!!! Looks almost shot for shot identical!

My take on this? They must have gotten scared of the pricing on iOS. Typically, Ambrosia games used to sell for $30 a pop on desktop. No one can charge that amount on iOS, although the volume is much larger.

Sad day.
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Pricing may have had something to do with it. Porting, though, would have been non-trivial, for the same reasons you didn't see them port all those games to OS X with the added difficulties of creating new touch-based interfaces. Also, again, a lot of them were made by third party developers, and Ambrosia would have had to negotiate new deals with those devs.
 
sillypooh said:
Sad but expected. I love Embrosia Soft. But frankly they missed the train when it comes to iOS. All their games are fantastic but why did none of them appear on iOS? How hard is it to port a game? You have the sprites, the sounds, the engine, just do it people! EV, Bubble Trouble, Apeiron, Harry, ... The list goes on! Not long ago I noticed a EV clone on iOS. It got game of the week!!! Looks almost shot for shot identical!

My take on this? They must have gotten scared of the pricing on iOS. Typically, Ambrosia games used to sell for $30 a pop on desktop. No one can charge that amount on iOS, although the volume is much larger.

Sad day.
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Porting the games would be easy. But making them playable and fun on a touch screen? None of my favorite iOS games have ever been ports.
 
Ah Avara - my first even LAN party. 10-15 Mac Quadra 610's connected by AppleTalk in a school lab. What fun we had.

Harry the Handsome Exec - classic and unique.

Loved em all. EV, Mars/Deimos rising, Barrack, Maelstrom of course.

Good memories. still playable on my retro games machine (Snow G3 iMac)
 
therockyroad said:
Ah Avara - my first even LAN party. 10-15 Mac Quadra 610's connected by AppleTalk in a school lab. What fun we had.

Harry the Handsome Exec - classic and unique.

Loved em all. EV, Mars/Deimos rising, Barrack, Maelstrom of course.

Good memories. still playable on my retro games machine (Snow G3 iMac)
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I suggest getting sheepshaver running. You get better performance in OS 9 on sheepshaver on a modern intel Mac than you ever could on a PPC Mac (especially a G3).
 
I went to their website to see what a decade old copy of EV Nova would cost me. They still want $30 for it. I sad to say I can't see paying that much for software that old. Sorry Ambrosia.
 
I loved Maelstrom back in the day. I remember playing it quite a bit after it came out. Then I moved on to the EV series. Those are games that need to be remade (as long as they are true to the original). I remember all the great mods for them (my favorite was having Star Wars ships in the game). I hope Ambrosia can keep going; my heart will always have a soft spot for them.
 
I suggest getting sheepshaver running. You get better performance in OS 9 on sheepshaver on a modern intel Mac than you ever could on a PPC Mac (especially a G3).
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Sheepshaver doesn't emulate an MMU. It's easy to be fast when you're only emulating half the processor. It won't run the latest versions of Mac OS 9 (9.2.1) because of that.

-SC
 
neuropsychguy said:
I loved Maelstrom back in the day. I remember playing it quite a bit after it came out. Then I moved on to the EV series. Those are games that need to be remade (as long as they are true to the original). I remember all the great mods for them (my favorite was having Star Wars ships in the game). I hope Ambrosia can keep going; my heart will always have a soft spot for them.
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From what I've seen, Ambrosia will still be operating, just not in quite the same manner as we're familiar with.
 
I've had Apeiron pre OS X and played it for years, then downloaded newer Intel OS X version when I upgraded to newer iMac. Still love it to bits. Hope Ambrosia keep going and possibly re-vitalise themselves.
 
Ambrosia have issues.

Wiretap anywhere doesn't work with Lion or Mountain Lion (Rogue Amoeba's Audio Hijack Pro does and is cheaper)

Wiretap studio is useless in comparison with Wiretap anywhere or Audio Hijack Pro.

Camtasia and screenflow are better than snapz pro

They've lost their way. It's sad.
 
freelancing said:
I'm not surprised. This is what happens when you act like you're the only game in town. They were IT for what their offerings were for a long time... but now there are a LOT of screen capture apps. SnapZPro had a bug w/ a version of OSX for a very long time and it went un-workable for months before they had a fix. Sorry - when I have a project due that requires a working app, I'm going to find a working competing app, and I did. No sense in paying for an upgrade to software in the future when they can sit on this OSX compatibility issue for months without getting a fix for it, when I can get a cheaper, competing app that works. You can make up in volume what you make up in price if your product is really good. When it's buggy w/ a new OS release and causes kernel panics every time you try to save a movie, people are going to stop trusting your product.
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same here. I used SnapZPro but when they did not fix bugs for many month I moved on. I feel sorry for the employees.
 
This is what happens when you become irrelevant, and don't do anything to stay relevant. Kinda like what's happening to Apple right now. I had a couple friends say the other day, there's nothing I want from Apple right now, isn't that weird? It's easy to become irrelevant, and insanely hard to make a comeback.
 
reden said:
This is what happens when you become irrelevant, and don't do anything to stay relevant. Kinda like what's happening to Apple right now. I had a couple friends say the other day, there's nothing I want from Apple right now, isn't that weird? It's easy to become irrelevant, and insanely hard to make a comeback.
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Apple becoming irrelevant? You clearly are not paying attention.
 
Parystec said:
This is what happens when we race to to bottom on software pricing and everyone else thinks software is free.:(
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NOPE. Snapz Pro X and WireTap Studio are $69.00 each.

Their Mondo Solitaire was last updated in April 2012.

It appeared that they are still not up to speed on the new App Store world.

reden said:
This is what happens when you become irrelevant, and don't do anything to stay relevant. Kinda like what's happening to Apple right now. I had a couple friends say the other day, there's nothing I want from Apple right now, isn't that weird? It's easy to become irrelevant, and insanely hard to make a comeback.
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I have a couple of friends say your friends are irrelevant. Isn't that weird?
 
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