OS X Mac gaming data

[MichalM.Mac]

Two years ago I wrote article about past decade of Mac OS X gaming for Czech SuperApple magazine. Because of that I had gathered a lot of data about Mac games. Article was build around my research but you can't put tons of tables and graphs on 4 pages.

For some time I was thinking of sharing this work online. So here we go.

Link to Numbers spreadsheet in iCloud.

Basically it is big Numbers.app table with list of games from Feral, Aspyr, MacSoft, MacPlay, Blizzard, Valve, Transgaming, Virtual Programming, Pangea and others (indie/inhouse development). Time scope is 2000 - 2015.

Only big games are concidered. Lately it is very difficult to draw the line between big titles and small/indie titles. I sort of handpicked games based on personal opinion, price tag, popularity, critical response and developer/publisher/porting house.

DLCs, updates and rereleases of existing Mac games are ignored because I consider them part of supporting the game. It's little tougher with expansion packs. I consider most of them however I ignore certain cases like The Sims. For example Aspyr data would look different concidering support duty (DLCs and updates) they are doing for titles like Borderlands or Civilization.

I was interested in following:

• First Mac release date (Re-releases and different store version (Steam) are not concidered)
• Original PC release data
• Mac version delay in months
• Platform (PowerPC, Universal Binary, Intel)
• Current state of game digital distribution
• Original developer
• Original publisher

There ought to be lot of facutal errors especially in Other games section because I don't have time to hunt down Mac release date for indie games. If you find error, missing game which should (or shouldn't) be on the list please let me know.

I posted this on IMG.

 

[keysofanxiety]

Such a shame. You could see it was soaring from 2011 as Macs became more popular and more dGPU options were available. Even in 2014 the amount of games shipping for OS X was impressive. Now it's gonna be the opposite - a lot of the integrated graphics shipping in 2015 still don't compare to the nVidias in the 2012 MBPs. Stagnated or worse graphics performance in 3 years for standardised non-upgradeable hardware simply means devs aren't going to bother writing games for OS X.

Yet another lapse in hindsight from Tim Cook. Gotta penny pinch on that hardware to ensure a short-term profit.

Though I guess this is the part where you tell me you haven't updated the 2015 numbers since April, and that it's actually the biggest number yet

 

[MichalM.Mac]

Though I guess this is the part where you tell me you haven't updated the 2015 numbers since April, and that it's actually the biggest number yet

Nope. It should be updated to December.

Number of ports from Feral, Aspyr and VP is indeed not comparable to 2013 and 2014. Plus Transgaming was bought by NVIDIA so no games from them. However smaller (indie) devs are doing quote OK in respect to total number of games. This trend is more about (crossplatform) gaming in general than Mac gaming specifically though.