Whatever the reasons, Mac gaming has started to boom. Despite the advent of this new age, it's still hard to find publishers who are willing to talk about it – expertise seems thin on the ground and nearly all developers, even longterm Apple aficionados, have developed almost exclusively for PCs, and Windows PCs at that.
Many still employ porting-houses to transfer games across, or use Transgaming's Cider tools – EA has used this to port all of their recent triple-A games, from Spore to Red Alert 3 and The Sims 3. But just how easy is it to develop for the Mac?
THE SIMS 3: The perennially popular Sims series already has Mac status
Ex-EA and Lionhead developer James Brown continues to develop his Ancient Frog game simultaneously for iPhone, Mac and PC; "Games are probably the easiest type of application to adapt from PC to Mac. Where you run into difficulty porting an application from one platform to another is in the user interface. And a game pretty much is a user interface – it exists solely as something to be interacted with, and that interaction is something which shouldn't be shoe-horned into the platform's general look and feel. Imagine writing a puzzle game that conforms to the Mac OS human interface guidelines; it would just show you the completed puzzle."
Industry veteran Dallas Snell, who worked on Ultima 1 to 8 and now works on social games and MMOs for Portalarium, says that the hardware isn't the problem: "The real magic is keeping everyone's social graph interconnected with our back-end infrastructure that spans multiple clients, multiple devices, multiple operating systems, multiple browsers and multiple social networks."
Transgaming's States points out: "One nice advantage to developing for the Mac is that there are few system configurations that must be supported compared to PCs. Most Mac gamers are quick to adopt the latest OS updates, especially compared to what happens with PCs. On the flipside, because the Mac OS is so tightly integrated with hardware, Mac users only get new updates to video drivers as part of the OS."
Are these porting houses still necessary then? "If you're a Windows developer making Windows games, then a porting house will save you an awful lot of work." says Brown. "But you're paying someone else to do what is really your business, and for your next game you have to get them in again to do pretty much exactly the same work."
States, CTO of the biggest rival to porting houses, the conversion technology Cider, is even more scathing: "The kind of porting house that was typical of the Mac gaming world is likely to have little place in its future. As the Mac becomes a bigger percentage of the overall PC market, more game developers and publishers are looking at getting into the platform directly, rather than trust IP and profit margins to third parties."
Transgaming's Cider engine makes porting a lot easier, dodging problems involving build systems, middleware adaptation and graphics paths, and helping with the difficult UI adaptation.
One of the most annoying aspects of current releases is that the Mac seems to lag behind the PS3, PC and 360 – the Chronicles of Riddick took an extra year to come out on Mac. So are simultaneous releases possible in the future?
"Definitely!" says States. "The easiest way to handle multi-platform development is to make sure you're building on each platform right from the start."
And Brown is ahead of the game: "One of the reasons I'm constantly switching back and forth between the Mac and PC is that I catch any non-portable code immediately, while it's still fresh in my mind and it hasn't burrowed its way to the heart of the code base. When the game is finished on the Mac, it's finished on the PC." Even Valve has committed to releasing Portal 2 simultaneously on all platforms.
There's a caveat here though – while we've been talking about this being a new age for Macs, it's a more of an age for low-powered gaming. The real platform of the moment isn't the iPhone, or the Wii or even the Mac. The most played game today, with 28.8 million players every day, three times that of World of Warcraft, is… Farmville. And Facebook is the platform.
Love it or hate it
Yes, 'social gaming' is the phenomenon of the moment and hugely profitable – MobWars is estimated to earn $1,000,000 a month from micropayments alone. Developers are cutting their teeth in indie games and then racing from the saturated iPhone market and the heavily restricted console markets over to Facebook. A good, well-integrated game can set a lone developer up for life.
COMING SOON: Diablo isn't just any old game – the series has a cult following online
Even the big developers, like iD and Firaxis, are porting their games to a free-to-play model. Quake Live is out, the next Civilization game will be Facebook only, and a free-to-play massively multiplayer version of Tiger Woods is available already.
These are the games that are really eroding the difference between Mac and PC, and as these and game-streaming services like OnLive grow, players will no longer have to invest in expensive hardware on any system.
So what does the future hold for Mac gaming? As we've seen, the additional cost for developers to develop for the Mac is shrinking, especially with tools like Cider available. So it's likely we'll see the Mac taking its place alongside the other platforms, receiving simultaneous releases.
Still, the real gaming, on any platform, is going to be online and free.
