Current and future gaming on the Mac

Try www.gametreeonline.com for Mac titles over the next few months.

Hi everybody,

we ´re from germany, just two brothers, and we´ve developed a kind of a tractor simulator for windows machines.And we did it on a mac, with unity, the greatest piece of software we´ve seen.

the game was developed in just one year, besides our daytime job.

we can say that it was great fun, we´re working for the company Fendt as a daytime job and we did it out of love to our traktors.

we are publishing to windows, because it´s the most spreaded plattform. but for developing mac is just great, it´s stable, its good, and unity3d is nearly perfect for small companys.

may somebody at TUAW is taking our game for game-developing on macs.

so here are links to our website:
www.kuhbuckel.com there is a demo on / pics etc.
sorry it´s mainly in german language.

so we can publish to mac osx with just one click, thats not the problem. may somebody is interested

Thanks

That is one hideous and dated-looking console mockup..

Potato - great to see some well thought out comments - and I agree, people tend to conveniently forget innovation when Microsoft does it - and with DirectX - they have been winning (can always change - thats why we love competition!) fair and square.

Apple, take note - effort and investment is required here, not just emotion.

Honestly, even if 100% of games for PC were available on a Mac, I still think 90% of hardcore gamers, if not more, would stick to PCs.

Most hardcore gamers run medium-to-high end machines that they've built themselves. This allows them to replace individual pieces as they go (a better CPU, replace the PSU, switch out RAM, switch motherboards, etc.) without buying a whole new PC. Last I looked though, that wasn't even close to possible with pre-builts, both PC and Mac.

Hell, I built this high end machine I'm on right now for $800 via Newegg and I can easily replace any part in it right now with a better one.

Please correct me if I'm wrong though about Macs.

Doug: Not the same. For one thing, the market for the Xbox, Wii, and PS3 are much larger than Macs (or even PCs for that matter). What percentage of Mac owners do you think are even remotely interested in purchasing games? Now, what percentage of PS3 owners are interested in purchasing games? Completely different story.

In the end the problem is cost of development. It's worthwhile for developers to invest heavily in PS3, Xbox, and Wii code, since the expected return is high. It is not worth it for them to dive through countless undocumented systems, reinvent the wheel 15 times over, just to create a native Mac version that probably won't even break 6 digits in sales.

And this is precisely the problem. MS has lowered the barrier to entry on their platform by doing a LOT of legwork for the developer. Want a networking library? Here you go. Sound/media? Well, there it is too. The huge middleware community on Windows also complements this. All of this results in a lower than ever cost to enter the market, and hence people do.

Whereas on the Mac... networking library? What? Nothing by Apple certainly, and most of the popular middleware libs don't even run on OS X. Sound engine? Nope, nothing there either. Graphics engine? Gotta be kidding me (though Ogre is coming along nicely for OS X).

Apple needs to partner with people, push and roll out comprehensive development tools and solutions, before ANYONE would seriously jump onto this bandwagon.

I'm perfectly happy using my Mac for work and casual computing, and owning a dedicated game console for gaming.

As far as I'm concerned, Apple can keep out of gaming forever. It would just draw resources away from other aspects of their business, and they've already splintered things enough with iPod/iPhone/iTunes/Apple TV.

I like all those things-- But I don't need an Apple game division. There are plenty of other options, and frankly, I think the XBox 360, Wii, and PS3 are plenty.

Ironically enough, the only thing Apple needs to do to be a force in the gaming market is to copy Microsoft.

Here, here, iBox!

Cheers,
FL

"Some developers say that there aren't games on the Mac because Steve doesn't want them there, and until Apple shows evidence to the contrary, PC will always be the gamers' platform of choice."

Noooooooo. The choice of gamers is consoles not pcs. Yes pcs have their market but that is eroding and people are tired of Windows not being good enough.

When you want to game, get a Wii or PS3 (the other one wasn't mentioned on purpose as I would never consider using it).

The main problem is definitely Apple. They just refuse to support gaming. I think Jobs just doesn't like video games, so we all have to suffer for it. The good news is that top tier games are coming to the Mac anyway. This year we're getting CoD4, Unreal Tournament 3 and Spore - all top tier.