Lugaru shows why game devs should support OS X and Linux

I take exception to the assertion that there are NO games on the Mac. Sure there aren't as many and not as many come out for the Mac yearly especially during the PowerPC to Intel transition. However there isn't literally NO games on the Mac! Between native and emulated games I have so many games on my Mac that I don't have time to play them all! It would be nice however to see more AAA games be ported to the Mac each year than there usually is.

I'm sure people are interested in more than just the latest sim game.... guitar hero and the latest Call of Duty! Macsoft also needs to get the lead out and release UT3 and Gears of War for the Mac already! Epic and id software games tend to be ones that you can count on there being a Mac version. Of course if you like to play games it's a good idea to have a copy of windows on the side or a console but again there isn't literally NO games on the Mac!

Blizzard gets tons of cred an loyalty by making a mac version of their games. Just by looking at the posters over at wowinsider you'll see that quite a few of the bloggers play wow on their mac, and overall I get surprised how many people hwo seems to be playing the game on a mac.

StarCraft (BroodWars) and Diablo 2 is also a quite interesting example. Nvidia decided it was a brilliant idea to remove support for 256 colours in one of their upgrades (it happened in 10.5.4) for MBPs, thus essentially breaking those two games. Blizzard on the other hand set out to fix the problem, something which basically entailed upgrading them to handle thousands or millions of colours, even if it wasn't their fault.

Combine it all with the fact that there isn't all that many good games on OS X and it isn't weird that quite a lot of mac gamers plays WoW or other blizzard games.

Half the sales are on OS X because no Windows user would ever take a look at a game that looks like this.

The trouble with this article is that most of the reasons given are benefits only because of the Mac's small gaming market share. A lot of these reasons would go away if every developer did this.

I see a very big reason to support the Mac coming in 2009 though: Snow Leopard. Suddenly everyone who bought a Mac Pro in the last few years gets a massive performance bump. It will also be the first OS to support OpenCL, which is likely to be embraced by Mac developers quicker than Windows ones. A lot of consumers have passed on Vista - no-one knows how they will react when Windows 7 comes out. It's likely that the uptake will be much slower than that of Snow Leopard.

As for DirectX, remember that consumers need Vista in order to upgrade to DirectX 10. There are very few DX10 games because the market for Vista is so poor. If consumers pass on Windows 7 as well, developers may be tempted towards OpenGL instead to take advantage of more modern features.

So for the short-term at least, you suddenly get a hell of a lot of power inside a box that's near in price to an equivalent-specced (but ultimately slower due to lack of OS support) Dell. These are very good reasons for developing for the Mac.

Yeah, I'd buy a Windows-only game and play it on Boot Camp, but I'm much more likely to buy a game if it has a Mac version, just for sake of convenience.

So for big gaming companies, I guess it kind of makes sense to make Windows-only, since it's more likely that people will know about it/buy it anyway, while an indie game, it if has the resources, might actually benefit more from making a Mac version.

I only buy games that have Linux support.

If you don't support Linux, then don't even bother in showing me your game.

I love the name of their game: Lugaru...

...I'm sure that, since their company is called Wolfire Games, it is a reference to the french "Loup-Garou" aka the werewolf! Funny...

I suck for using very well twice in one sentence. My english teacher will be turning in his armchair

No DirectX = no thanks

If you have an extremely amazing game, then sure, it's less likely to get lost in the mix when there's less competition. If you have a game that's just "pretty good" then you're better off focusing your limited resources on the largest pool of potential customers, which also just happens to be the easiest platform to develop for.

It was great that they gave away copies of this through MacHeist just now.

But I have to say, they have the poorest registration setup I've seen in a while. You need to enter a 16 digit random number they email you, BUT you can only type it in (no copy-paste), and the app is in full-screen mode when you do (so you can't look at the email to type in the number). You need to write the number down or memorize it or have a second computer just to be able to register the game.