Mac gaming

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While marketed as family-friendly products, Apple computers have not attracted the same level of computer game development as Windows PCs. This can in part be put down to the historical technical factors involved.[1]

Contents

[edit] Early game development on the Mac

Prior to the release of the first Macintosh computer some of the marketing executives at Apple were concerned that including a game in the finished operating system would aggravate the impression that the graphical user interface made the Mac toy-like.[2] More critically, the limited amount of memory in the original Macintosh meant that fitting a game into the operating system would be very difficult.[2] Eventually, Andy Hertzfeld created a desk accessory called Puzzle that used up only 600 bytes of memory. This was deemed small enough to be safely included in the operating system, and shipped with the Mac when it was finally released in 1984.[2] The Puzzle would remain a part of the Mac OS for the next ten years, until being replaced in 1994 with a jigsaw puzzle game called Jigsaw included as part of Mac OS 7.5.

Subsequent game development on the Macintosh included titles such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (1986) and SimCity (1988) though mostly games for the Mac were developed alongside games for other platforms. A notable exception was Myst (1993), developed on the Mac (in part using HyperCard) and only afterwards ported to Windows.[3]

[edit] Pippin

The Apple Pippin (also known as the Bandai Pippin) was a multimedia player based on the Power Mac and running a cut-down version of the Mac OS designed, among other things, to play games. Sold between 1996 and 1998 in Japan and the USA, it was not a commercial success with fewer than 42,000 units being sold and less than a thousand games and software applications running for it.[4]

[edit] Porting from Windows

[edit] In-house porting

Only a few companies have developed or continue to develop games for both the Mac and Windows platforms. Notable examples of these are Aspyr, Big Fish Games, Blizzard Entertainment, Brøderbund, Linden Lab, and Microsoft. In many ways this is an ideal situation: those creating the Mac version have direct access to the original programmers in case of any questions or concerns about the code. It also increases the likelihood that the Mac and Windows versions of a game will launch concurrently or near-concurrently, as many of the obstacles inherent in the third-party porting process are avoided. Another benefit of in-house porting (if it is done simultaneously with game development) is that the company can release hybrid discs, making distribution of the game easier and largely eliminating the shelf space problem.

Among the Mac versions of popular Windows games that were developed in-house are Diablo, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Second Life, Stubbs the Zombie and World of Warcraft.

[edit] Third party porting

Most of the high-budget games that come to the Macintosh were originally created for the Microsoft Windows operating system and ported to the Mac operating system by one of a relatively small number of porting houses. Among the most notable of these are Aspyr, Feral Interactive, MacSoft Games, Red Marble Games, and MacPlay. Robosoft Technologies, an India-based company, ports game-titles from Windows to Mac on behalf of Feral. A critical factor for the financial viability of these porting houses is the number of copies of the game sold; a "successful" title may sell only 50,000 units.[5]

The licensing deal between the original game developer and the porting house may be a flat one-time payment, a percentage of the profits from the Mac game's sale, or both.[citation needed] While this license gives the porting house access to artwork and source code, it doesn't normally cover middleware such as third-party game engines.[6] Modifying the source code to the Macintosh may be a difficult task as code for games is often highly optimized for the Windows operating system and Intel-compatible processors. The latter presented an obstacle in previous years when the Macintosh platform utilized PowerPC processors due to the difference in endianness between the two types of processors, but as today's Macintosh computers use Intel processors as well, the obstacle has been mitigated somewhat. One example of common work for a porting house is converting graphics instructions targeted for Microsoft's DirectX graphics library to instructions for the OpenGL library; DirectX is favored by most Windows game developers, but is incompatible with the Macintosh.

Due to the time involved in licensing and porting the product, Macintosh versions of games ported by third-party companies are usually released anywhere from three months to more than a year after their Windows-based counterparts. For example, the Windows version of Civilization IV was released on 25 October 2005, but Mac gamers had to wait until 30 June 2006 for the release of the Mac version, a delay of about eight months.

[edit] Valve Corporation

An 2007 interview with Valve Corporation's (Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and the Source engine) Gabe Newell included the question of why his company was keeping their games and gaming technology "a strictly Windows project".[7] Newell answered:

“ We tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to... well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms. ”


[edit] TransGaming's Cider

TransGaming Technologies has developed a product called Cider which is a technology that is the industry's leading Mac Portability Engine. Cider's engine enables publishers and developers to run on Mac OS X. It shares much of the same core technology as TransGaming's Linux Portability Engine, Cedega. Due to the increase in demand for Apple computers, the company is experiencing above average growth. Electronic Arts announced their return to the Mac, publishing various titles simultaneously on both PCs and Macs, using Cider on the Mac. Several other leading developers and publishers are also part of Cider's client list.

[edit] The middleware problem

A particular problem for companies attempting to port PC games to the Macintosh is licensing middleware. Middleware is off-the-shelf software that handles certain aspects of games, making it easier for game creators to develop games in return for paying the middleware developer a licensing fee. However, since the license the Mac porting house obtains from the game creator does not normally include rights to use the middleware as well, the Mac porting company must either license the middleware separately or attempt to create its own workaround or alternative.[6] Examples of middleware include the Havok physics engine and the GameSpy internet-based multiplayer gaming client.

Because of the smaller market, companies developing games for the Mac usually seek a lower licensing fee than Windows developers. When the middleware company refuses to do this, then porting that particular Windows game to the Mac may be uneconomical and engineering a viable alternative within the available budget impossible.[6] This means that some very popular games which use the engine, including Half-Life 2 and Far Cry, have not yet been ported to the Macintosh and most likely never will be.

In other cases workaround solutions may been found. In the case of GameSpy, this workaround is limited to allowing Mac gamers to play against each other but not with users playing the same game on a PC.[6] However, in some cases, GameSpy has been reverse-engineered and implemented into the Mac game, so that it is able to network seamlessly with the PC version of the game.[citation needed]

[edit] Boot Camp

In April 2006, Apple released a beta version of Boot Camp, a product which allowed Intel-based Macintoshes to boot Windows XP and Windows Vista. The reaction from Mac game developers and software journalists to the introduction of Boot Camp has been mixed, ranging from assuming the Mac will be dead as a platform for game development through to cautious optimism that the Mac owners will continue to play games within the Mac OS rather than by rebooting to Windows.[8] [9] Regardless of Boot Camp, the number of Mac ports of Windows games released in 2006 was never likely to be very great, despite the steadily increasing number of Mac users.[10]

There are a number of reasons why Boot Camp might not depress the Mac gaming market significantly. Firstly, Boot Camp only provides a means for installing Windows; the user will have to purchase a copy of Windows for Boot Camp to actually be useful. This in turn demands that a large amount of hard drive space is set aside for the Windows operating system (Boot Camp requires the Windows partition of the user's hard drive to have at least 5 gigabytes of free space; much of which would be taken up by Windows itself), and maintaining Windows in terms of security and viruses introduces another level of hassle most Mac users are not accustomed to. Since Boot Camp only allows the computer run either Mac OS X or Windows but not both at the same time, to play a Windows game a Mac user will have to reboot their Mac from OS X to Windows each time a Windows game is played.[11]

[edit] Emulation and virtualization

Over the years there have been a number of emulators for the Macintosh that allowed it to run MS-DOS or Windows software, most notably RealPC, SoftPC, SoftWindows, and Virtual PC. Although more or less adequate for business applications, these programs have tended to deliver poor performance when used for running games, particularly where high-end technologies like DirectX were involved.[12]

Ever since the introduction of the Intel processor into the Macintosh platform, Windows virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion have been seen as much more promising solutions for running Windows software on the Mac.[citation needed] In some ways they are better solutions than Boot Camp, as they do not require rebooting the machine because the Mac and Windows environments can run simultaneously. VMware Fusion's public beta 2 supports hardware-accelerated 3D graphics which utilize the DirectX library up to version 8.1[13]; newer games requiring DirectX 9 are not yet supported. Parallels Desktop for Mac version 3.0 has announced that it is now supporting GPU acceleration allowing Mac Users to play Windows based games.[14]

Another application is CodeWeavers' CrossOver products, which use a compatibility layer to translate Windows' application instructions to the native Macintosh operating system. CrossOver is built from the open source Wine project and adds a graphical frontend to the process of installing and running the Windows applications through Wine. It is a similar approach that TransGaming uses to run Windows games on the Mac OS. CodeWeavers is an active supporter of Wine and routinely shares programming code and patches back to the project.

[edit] Original Mac games

Although currently most big-name Mac games are ports, this has not always been the case. Perhaps the most popular game which was originally developed for the Macintosh was 1993's Myst, by Cyan. It was ported to Windows the next year, and Cyan's later games were released simultaneously for both platforms with the exception of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, which was Windows-only until a Mac-compatible re-release was released (currently in beta) by GameTap in 2007, with the help of the Cider virtualization software developed in part by TransGaming Technologies.

Another popular Mac game was the Marathon series of first-person shooters. These games were released in the wake of the popular DOOM, which defined the first-person shooter genre, but contained many innovations new or uncommon in similar games from the time, such as weapons with two functions (for example, an assault rifle which could also shoot grenades), and the ability for the player to look and fire up and down, swim through liquids, fight alongside allied characters, and wield two weapons at once (one in each hand). Bungie Studios would port the second in the series, Marathon 2: Durandal, to the Windows platform, where it would meet some success. They also ported their post-Marathon games Myth and Oni to Windows. At the 1999 Macworld Conference & Expo in New York, Bungie showed a demonstration of a new game entitled Halo, to be released for the Mac the next year; however, before this happened, Bungie was purchased by Microsoft. (This move angered many Mac gamers, who accused Bungie of selling out.) Halo was released exclusively for the Xbox video game console in 2001. The Macintosh (and Windows) version of the game would not arrive until late 2003, almost four and a half years after its original announcement at Macworld. (Despite the earlier anger among the Mac gaming community, Halo was a resounding success on the Macintosh.) Today, there are many companies both large and small creating original games for the Macintosh; however, following a trend in the industry, these tend to be lower-budget "casual" games with simple graphics that are easy to pick up and play in short bursts, as opposed to high-budget "hardcore" games that are more graphically intensive and require large investments in time to play and master.

During WWDC 2007, Electronic Arts announced they would start producing games to the Macintosh.[15] Like GameTap, EA's games will be using TransGaming's Cider. It was hoped that some of the newer games, such as Madden 2008, would be released concurrently with its release for Windows; this did not come to pass. However, the "gap" between the Windows release and the Mac one will still be significantly shorter than usual.

[edit] The shelf space problem

One problem afflicting both porting houses and original Mac game developers is that of "shelf space," or how much space a retail store allocates to stocking Mac games. Already, due to its small market share, Macintosh software as a whole will receive very little shelf space in most major computer retail stores, if it gets any at all. Within that space, retailers will usually be reluctant to stock relatively inexpensive games which may or may not sell well instead of high-cost, guaranteed high-selling products such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. Due to this, almost all smaller Mac game companies release their products using a shareware business model, either exclusively or in addition to a more traditional retail "boxed" version. All porting houses and larger game companies have stuck to the traditional model, but the recent rise in the digital download model may lead to some companies eventually releasing games as paid downloads in a model similar to Valve Corporation's Steam service. Virtual Programming was one of the few porting companies to offer commercial games via digital download, although with the launch of Deliver2Mac in early 2006 other companies are beginning to move towards digital distribution. Aside from getting around the shelf space problem, shareware and digital download models also provide a larger percentage of profit to the company, as the wholesaler middleman is avoided and costs (and turnaround times) involved in media replication are eliminated. The latest player is TransGaming Technologies' GameTreeOnline.com which was launched in Beta, March 2008, with a focus to offer the Mac gaming community digital downloads of major published Mac titles.

[edit] External links

[edit] Notable current porting houses

[edit] Notable current original game developers

[edit] References

  1. ^ Tom Krazit (2007). Apple still quiet on game strategy, CNET News.com.
  2. ^ a b c Andy Hertzfeld (2004). Revolution in the Valley, O'Reilly. ISBN 0-5960-0719-1
  3. ^ CSE/ISE 364 Lectures & Recitations (2007). A Brief History of Hypertext, Authoring, and Multimedia, Centre for Visual Computing, Stony Brook, State University of New York
  4. ^ Owen Linzmayer (2004). Apple Confidential 2.0, No Starch Press. ISBN 1-5932-7010-0
  5. ^ Arik Hesseldahl (2006). [Apple Needs to Get Its Game On http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060531_384873.htm], Business Week
  6. ^ a b c d Peter Cohen (2006). Middleware messing up Mac game development, Macworld
  7. ^ Gabe Newell Valve Interview - Orange Box (2007-09-28). Retrieved on 2007-10-02.
  8. ^ Neale Monks (2006). Has BootCamp squished gaming on the Mac? MyMac.com
  9. ^ Tuncer Deniz (2006). Developers React To Apple's Boot Camp Inside Mac Games
  10. ^ Peter Cohen (2006). Mac games: What to look for in 2007 Macworld
  11. ^ Apple Inc. (2007). Apple - Boot Camp
  12. ^ Neale Monks (2004). Review: Virtual PC 6.1 for Mac, AppleLust.com
  13. ^ VMWare.com
  14. ^ Inside Mac Games Interviews Parallels Inside Mac Games
  15. ^ WWDC 2007 keynote of the announcement

[edit] External links