The Brad Hole

Hey Brad.

In my opinion, things can go two different ways from here on out, with a basic axiom that the Mac market share will grow by integer percentages in the coming years.

1) Apple starts backing Mac OS X game development

If Apple starts to seriously support game development on Mac OS X on all fronts, I believe the likely outcome will be a lot more Mac OS X native games and ports. It's the Cocoa effect, in a way: whatever platform has the nicest API and a financially viable user base gets the initiatives and the innovation. Right now, Mac OS X is pretty much the suck as far as game technologies are concerned. Our OpenGL is OK in features but desperatly in need of speed, we have zero networking API, zero mathematics API (animations, physics, and so on) and zero game-oriented sound API (Core Audio is good, but it's a lot of work from it to an audio engine), and let's not get into input management.

That's just the operating system technologies part. Howver, if Apple starts to remedy these issues and provide a kick-ass development experience like they have with Cocoa, Core Data, Shark and so many other, then perhaps we'll be able to compete with powerhouse DirectX.

Once we get there, it's not inconceivable that the likes of Aspyr can start producing more original titles for Mac OS X :)

2) Apple doesn't back Mac OS X game development

Games on Mac OS X die, outside of the trivial and casual games (Tetris, card games and the likes). Porting houses are in serious trouble, and only huge companies (Blizzard) will continue selling advanced titles for Mac OS X with increasing difficulty due to significant and increasing (just look at Civ IV, Quake 4, and let's not even think about Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R.) development costs and poor performances at the end of the day.

The good news for you is that up until now the Mactels all have pretty weak-sauce graphics - none of them make great or even average Windows gaming boxes. That'll change when the full-size Intel Macs are introduced of course, but those are also less of a "easy second or third computer" than the Mini or iMac.

"The good news for you is that up until now the Mactels all have pretty weak-sauce graphics - none of them make great or even average Windows gaming boxes."

That's not really good news for us. At best, it's just news. ;-) OSX doesn't make those chips perform any better, and we still have to target them for our ports. The odds that we'll produce a Mac version that performs better under OSX than Windows is slim to none. The best we can hope for is break-even performance and the increasingly-rare case of feature parity. The odds that our versions will perform slightly worse and lack features is, sadly, pretty high nowadays.

Brad, I for one can assure you I'd rather wait for the Mac port, one to support programmers like you, and two to get the extra round of bug fixes =) (from other mac users I know, many switchers from windows, they would use a windows version of a program or game... only if it never came out for Mac OS, they generally prefer to avoid windows whenever possible)

I may use a game editor very rarely, and might use virtualization of dual-booting to do that, but I would buy the mac version.

currently saving up for Civ 4... mostly because I have to save up for a new tower to run it.

Hmm... this is a tricky situation. Mr Oliver, if the whole porting industry implodes, what will you do?

Brad,

I have two words for you from a user's perspective:

Don't worry!

A guy over at the ars.technica forum said it best: When even wanting to play DeusEx couldn't keep me booting into OS9, what else possibly could?

I'm pretty sure that all the lost sales from the early adopter crowd ("Got ... to ... play ... Half-Life .. now ...") will be more than compensated by the increase in marketshare for the Mac platform. People want to *be able* to dual-boot when they have to, but they don't want to actually *do* it every time they want to play a game. After the novelty has worn off, inertia will set in and convenience will take over.

If anything, you can view Boot Camp as an incentive to bring down the time between PC and Mac release-dates ... ;-)

The pendulum must swing the other way.

Apple has given Macs the ability to run Windows software.

now. I believe apple will give windows the ability to run mac os x software via the old yellowbox. It just needs the updates to quartz, some direct3d/opengl tie-ins and then game developers can write once and deploy on macs with g4/g5, macs with intel, and anything with WinXP/2000.

I so hope this happens. I, being a mac developer, am pissed. Nice 30th Anniversary. I mean, it is good for mac gamers, but really really bad for apple developers.

The pendulum MUST swing back!!!

Brad

Dual boot doesn't seem like it's aimed at existing Mac users. Its primary purpose in Apple's repertoire is to provide a soft landing for switchers. I well remember in the late eighties, when I was rolling out Macs in a new business, I supplied a Mac II with a DOS co-processor to the accounts guy to make him feel at home. He never booted it in anger as far as I can recall, but it was a security blanket for him that it was there.

I just can't see rebooting into an alien and temporary environment with no access to my usual life support systems, just so that I can play a game in it. Sure, mail, web favorites, RSS feeds, chat clients ... all exist over on the dark side, But I'm not going to spend time configuring and syncing a Windows setup to emulate my Mac environment.

I'm a Mac user! If a game isn't playable in a Quartz window on my OS X desktop it won't get my dollars.

Well, let me start by saying the current mac I have is an Yosemite G3 which I upgraded over buying a new computer because it will boot into OS 9. Now when was the last time I booted into os 9? . . . I think it might have been about 4 months ago. Sure I will likely boot into it again whenever I feel like playing Deus Ex, Rune(if I can fix refresh rate) or hosting rogue spear. But for the most part I hardly boot into it - its a pain to wait an extra 2 mins. just to open a game, despite someone saying gamers will not care about wasting an extra minute or 2 to play a game. Gaming is a quick pick up and play past time.

Now let me also say there is a decent pc(or 2/3 depending on game) for most games and medium settings(1024x768 with some higher settings). I know I'm probably not like most people but the only pc games I have currently are games I also own on mac(cod, cnc generals, NWN, UT2004, etc), games which are clearly not coming out due to being low sellers/niche market/old games on the pc side (silent hunter 3, psychonauts, grim fandango, etc.), or hybrids.

I'm not saying my game buying habits won't change when I get an intel mac, or that I'm not going to install XP and dual boot(I likely am just a little). But I more desire the ability to simply install a pc game and double click it and it run via wine or similar. I enjoy the os X user interface and would be more worried as a programmer about this form of running pc games since honestly I'm wanting this ability.

I also think Apple really needs to work on optimizing its OS for games. I can see the aforementioned problem of performance parity of ports becoming a problem if the pc game will run faster on the mac in some form or another then the port. I also think this may be a good time to start including editors on ports even if they will not run on mac os X(though I can see the inevitable "Why won't this editor run on my mac" from the person that doesn't read the read me.)

Hi Brad

For what its worth I really do feel for you and your fellow programmers at this juncture. However, I think that the whole dual booting issue really is a 'flash in the pan' kind of situation. It's hot news now, and yes its exciting, but after the fall out we'll start to see users becoming bored with having to fire up Windows every time they want to play their new or favourite game. What really concerns me is virtualisation and how that might impact the need for native Mac ports. If for example Parallels can create software that has 3D hardware support then I think we're really heading for hard times. This also begs the question of whether or not other companies continue to support the Mac, especially if a title, be it an Office productivity suite or whatnot exists for Windows, so why bother porting it when virtualisation or dual booting does the job already.

These are uncertain times, but I sincerely hope that it all works out in favour for the need of mac native software.

"If anything, you can view Boot Camp as an incentive to bring down the time between PC and Mac release-dates ... ;-)"

It's comments like these that frustrate me, because they imply that we're somehow not doing this already. Honestly, what's the incentive for us to stretch the time between a Mac release and PC release?

"If for example Parallels can create software that has 3D hardware support then I think we're really heading for hard times."

I'd say this is going to be a very hard task, and I suspect we won't ever see a 3D solution in a virtual environment, at least not one without serious limitations. The WINE solution suffers from this - they're essentially having to rewrite DirectX from the ground-up to sit on top of OpenGL, so OpenGL's limitations on the host platform are passed directly onto DirectX. This is also the strategy we take with our Mac ports, the main exception being that we can alter the PC code to work around the cases where DirectX and OpenGL do not easily meet.

"It's comments like these that frustrate me, because they imply that we're somehow not doing this already. Honestly, what's the incentive for us to stretch the time between a Mac release and PC release?"

Uhm ... that's why I put ;-) at the end, as in, you know, irony ...?

Sorry if this came over the wrong way. I didn't want to imply that you (or all the other porting houses) were playing pocket pool instead of working.

On the other hand, the time between Pc and Mac release *may* be an incentive for *some* people to buy the PC version and dual-boot.

What I was trying to say was that now the issue of release dates has acquired a new importance it didn't have before.

Sorry for being so unclear.

Thank you for the most candid assessment of what Boot Camp means for the porting side of the Mac business that I've read among developers and game publishers. And while I'm at it, thank you also for all the games you've ported and maintained on the Mac OS, especially Descent and MAME.

If you want yet another intermediate Mac gamer's perspective, BootCamp means I won't be buying a Windows gaming rig, which had looked increasingly likely until the MacIntel announcement but wasn't ruled out until Apple itself came up with a dual-boot option. My long-overdue desktop will now definitely be from Apple, and I'll be buying Mac-ported games for it, as well as games that will never make it to the Mac for reasons you've outlined.

You already mentioned exorbitant middleware licenses as a killer of Mac ports for top-notch games, but do you see any reason for optimism for the future between MacIntels and Boot Camp? You touched on what's a very deep issue to me: the difficulties of porting editors in addition to the games themselves. I know that editors increase my fondness for a game exponentially - not only for playing user-created mods, but also mucking about, even casually, with them. (I'm also thinking of Blizzard and pre-MS Bungie policy of always bundling Mac versions of editors with their games, and Will Wright declaring user-created content will be central to "Spore".) What place do you think can Mac gamers look forward to in the modding community?

Certainly, Boot Camp WILL affect the Macintosh game market....that much is obvious.

It is also clear to me that most Mac users would prefer a Mac version of a game, as opposed to having to boot into Windows to play a PC version.

Macintosh game companies/publishers/porters, etc. will NEED to make EARLY announcements for their upcoming games.

Thanks indeed! I have to say I think it is overall a great thing for Macs to be able to run windows software. A WINE or VMware sort of solution works for most business apps, while hard core "gotta have pc game X" kids will get their joy on. Reboot? meh

For myself, I think that there are titles I might want to play, but aren't coming to the Mac platform (HL, HL2, etc). While there are AAA titles I want to play (Civ4 and CoD2!!! esp Civ4!!!) these are coming to the Mac soon enough (barely soon enough!)

And will Spore be coming to the Mac? signs say: dunno

Besides, how many PPC G4 and G5 machines are out there in comparison to the Intel Macs? It will be years before the majority of Macs are intel based. How many years is a big question of course, but by then the rising tide of Mac gamers may more than make up the difference. Wishful thinking? Will porting be easier when there is no PPC code to shoehorn in there (a few years hence)? I am sure a guy with your experience and talent will do well wherever you might land Mr Oliver. Cheers!

I don't want to run Windows games, otherwise I wouldn't have bought a Mac.

Good luck Mr Oliver

Hi Brad,

thanks for your great work for the Mac gaming community over all those years. It's highly appreciated. I hope I speak for a lot of passionate Mac users who have sticked to Apple and the Mac in good and bad times during the last 20 years. I don't like the thought of having a Windows partition on my MacBook Pro and I don't want to use Windows anyway. That's why I bought my first Mac, a b/w Classic, many years ago.

I've played many Aspyr games in the course of the last few years and I guess you've always pulled off pretty good ports. And I don't want that to change. Yes, we Mac users miss out on some great games due to middleware and licensing issues. But for most titles you can get an equal or better console counterpart anyway. At least if it's about action or sports titles.

There will be SOME users dual-booting, in particular the hardcore shooter/RTS crowd. But I doubt this will be the majority of future Mac buyers. Hardcore gamers don't buy Macs anyway, because they need the latest and greatest graphics cards, special cooling solutions, etc. But games like Civ 4, The Sims 2 or even the upcoming Dreamfall appeal to a wider audience, which won't be bothered to use Windows on a Mac. Keep up the good work, bring Dreamfall to OS X, and have fun.

Thanks for your comments on the boot camp situation. I think there is a possibility you will lose some of the hard core gamers out there. Especially the games where the networking only works mac-to-mac. But to be honest, even though I may dual-boot windows whenever I buy a new Mac one day, I highly doubt I will use it for games. I'll probably just do it to try it and then stick with the Mac 99% of the time. I play games on my mac because I can just click the game in my dock and there I am playing the game. I don't have to wait to reboot into Windows. That is too much of a pain for me since I play games to kill some time and relax. For those of us who don't care about having Halo at 12:01am at the midnight release and can wait a few months, having a mac port is worth the wait and money. Even if I had the ability to dual-boot, I'd still wait until June to get Civ IV to run on my mac. I didn't buy a Mac to play it in Windows.

The honest-to-goodness hard-core gamers are on consoles...

Gaming on a PC or a Mac is (often) a secondary diversion to some other activity. Personally, I've very rarely rebooted into OS9 to play a game, and can't see myself rebooting into XP for that purpose either. I always have several applications running (mail, web, finance, etc.) and don't see any value in quitting all that (with the need to restore it) just to play a game. If the gaming experience is not seamless, I'm not going to spend my time playing that game. Maybe I'm not enough of a gamer, but I just don't see how this is going to "kill" gaming on the Mac.

With a larger market to sell to, perhaps it's more a shift in the titles that will sell (more Sims, strategy, MMRPG, less FPS?) as these appeal to different demographics?

Only time will tell... Good luck Brad, and thanks for all your efforts :-)

Who gets to make up the definition for "hard-core gamers?" I think there are the hard-core PC gamers and hard-core console gamers. Then the honest-to-goodness hard-core gamers are on both.

When Apple "switched" to Intel, I was very in doubt about making "universal binaries" of Mac games, given the fact that Intel-based computers are already there and are called PC.
Now, I think that supporting Macintel is nonsense. Our production will continue to support dual-format games, Win and MacOS, but the MacOS version will be PPC only, and we'll continue as long as the PPC user base is big enough.
We are not going to support Macintel, now that they can easily play the Win version of the game (that, sadly said, will perform better on Win than on OS X)...

Games are best on the PC and Consoles. Now would be a good time to give-up designing/porting games for the Mac as you say it is easier for gamers to simply boot into windows.

I am a fan of a universal system. Allow the developers of an OS to focus on their craft. There never was a market for games on MAC, it was simply something that filled a blank spot. Such as media on Windows, Macintosh does it better but for the windows OS they need to watch videos too.

What I'm getting at here is with this renewed interested in virtualization I hope there can be a universal standard so that hardware vendors like ASUS/ATI/NVIDIA/etc can focus soley on a single hardware platform which works with something such as XEN that will allow OSX/Windows/Linux/etc to operate simultaneously. Then allow the software companies to work on the OS in which their application is best suited for.

The only game I have ever booted a PC for was Starfleet Command. Half-life, Morrowind, other PC titles? I found different games to play.

I have talked to a lot of mac users, mostly my age. We all have families, jobs, and other things to do, so we cannot afford the hours of play that are required for a really good all night game fest. Further, we tend to get interrupted a lot.

Turn based strategy games tend to play well in a window, allow saves at any point, and otherwise fit the 30something life style. Further, if something important comes up and you have to abruptly put down the keyboard, you can usually pause without real harm. I see, though, only a very few such games out there, and few are coming to the platform.

The 'hardcore gamer' market seems pretty focussed on gamers who can plop in front of the box for hours on end. Who can ignore a distraction for the five minutes it takes to reach a save point. Who can check on their WoW or RTS game every single day to 'take care of business'

If that is the market we lose, well, I am not in it and never have been. I am glad that people enjoy those games, but I do not buy them.

Put another way, I own a PS/2 and a PSP. I have bought four times as many games for those over the last year as I have for my mac, because those games tend to let me play my way, with a pause key, and with a bit of thought and not a lot of blasting away.

So, if you want to get my gaming dollars, provide games I want to play, and provide them on a mac. Given the overhead gaming entails, I am really not likely to reboot into XP to play a PC game. Upcoming this year, I see only Civ 4 and HOMM as potential games to get my Mac gaming dollars, and I would buy a new game every month if there were titles to be had.

Scott

To: "A Mac Game Developer"

Thanks for your 2 cents' worth of comments. It would also be informative to know what kinds of game genres you're involved in developing, i.e. whether they're marketed at casual or hardcore gamers (however you define those).

For the record, I occasionally boot back into OS 9 on my G4 Sawtooth to play Oni and Deus Ex again. I can forsee booting into Windows on a MacIntel only for long sessions with the best-of-the-best Windows-only games. Otherwise, I tend to play only for a quick fix of Unreal Tournament or WarCraft III (to say nothing of all the Flash games I've downloaded to my hard drive).

I bought WinXP and Civ IV the day after the Boot Camp announcement, and put it on my intel iMac. I wrote a blurb about it on the civfanatics civ iv forum. It works very well.

So what Brad fears may come to pass. I'm not sure I count as an example, though, because I'm still going to buy Civ IV mac when it comes out. I have absolutely no desire to boot up windows, rather I'd just like to play Civ IV. If I can do it mac native then I will.

To "A Mac Game Developer" and anyone else who is considering not compiling for Intel Macs for whatever made-up reason:

I do not have Windows, I never had Windows and I have no plans to buy it any time soon. Henceforth, I will not (be able to) install Windows on my machines. I do, however, buy games for Mac OS X.

If, given time and opportunity, you do not add support for Intel Macs to your games, you will not get a dime from me and others like me that bought a Mac for a reason; namely, to use Mac OS X.

Just for the record, at my previous employers I have worked extensively with various versions of Windows and I consider myself equally skilled on both platforms, yet I prefer to use Mac OS X for various reasons, the most important of which is that it makes me happy. I don't know exactly why and I don't care. I do know that using Windows always leaves me feeling apathetic.

Oh well, enough ranting; ship for MacTel or lose the business of a lot of Mac users. Period.

I'm just gonna toss my 2 cents in. I dual-boot my DTK Mac to play just one game - America's Army. That's because the only way to play AA is online, and the PC version is always one step ahead of the Mac version (meaning Mac guys end up with just over 0 servers).

With dual-boot ability having freed me from the tyranny of having to buy Mac games, let's see how many Windows versions of games I've bought (other than the above mentioned AA, which is free). That would be - ZERO.

That's right, even though I can dual-boot, all the new Star Wars, Sims 2, and whatever else games around here have been Mac versions. I don't even really know why. I do know that I cringe when I see Windows booting up. And all those bizarre don't use this driver, use that one instead, except for then that OTHER game doesn't work anymore Windows-isms. And that crashing thing Windows is doing even after I reloaded XP SP2. With a clean system and exactly one game on it.

So I'll wait for the Mac ports, and as long as you guys keep doing them, I'll keep buying.

Hey Brad,

I've been following your comment on this topic since Apple announced their switch to Intel, and I, too, think that for my gaming lust, this announcement is great news (or would be, once I can afford to update to a new Mac).
The common observation is in my opinion right: Mac ports have just lost a lot of reasons to exist. To think that I still have to pay 50€ for Halo 1, when it's even hard to find in PC-bargain bins these days. And to add pain to injury, I still do not know whether that 50€ buys me a game that will at some point - perhaps with additional cost - run natively on Intel-Macs.
And then there are the feature-crippled ports. I hear that one of the main reasons Halflife for Mac was shelved, was the ports inability to network with the Windows version. Now how many ports appear today, where that is just the case? Would Halflife be released to the market, were it a current port?

Which leads me to my claim: porting is just plain wrong. It's a concept from a time when people had no choice but to wait for games as ports and then take what they got (or buy a second box). Boot Camp ended this. The only way to satisfy me as a Mac-gamer now, is simultaneous development (I don't exactly remember details of the industry in the 90s, but I believe that's now what you mean with "in-house ports"). Use a common codebase. Use no single-plattform middleware. Ship on hybrid disks.
Blizzard can do it. Cyan did, too. That sad thing is: I can't think of any other developer that does. But why? Are Valve's developers (or their managers) too stupid? Doesn't EA have the financial means? I doubt that.

Of course, I realize that especially for games developers, there is a great temptation to tell me to just boot into Windows. After all, games don't integrate into any workflow. They bring their own fullscreen GUIs. It's not as if Adobe told people to boot into Windows for Photoshop. Why should they spend the extra buck?

I think that's the big problem now and in contrast to your company, I don't have any market share and demographic data and such, but I think John Gruber's evaluation and outlook http://daringfireball.net/2006/04/windows_the_new_classic sounds quite reasonable. Hopefully, these new Machines sell well enough that running natively on MacOS proves financially rewarding enough for development companies.

Until then, I just hope that Blizzard's next project is more affordable than WoW.

I want to see where apple is going to take this. Apple themselves aren't really a gaming company. I mean most of the hardware and software they make is for communication or video and audio. They do make some fun games, but big budget gaming isn't apple. I don't know--but would love--if Apple would make better 3D/Audio/Overall gaming engines. Gaming is something everyone loves to do, whether your on a mac playing pocket tanks, or linux playing in telnets ;P, or on windows playing minesweeper. It would really be nice if everyone would get along and share software, but it's not happening yet and windows isn't really trying to help, seeing as they're working on longhorn. I haven't experienced bootcamp. It looks just like regular windows to me, so whats new??? It'd be nice if they made bootcamp run with mac os at the same time (don't ask me how) and make executables run when you need them on mac. I don't know too much past java about programming and I know it's not just simple as I put it, but to me it's just windows again. I play tons of mac games. Love em all... Americas Army is ported to mac which takes usually a couple months after the release of the windows version. I am not going to buy a windows box just for a game. I know I can wait... The thing is I don't think other people can :\