Apple Being Facetious About PC Gaming?
By Steve on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 1:14 AM PST In Game Companies, Games Industry, Valve
You know it. I know it. Gaming on a Mac has historically sucked. It’s not that the hardware has never been there. It’s the fact that Apple just never cared. Which is a real shame considering how attractive their recent OSs have been. Kikizo recently sat down with Valve’s Gabe Newell to discuss the soon-to-be released Orange Box for PC & console. Among the various topics discussed are why Orange Box, and to the lesser extent, Source, is not heading to the Mac:
Kikizo: People keep asking you about a potential Macintosh version, and your stance is that this is a strictly Windows project…?
Gabe: Well, 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.
It does seem a crying shame that Apple continues to shrug off Mac OS as being a viable gaming platform. The technology is certainly there. With the upcoming release of Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard” and its promise of working on Intel powered PCs, the potential to draw PC gamers to their operating system is there, right now, more than ever. As a long time Windows user, I even have to admit - Leopard looks damn sexy. Unfortunately, gaming capabilities are a priority to me. So as long as Apple keeps treating gaming as a joke, I’ll keep treating their OS as a joke. To have such a narrow marketing focus baffles me, considering the multibillion dollar gaming industry sitting right in front of them.
So keep burning all those resources in making your fancy phone work pretty with your new shiny OS, Apple. When your phone becomes obsolete early next year and OS sales sag, you’ll be scratching your head wondering “What the hell went wrong?” Pretty is as pretty does.
Via Kikizo.com
typical mac user
“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” that made me laugh.
There are still other advantages over a non-Apple machine. You can’t just open up your Mac and replace or upgrade hardware freely and expect Apple to be OK with it. They’re less upgradeable than your average Dell.
Of course, considering how many companies have gone to console and aren’t even developing games for Windows very much, you can hardly expect them to develop for Mac OS as well.
I love this article. Please do more stuff like this. I like to laugh at mac users anyway.
Can Apple do more to promote gaming on Mac? Definitely, there is ALWAYS room for improvement. Should Apple do more? That depends.
Like others have pointed out, even the PC gaming industry is struggling compare to their console counterpart. Why do you think Microsoft released Halo 3 for Xbox first and not PC?
As for PCs being more “upgradeable”, that is somewhat true although misleading. AFAIK, most PC manufacturers make your typical “boxes”, nothing unique like the iMac or Mac mini (except for the copycats who do a piss poor job anyway). However, Apple’s Mac Pros (formerly known as Power Macs) are very upgradeable.
Now from a completely marketing POV, there is a very well established myth out there that Macs simply aren’t good for gaming for various reasons. This myth is often reinforced by ignorance (as can be seen by some immature comments above) and also lack of games for Mac compared to PC. In order to make the Mac a competitive gaming platform, it would require A GREAT AMOUNT of money, time and effort with no guaranteed (and even likely) success and even if they did succeed, would the reward be worth it?
Bottom line is, if you are a hardcore gamer, you probably already own a console or two (and maybe even a PC). If you are a casual gamer, like myself, the games available on the Mac is more than enough.
But Mac’s suck…
“OK, here are three things you could do…”
It’d be nice to know what’d be “necessary.” A direct-to-hardware interface, such as MS has now made impossible in Vista, that’d probably be a non-starter, all right. Driver support for high-end vid cards, well, that’s pretty much in ATI & NVidia’s courts. An API extension to cover high-speed texture mapping, anti-aliasing, etc., well, that just needs a couple dozen programmer man-years, and Apple could/should/would do it if they thought they’d sell a bunch of machines by reaching feature parity.
Personally, I doubt they would. From what I read in the gaming threads, game players are willing to spend huge amounts of their time fiddling with overclocking, disabling system services that might lower frame rates, and etc., and these users match very poorly against their customer profile of people who want things to just work, perhaps not run at 105% of the hardware capability even, as long as they don’t have to waste their time on the 95% capability that gets their pictures / email / etc taken care of. Why would somebody who wants to hotrod their machine buy one that offers superior tech support but only to those who don’t fiddle with stuff? (E.g., people who modded their iPhones into iBricks.)
“When your phone becomes obsolete early next year and OS sales sag, you’ll be scratching your head wondering “What the hell went wrong?” Pretty is as pretty does.” that line just totally ruins any possibility of a point to this artice, it turns from raving rant, to bitching little girl, macs are good, mac does what mac wants to do. Just because a mac isn’t focused to do the one thing you do doesn’t mean you should write bitchy articles, compare a mac’s loadtime, OS space usage, and user compatibility, Windows is shit when comparing that, how often has a mac crashed when used normally, how often has a windows, i would say from experience of using macs for maybe 10 years or so that they are a lot easier, my grandfather could pick one up and use it, a window he would be yelling at in 5 minutes due to the cryptic nature. Next time have a point of view, and don’t rant
I’m a gamer and a mac user.
I wish they made games more of a priority but I’ll gladly take an appalling lack of games to avoid the trainwreck that is gaming in Windows.
When I got my first intel mac I gladly loaded bootcamp and installed Windows on a partition. After a month of that I never went back.
Am I a fanboy? No, just a former Windows user. Maybe Vista will patch its way into OS superiority (it’s happened before. I left that horrible legacy Mac OS for XP) and if that happens, I’ll be a Windows user once again. Blind loyalty to a particular OS is stupid in the extreme.
How often does Apple let you do anything with your computer? NEVER Because even though you bought it is really treated as their computer or their IPod or their IPhone. If you miss treat their stuff your screwed.
Apple = most proprietary closed system ever.
If you had to make an OS for a handful of machines its easy not to screw up
Apple = Subaru of Computers. It does one thing well, but don’t look for a large variety of options.
Apple = Cares little for gamers therefore I care little for Apple.
Most Mac users (heck, most computer users) don’t buy their computers so they can tinker with it. I mean WTF really cares if you squeeze out 50 extra MHz on your professor if you need 50 loud ass fans to keep it from melting.
I love Macs because they do what I need a computer to do and I prefer it to Windows PC. Will I follow Apple blindly? No. If Apple one day started making software and hardware that don’t meet my needs, I will look for alternatives. I do hope Apple do well though and it’s only because I own their stocks
Anyway, point is, Apple is not Microsoft and I don’t think it’s trying to be. Apple has its niche and it’s doing just fine. If you aren’t attracted by Macs you either haven’t tried one or simply aren’t the kind of people Apple is targeting. Does that mean Apple is perfect? Far from it, but for better or worse, it’s obvious Apple is going after hardcore gamers who like to take their computers apart and tinker with everything. They are going after people who want computers that just works.
Or you could buy a Mac and run both WinBLOWS and OS X on it. Use OS X for everyday uses (so you don’t have to tear your eyes out) and play games on the ultimate GAMING operating system.
WinBLOWS.
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Oh, and I follow Apple blindly! It’s more fun that way.
I’m with stupid
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Transgamings Cider is a big help.