Has ‘Cider’ Truly Changed Gaming For The Mac?

Macworld has an interesting article concerning the state of “Cider” can mac users. Macs have been so far behind the gaming curve for years it’s not even funny anymore. Cider has been out for about a year for Mac now and this article reviews whether or not it has made a true impact or not.

Depending on where your loyalties lie, TransGaming’s Cider is either the best thing to happen to Mac gaming in years or a technology that’s destined to disappoint. To help understand what Cider’s continuing role is in the Mac game market, Macworld recently spoke at length with the company’s CEO, Vikas Gupta.

For years, Mac users have lamented the state of Mac games. Macs have a smaller piece of the pie than the PC game market, disproportionately so given the market share. While high-quality Mac game titles abound, the major commercial releases often taken months or a year or more to come to the Mac, and sometimes miss features like network interoperability with their PC counterparts. That’s relegated the Mac to an “also-ran” status as a gaming platform, and made many Mac users turn to greener pastures, such as game consoles or a PC.

The Mac game market has mainly been dependent on “ports” of existing titles—conversions that require developers to rewrite and recompile source code to run natively on the Mac, often replacing code that’s optimized for the Windows operating system with code designed to work on the Mac instead. Cider’s different, says Gupta.

“We do not touch the original game’s source code,” explained Gupta. “The developer gives us complete binaries, copy-protected and ready to go.”