August 2006

Apple and games

Recently, Lionhead Studios founder and legendary game developer Peter Molyneux called upon Apple to get serious about gaming, noting the lack of coordinated efforts to provide APIs and other developer-friendly tools.

He’s got a point, but there’s also the vicious cycle of market share to blame for disinterest. The Mac is a great development platform, but its market share, while rising, is still nowhere near the Wintel mark. The current gaming economy demands hits to stay solvent, so only previous WinTel million-sellers get ported, a year later.

Apple did itself a disservice by discouraging games on the Mac early on, to distance it from the “fun” Apple II, seemingly forgetting that game availability spurred hardware sales, not the other way around.

That said, more games are finding their way onto Intel Macs. Apple’s own Boot Camp lets you run Windows natively, so it’s as good as an equivalent PC for gaming. Just this week, Toronto’s TransGaming announced Cider, an engine for game developers that apparently bundles or emulates key Windows APIs to speed the porting process.

Those are both good solutions, but as Molyneux says, what could Apple do to encourage developers to consider OS X as a native development platform? I say: emulate.

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August 7, 2006 in Technology | ✍ 1