Macworld Forums: Mac games in 2009: What to watch for - Macworld Forums

Post your comments for Mac games in 2009: What to watch for here

I'm hoping to see a Mac version of Train Simulator; it's the only thing I miss from my pc days. Happy Holidays everyone! cb ☺

It amazes me that companies feel there is a profitable market in porting 4 year old titles (CoH) and are then surprised with dismal sales.

Root for Halo Wars to stink? Hey, I've got both Macs and an Xbox. I prefer most games on the Xbox because the screen is larger and I like the controller.

Game capable macs? At the ending of 2008 it, once again, seems a bit promising. The obvious success of iphone aside, the current crop of macbooks is pretty decent, as was imac at the time of it's introduction.
It's been a norm for Apple to follow up with some huge letdown. Could this change? Could we see decent games performance from next years crop of macs?
At the moment, the future (if any) and capabilities of mini, imac and macpro is pretty much in the air.
If next year should see:
- GF9400 in mini as the minimum mac performance.
- App Store for small mac apps (thinking games here)
... then next year could be huge.
More likely, there'll be nothing very interesting and the slow death of mac gaming will continue, temporarily stalled by the growing overall marketshare.

I could be wrong, but I think indifference is more the feeling toward Bungie these days than bitterness. They don't even bother with lip service toward the Mac anymore, so who cares? It was different when they still talked about how they love the Mac and look forward to developing for it again some time in the future.

Remember in the keynote from Oct 14 Steve said "Nvidia came to us and wanted to build a fantastic part for graphics... for desktops ...." Ok, I am still waiting for that technology to be in the new minis and iMacs, if the new minis come with cool graphic processor like the ones of a macbook pro or better, an aluminum case, and at least 4 Gb of ram ( could this be the Mythical Midrange Mac Minitower that everyone wants), I am getting one. that would make the hole line of macs capable for playing games, so there would be more interest for game production for macs.

Why does no one offer games for Mac OSX like Riven, Exile, Myst? Beautiful, thought-provoking, challenging and without violent guts & gore!

pwwwayne said:

Publishers offer games for the Mac that they're likely to make a return on their investment on. Those games have seen diminished popularity over the years, so it's become harder to make money on them.

RobK said:

Given that CoH hasn't even gone on sale yet -- it's still in public beta -- I think you're jumping the gun by announcing that NCsoft feels the game is having dismal sales on the Mac platform.

Jarmo said:

You say that as if it isn't the case for the PC gaming industry as a whole. Consoles (especially the PS2 and Wii) and PC games like WoW have brought the traditional PC gaming scene to its knees. However, the Mac could bring about a new era of computer gaming that "just works" thanks to Apple's apparent interest in unifying all their computers on NVIDIA's 9400M chipset-on-a-chip, which started with their notebook line and is likely to carry over to their desktop line - at least the Mac mini and iMac - at or soon after Macworld next Tuesday. Snow Leopard, which we'll hopefully see a demo of, will enable performance gains that won't be easily matched by Microsoft's Windows 7 for years. Finally, as you brought up, it seems only natural Apple would introduce a Mac section into its hugely popular iTunes App Store especially considering Apple already has the groundwork laid here:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/

Just slap a pretty face on it in iTunes and suddenly all the third party Mac apps and games otherwise ignored are now easily found, easily installable, and easily update-able. You'd still be able to download software that Apple couldn't allow in the store - P2P and torrent clients, for instance - via the web, just like Apple's podcast database is simply a pretty face for podcast feeds.

I really, really don't mean to be rude, but every single one of these "predictions" are completely self-evident, the equivalent of predicting that "in 2009, weather will continue to affect the appearance of the sky."
Here's a tip: If a plausible argument cannot be made against a given "prediction," it's not actually a prediction. If you can't do better, please don't bother.

Peter Cohen said:

That's only part of the story. A larger part is that the few remaining development houses are stuck on DirectX. If they switched to cross-platform libraries like OpenGL then releasing Mac versions would be trivial. These games are a dime a dozen on Windows, so they're definitely making money on them.

I'm sure it will be too much to hope that Aspyr will port the rest of the SIMS 2 expansion & stuf packs as we have been begging them to do for years. The scuttlebutt online is that EA Games are refusing to give Aspyr the packs to port, with no reason given.
sigh