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.

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.

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24" iMac, Athlon 3800+, Phenom II, PS2, Gamecube, PS3

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.

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.

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.

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 believe there is as large a market as ever for PC gaming (both Windows and Mac), but the marketing has been all negative. Microsoft splintered the platform by not supporting DirectX 10 on Windows 2000 and XP. Some may chafe at Leopard-only applications, but Vista redefined uncompelling. In the case of least one game, Shadowrun, the requirement for Vista was found to be completely artificial, as cracks enabled it to be run on XP.

The other big problem, of course, is DRM. I still had one foot in the Windows camp when Half-Life 2 came out, but I wanted nothing to do with Steam. More recently, of course, Spore took it to a new low. The negative publicity it generated did irreparable harm to PC gaming as a whole. Games are malware until proven otherwise.

I'm a little sad about the state of affairs, but there are several Windows and Mac games on my shelf that bear replaying, and a few that I've yet to play at all. Meanwhile, quality titles do find their way to the Mac, albeit belatedly.