Why are Macs not Considered Gaming Computers?

Jan

Why are Macs not Considered Gaming Computers?

Posted by Rachel Burger

Introducing… our new social media marketing intern, Rachel Burger! Rachel is a student at Agnes Scott College and will graduate in May with degrees in creative writing and Sino-American relations. As a second-generation Mac enthusiast and first degree gamer, Rachel’s favorite games include Fable II, Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, Dragon Age: Origins, and World of Warcraft. As her career progresses, Rachel hopes to specialize in creative game design or advertising. For her first entry, we asked Rachel to take a look at the Mac gaming market, both current and past. Below, she explains why Macs have not always been considered gaming machines and what can be (and is being) done to change this.

The Market

As the Mac versus PC battle wages into the next decade, Mac enthusiasts continue to struggle with the dismal volume of computer games available to them. While most of the world’s most popular games are available only for PC, Macs have a serious disadvantage in appealing to their gaming consumers because when a new game becomes available, there is commonly a wait for the Mac release (Halo lost the Mac community because it was not available until two years after its original Windows release date). Because of the discrepancy in available titles, Macs are not typically associated with gaming.

In previous years, the computer market discouraged game designers from developing for Macs. In 2005, Apple only made up 4.6% of the PC market. However, now that Apple makes up 10.6% and has inspired unprecedented sales despite the unyielding recession, gaming companies have started to create multiplatform products (Blizzard, naturally, at the forefront of the charge).

Still, Macs are not the standard in personal computers, and thus designers continue to refuse to invest in multiplatform products. Fortunately, port companies like Aspyr began to address the Mac consumers’ gaming needs. Because of their efforts to produce award-winning titles (like Civilization V and Call of Duty 4) and crunching Mac release dates within weeks of Windows, Macs are slowly gaining ground with gamers internationally.

What about Boot Camp?

Boot Camp enables Apple computers run Windows 7 and Mac OSX, expanding gaming options In 2007, Apple released Boot Camp to support dual booting with a copy of Windows (Windows Vista and XP were available at the time). The latest version of Boot Camp allows the installation and use of Windows 7 as well as the previous two versions of Microsoft’s operating system. While Boot Camp has its advantages, like tapping into the vast games available for PCs, it is only a patch for the greater problems that occur when playing PC games via Boot Camp. Gaming via Boot Camp utilizes limited graphics (dependent on PC compatible graphics drivers) and drains the battery quickly, not to mention that users still need to purchase a copy of the Windows operating system. For example, while running Civilization V on Boot Camp, graphics settings are barely tolerable and the game process is slow. However, running Civ V on the Mac is smoother than Pierce Brosnan in a suit. Playing games made for the Mac and on a Mac is going to remain the superior alternative to playing PC games via Boot Camp.

Macs as Gaming Computers

Macs are capable of being entertainment machines in addition to fulfilling their role as workhorses in many forms of development; they are known for their phenomenal graphics handling that allows for detailed, quick-running games. There are not enough gaming companies that take advantage of Apple’s innovations in personal computing. Until gaming companies develop Mac-compatible games in larger numbers of their own accord, increasing the availability of current titles through porting companies is the best way to change the perception of Macs as non-gaming computers.

Tags: apple, Aspyr, boot camp, Call of Duty 4, Civ 4, civ 5, Civilization, Civilization 5, Civilization Mac, COD4, Halo, Mac Games, PC, porting Posted Call of Duty, Civilization, Classic Posts, Mac Hardware |

http://korpil.net/ Korpil

I switched to Mac in 2005 and stopped being a gamer completely until last year, when Steam for Mac launched and more titles began to appear, including some sold by GameAgent like The Secret of Monkey Island, and old Star Wars games…

Yes, we are still limited by the offer of games available, but some of the bigger titles are slowly coming to Mac and I don’t mind waiting… I’m currently playing Left 4 Dead 2, Starcraft II and eagerly awaiting Portal 2
http://enriquesantos.net Enrique

A great deal of the reason is historical.

While most people nowadays have laptops, Apple’s control over their high-end towers along with the cost associated with it made it very hard for gamers and developers to take advantage of custom machines for the sake of pushing performance or adopting new industry standards without Apple breathing down their neck. Since that has been the state of the industry for a while, it’ll be hard to reverse that.

An even bigger reason is the availability of great tools for developing games. While it is very possible to make games on Macs that look and function every bit as good as on any other platform, Microsoft has invested greatly in making sure that the most polished game development tools are available for their platforms. Using Microsoft’s XNA platform allows any developer to simultaneously develop games for their computer and the XBOX 360. Also, it’s free and insanely well-designed. C# is a great language to work with and the entire platform integrates really well.

The ironic thing about all of this is that I run GNU/Linux as my main OS, but I keep Windows around for games and music creation software. That’s where Windows really shines.
Herbert

Actually, I believe the main reason why macs haven’t flourish yet as a gaming platform is because of the hardware restrictions. The fact that I can’t upgrade hardware as cpus and graphic boards make the imacs become obsolete rapidly. I love my imacs and macbook pro, but their 2007 hardware can’t cope with more modern games and even struggle with games lauched years ago.
As long as we gamers are stuck without options for the less expensive lines of macs capable of hardware upgrades, we will still be second class citizens in the eyes of the game developers.
And as far as I can see, this won’t happen…
Jim

Welcome to the team, Rachel, but I’m afraid this entry came up short.
- Playing Civ V in bootcamp on a MacBook with a 9400m is somewhere around barely tolerable. But doing the same in OS X is somewhere between impossible and unsupported.
- You can’t have a conversation about Mac vs. PC in gaming without having a conversation on OpenGL vs. DirectX.

I was hoping to get a progress report on hardware acceleration for OpenGL in this post. Guess not.
Jim

@Herbert – I actually disagree with upgradability as a deterrent, because Macs actually retain a lot of their value on resale. You can sell a 3-yr-old iMac for $500-$800 and have a good portion of the purchase price towards a shiny new one. If you factor what you would have spent in upgrades across those 3 years, it’s pretty close. The performance curve just isn’t necessarily smooth year-to-year.
http://www.appletell.com Kirk Hiner

Boot Camp is not an option. For the price of buying a legal copy of Windows, you can get a PS3 or Xbox and not have to deal with all of the problems.

Hard core gamers will likely never see the Mac as a logical option, so the audience will be Mac users who happen to enjoy games (like) as opposed to those who buy computers specifically to play games. And this is fine, because the majority of great PC games either make to the Mac (eventually) or have console versions. Yes, I’d love to have a Mac version of Fallout 3, but it’s not like I’m sitting around with no games to play in the meantime.
Aaron

@Jim and @Kirk Hiner, I think that both of you missed a very important section of the blog post when both of you proceeded to bash the opinion that Boot Camp is an option for PC gaming on the Mac. Read the last 3 sentences of the “What About Boot Camp?” section. For your convenience, I’ll quote them:

“For example, while running Civilization V on Boot Camp, graphics settings are barely tolerable and the game process is slow. However, running Civ V on the Mac is smoother than Pierce Brosnan in a suit. Playing games made for the Mac and on a Mac is going to remain the superior alternative to playing PC games via Boot Camp.”

Clearly you missed this section that specifically says Boot Camp is not an option, especially for the newer games, and that the real alternative, as described in the following paragraph, is ported games that are designed for the Mac.
Jim

@Aaron, I saw that section and even offered a counterpoint. I cited an example where Boot Camp was the ONLY option, and it involved Civ V.

I dislike Boot Camp because I dislike Windows in general, but I think the performance claims in this post are overstated. There are plenty of examples where Boot Camp performs just fine; in fact Steve Jobs himself once claimed that a MBP was the fastest Windows laptop out there, and benchmarks suggested he wasn’t far off.

The point I was trying to make is that Mac ports are hampered by poor and incomplete implementations of OpenGL. Boot Camp / Windows versions can be faster simply because DirectX has better support. A concerted effort by both Apple and the major graphics companies is needed for Macs to compete long-term.
Aaron

@Jim I can’t disagree that OpenGL needs better implementation for Mac gaming to reach it fullest potential. It is possible that such could be a future, more technical post? This post seems to have specifically been avoiding the potential pitfalls and debates of the technical details, which was likely a good idea since it is written to compare PC gaming to Mac gaming regarding the viability of porting.

As an aside, Civ V is not a good example as of November of last year. The game came out in September for the PC market and was promptly ported within ~2 months time. However, there are many other games that are not Mac compatible and have not been ported yet (if ever) that still leave Boot Camp as the only viable option when restricted to only have a Mac OS X machine. I personally have the luxury of a desktop I built that runs Windows (and a flavor of Linux) to fill out any gaming or academic needs. It is running 4 year old hardware, but suits my needs for gaming at present.
James

Welcome to the team, Rachel. It’s pretty interesting how many Mac enthusiasts seem to have degrees in things completely unrelated to computers, such as your degree in Sino-American Relations. For example, my fellow coworkers in the Genius team when I worked @pple Retail had/pursued degrees ranging from graphics design to dentistry, education, and in my case political science.

I am in agreement with Jim about the OpenGL vs DirectX conversation. It’s an integral part of the discussion. That software/driver factor robs us of the same kind of graphics performance that Windows games easily churn out. If we at least had that, then the hardware upgradability shortfalls that Enrique hinted at and Herbert mentioned wouldn’t sting as much.
http://enriquesantos.net Enrique

Eh, I’m not too sure I see a point in rallying behind one platform or another on anything other than developer tools. Ease of development means you end up with more people making games for a platform.

A big thing that is missing from this discussion is the role of indie games in all this. Most any gamer on the consoles have nabbed an indie title or two from XBOX Live Arcade, and the availability of many on Steam makes many PC gamers open to it. A neat trend among many indie developers is starting on platforms that may be easily ported across OSes, but that often comes after the success of a game is proven, or they happened to hire enough programmers to support that.

The way I see it, any platform that provides quality tools to developers is going to end up being the winner in the game. Apple’s tools are very nice, but company support isn’t nearly as nice as Microsoft’s to gamers and game developers at this point. Hardcore gamers are a very different demographic than what Apple is used to. It’s not about bleeding-edge for Apple, it’s about a quality product with a controlled experience.

And trust me, quality, easily portable tools for all UNIX variants would be welcome in my book, but at this point, most toolkits don’t hold a candle to XNA for quick development time. Apple could put more resources into making its platform the ideal gaming platform, but I don’t think that’s really their priority.
James

Well if you want to bring up indie developers, I think the Mac has a very strong history of indie development. I remember back in the day playing Bolo, Avara, Escape Velocity, etc on my Mac. Yeah, there were the ports of big titles like Doom or Myth II etc, but I think in comparison to Windows indie development, Mac developers have released far better quality indie games and the Mac community has been much more receptive of small budget titles. Ambrosia Software, Freeverse, hell even Bungie, were indie/shareware Mac only developers back in the day.

Also, I disagree with going into discussions about consoles. On consoles, you’re developing for 1 specific hardware/software set, with far fewer buttons and controls. Talking about consoles in a discussion about computers and gaming is unnecessary, except to maybe point out that it just exists as an option for consumers looking beyond computers. Why would you bring up Delta Airlines in a conversation about Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise ships?
http://enriquesantos.net/ Enrique

Consoles have everything to do with this, they are a competing platform for gaming, even with PCs. If the PCs are doing alright with easily portable code between Windows and the XBOX, where does that leave the Macintosh in being considered a viable game platform? In comparison with other ways to game, Macs are losing out for the audience it seeks the attention economy of.

Yes, Apple has had a strong line-up of indie developers that catered to just the Mac. (Hell, I coded a Bolo-derivative in high school.) Though it’s amazing what happened to Bungie when Microsoft bought them. They’re independent now, but they sure have changed platform loyalties now due to the amount of people hired back in their Halo days.

Whether I want to make or play quality games, my concern isn’t whether a game is made for my PC, Mac, or any other platform. My concern is whether I can make or play the best game possible. While it’s nice that people hold platform loyalties for one reason or another, in the end, the platform with the best tools is what inevitably wins out. The tools on the Mac for creating games aren’t as polished, even if the potential games themselves are.

This is also part of the reason why Apple products were such a niche in the 90′s as well. Microsoft operated in favor of a sort of anarchy among developers while they made tools that caught on in the industry, while Apple products were well-designed niche products where major software was determined by a relatively tightly controlled ship. The fate of HyperCard should have been considered a precursor to the behavior Apple’s doing in their App store now.

The real Apple platform that has a good foothold in the gaming market now is the iPhone. There’s tons of casual game son it and they’re making bank on that. As far as desktop gaming though, The Mac just serves as a machine that you can play ports of the most popular Windows games (barring Boot Camp, of course). You’re not going to win over the hardcore gamers with that.
http://enriquesantos.net/ Enrique

Also, there was huge reception back in the PC shareware days. People just focus on the piracy because that’s what’s inevitable in any platform.

id Software and Epic Games wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for their success in the shareware scene. There are also very many quality PC games, and the ones that made an impact on their respective genres were originally found on platforms other than Apple’s (and I don’t just mean the Wintel platform either, the Amiga, and MSX also played their roles).

Apple developers have made amazing independent apps, and it’s a tradition that continues today, but in the realm of games, that means nothing when so many more of them were on another platform. You love your platform for reasons other than games. That’s what separates the hardcore gaming set from everyone else.
Jason Kenney

1. I think to be honest many Civ players use bootcamp or vmware/parallels due to being able to play with mods and against pc opponents. For a game like that… graphics doesn’t matter that much.

2. If you look at retail value curve: Outside of Blizzard and Nintendo, PC and Console games fall quickly. By the time the Mac version comes out often the PC version is in the bargain bin. (Civ V being an exception). Add to the fact that we almost never get modding tools or DLC, and then Apple’s penchant to yank the rug out sometimes can leave an older game unplayable (Fallout 2 (256 color mode disabled), Battlefield 1942 (doesn’t work on intel), Myst…) this sort of leaves the impression that mac games are just thrown out there and we’re more than willing to beg for scraps. (People don’t of course see things like Brad Oliver helping us Civ players out, or the very close knit indie developers like Spiderweb and Ambrosia.) If one ever wants to change this part… publishers have to start thinking of developing mac and windows versions at the same time. If they can do it with PS3, Xbox, Wii, and PC… they can do it with Mac as well.

3. I think Bungie was the last big name Mac Developer. We hardly get first party games like Marathon or Myst or Myth anymore.

4. Performance of DirectX vs. OpenGL. the issue is more of Apple putting the effort in fixing their drivers. They also don’t support performance options like crossfire or SLI. I hear that it took the sales of games on the iPhone to show apple execs that gaming had value… and that they really don’t get gaming at all.

5. Rachel: Female, mac gamer, creative writing, likes rpgs (Dragon Age/Fable)… why couldn’t you have been in the Boston Area? I actually don’t think I’ve seen that exact combination before. I had similar goals in college as well (and ended up in IT anyhow), I did find two unusual classes helpful: Screenwriting (plot, dialogue), and Cultural Anthropology. I wasn’t able to but a friend told me that another good class is Economics (specifically game theory). Good luck.
Janichsan

Sorry, Rachel, but there are at least three glaring mistakes in that post:
1. The Mac version of Halo was not released two years after the Windows version. In fact, there were only a bit more than two *months* between these versions. It was the Xbox version of the game that was released two years before that.
2. Your description of your experiences with Bootcamp lead me to the conclusion that you did not install the appropriate Windows drivers provided by Apple at all. With those, Bootcamp neither drains the battery faster than Mac OS X, nor is the graphics limited. The graphics performance under Windows is much better than under Mac OS X on the same machine. You could even squeeze out much more when you install third-party drivers provided by the GPU manufacturers themselves. My experiences with Civ V under Windows and OS X are almost exactly the opposite of what you describe.
3. And last but not least, Macs are not “known for their phenomenal graphics handling that allows for detailed, quick-running games”. Quite the opposite. Apple’s OpenGL support is abysmal – only supporting OGL 2.1 completely and most of OGL 3.0′s extensions, while the current standard is OGL 4.1 – and the graphic drivers’ performance is far behind what the hardware would allow.
Jim

Agree w/ Janichsan, esp. point 3.. Macs are traditionally known for beautiful displays that allow close-zoom photoshop work, and insufficient graphics hardware to drive those displays on 3D games.
http://www.gameagent.com BlogLady

Thanks for everyone’s feedback and being kind, but educational, for our new colleague! Opens up some great opportunity for new discussion.
Rachel Burger

@Korpil I agree; definitely worth the wait!

@Jim We will definitely have a more technical post about OpenGL vs. DirectX.

@Kenney I am guilty of playing Civ IV still just to play with my friends online. With Civ, it depends on what the user is hoping to get out of the game. I also think that the value curve is slowly evening as more games are being developed for both Mac and PC. I have taken both screenwriting and lots of economics courses that include game theory; cultural anthropology sounds interesting though!

@Janichsan You are absolutely right. Halo was released for XBOX on November 15, 2001, for PC on September 30, 2003, and for Mac on December 11, 2003; my fact-checking error.
Brian

Agree with Janichsan.
The performace claim about Civ 5 running on a MBP native OS X and Boot Camp Windows 7 seems off. My findings are exactly the opposite, it is much better under Boot Camp.

I set Boot Camp w/Win7 yesterday just to test Civ 5 performace and not only did FPS go up but I ran at a higher resolution with more graphic enhancements turned up.

I followed the Boot Camp instructions step for step and then dl’d/installed the latest video drivers from Nvidia. The performance difference was staggering, and saddening.
ltcommander.data

Yes, I find it unlikely that a Windows native game would perform significantly worse under Boot Camp than a Mac port under OS X. As others have mentioned for recent games it’s important to install the latest graphics card drivers than the Apple Boot Camp ones which are usually older. Admittedly, this might not be very “it just works” but it’s not exactly a difficult process and I believe Windows Update is pretty good at identifying important driver updates as optional downloads now anyways.

In regards to the DirectX to OpenGL conversion details, I too would look forward to a technical blog post about how it’s done. Do you use a bunch of libraries that try to replicate DirectX and other Windows APIs (sound, networking, etc.) to what’s available natively on OS X so the game itself is relatively unchanged and is making DX calls? Which sounds kind of Ciderish. Or do games usually have an internal intermediate stage that calls out certain graphical tasks it wants to perform and then different output APIs like DX then takes those calls and implements them so you are then writing the OpenGL module to hook up to this intermediate layer? Or do you go in an basically rewrite the whole engine to use OpenGL directly? I guess much of this depends on how the original game was written.

It’s less common now, but previously popular game engines like id Tech 3, id Tech 4, and Unreal Engine 2.x had integrated OpenGL code-paths in addition to DirectX ones, so did this make games easier to port to the Mac? If so, I wonder what’s the chance of Apple using their influence with Epic to get an OpenGL path put into Unreal Engine 3 and pushed out to licensees not just an OpenGL ES code path for iOS.

And finally, if it doesn’t break NDAs, maybe you can comment on the ownership division and update process for the OpenGL stack and driver updates in OS X. I believe it works with Apple writing the common front-end OpenGL which takes GLSL instructions and uses LLVM to compile them into an intermediate form. This intermediate form is then passed onto either the software renderer written by Apple, ATI drivers which I believe are lead by ATI themselves, or nVidia or Intel drivers which I believe Apple is more heavily involved in. Apple owning the front-end explains the slow process in supporting new OpenGL versions since while ATI and nVidia drivers in OS X for DX10 and newer generation GPUs currently support all OpenGL 3.0 feature extensions (presumably fairly easily transferred from Windows and Linux drivers) the one still missing for full compliance is GLSL 1.30 support which is Apple’s responsibility. Apple would presumably also want to bring the software renderer to parity as well as a fallback. Now when bugs crop up, optimizations are needed or you want to request new extension support, do you go to Apple or the GPU makers and who takes the lead in resolving these issues?
Jason Kenney

@Rachel, if you look at the mac boards at civfanatics most of the users have pc and mac copies to play. I think the steam thing of owning both is amazing. (I do think they need to revise how they deal with mac publishers though.) Though considering I own console systems, I rarely have to use Windows for a mac game. And yeah anthropology is fun.

@Itcommander, I talked with the ATI guys at PAX and what they told me is basically Apple writes the drivers, they have no input. They also have only figured out that gaming is important to sell a platform recently (with the iphone). So there is very little motivation to update graphics unless Valve, Aspyr, Blizzard makes enough noise that Jobs can’t mediate until they provide a fix. And also bear this in mind: A number of games got broken when Apple updated the ATI drivers in 10.5.5 (I think) and neglected to provide a clean way of deprecating 256 color mode. (The app looks for it and crashes, only giving an error in the console.log). Blizzard fixed Starcraft and Diablo on their end. Fallout and Fallout 2 still don’t work. (MacPlay went under)… but they don’t seem to mind breaking Applications and expect Developers to just deal with it.

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