Mac Game Makers Weigh in on the Move to Intel Macs
TMO Reports - Mac Game Makers Weigh in on the Move to Intel Macs
by , 3:30 PM EDT, July 5th, 2005
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company's move to Intel processors, no segment of the Mac publishing industry gritted its teeth harder than Mac games publishers. While the move to the new architecture will bring about better compatibility with the Windows side -- since ever-increasing requirements on the Windows side mean that many current titles require relatively new Macs -- it also raises the issue of getting games to run in Rosetta, the emulator that will enable older Mac software to work on the new machines.
It also presents the specter of booting an Intel-based Mac into Windows, which some worry could kill Mac gaming as consumers turn to that OS rather than wait six months or more for a new Windows game to be ported to the Mac. In addition, WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator), open source software that allows Linux users to run Windows software without having to reboot their computers, could appear for OS X, which means Mac users could conceivably run Windows games on their Intel Macs without rebooting. In fact, CodeWeavers has already announced that its CrossOver technology, which is based on WINE, will run without a hitch on the Intel Macs once they start shipping in a year.
"I think the dual boot/WINE side of things may take 10-20% of the hardcore Mac gaming market out of the picture," Glenda Adams, Aspyr Media's Director of Mac and PC Development, acknowledged in an e-mail interview with The Mac Observer. "But I also think the switch to Intel will allow us to release OS X Intel native games much more quickly, so the lead time between a PC release and an OS X release will be shorter."
Ms. Adams added, however, that "the existing WINE and dual boot solutions for Linux don't seem nearly as clean and wonderful as some people portray it. A lot of people talk about running games okay in WINE, but only after tweaking a lot of drivers, downloading updates, etc. It's definitely not the easy drop-in experience that 90% of end users want. I think most people just want to buy a box at the Apple store, take it home, install it and play. They don't want to restart their Macs, subscribe to a monthly fee for an emulator or have to keep track of emulator updates.
"So there will continue to be a market for OS X native games," she continued. "It just may skew more towards casual gamers and not such much to hardcore gamers who might put up with extra work to get a Windows game running."
The Casual Gaming Factor
In fact, casual gamers will likely have the easiest time making the transition to the new Macs. Ian Lynch Smith, president of Freeverse Software, told The Mac Observer that "Rosetta seems to do a fantastic job, especially for the more casual games we focus on. No one will be dual-booting to play Burning Monkey Solitaire, so that's not a concern for the casual gamer. We expect all of our games to run acceptably in a 2006 Intel-powered Mac OS X machine, but it's too early for absolute guarantees."
Aaron Fothergill of Strange Flavour, developer of the Freeverse-published titles Airburst Extreme and ToySight, echoed that assessment, noting that "even if the new Macs outsell the current ones 2:1, we'll still have a mostly PowerPC customer base for a couple of years, as our games still work on a 500MHz G3 and we're targeting around the 1GHz mark for future titles.
"We might start doing some extras for the new Macs, though," Mr. Fothergill added. "We've done that with G5-specific extra features in ToySight Gold; it's nice to be able to add in some features just for the new toys."
First Look at Intel-Based Development Hardware
While Mr. Fothergill and Mr. Smith both agreed with Ms. Adams that dual-booting into Windows could hurt the sale of high-end titles to hardcore gamers, Destineer president Peter Tamte told The Mac Observer that such a possibility "will be a great thing for Mac users. We've been building Destineer to create original content, and we plan to release our best games simultaneously on the Mac, like we did with First to Fight.
"Anything that grows the Mac market is great for Destineer," he added. "Anything that lets Mac users run more games is great for Mac users." Destineer publishes Mac games through its MacSoft imprint, which Mr. Tamte founded over a decade ago and purchased from Infogrames in January 2003.
Regarding Rosetta, Mr. Tamte said: "I haven't seen any emulator ever run a performance-intensive game well. However, keep in mind that a game released a couple years earlier will target hardware that was available then, which sometimes leaves users with the overhead for the emulation. But don't expect to run a just-released game well through an emulator."
Because the companies both concentrate heavily on high-end games, MacSoft and Aspyr Media already have Intel-based hardware in their offices. (Freeverse and Strange Flavour have put off the acquisition for now, since their titles don't push the hardware as hard.) Mr. Tamte said that "a number of our development groups have already started making their PowerPC apps work on Apple's Intel systems. It's been surprisingly painless so far."
However, he did ding Apple for its inclusion of Intel's integrated graphics chipset in the machines, saying that they're "such garbage the whole industry is surprised Intel even puts their name on it. In fact, virtually no modern 3D game even works on it. Apple has almost always offered innovative graphics chips in their hardware for the past five years, with the exception of the FX5200, of course. Hopefully, they'll continue this tradition with the new Intel-based Macs."
Ms. Adams added: "I'm very impressed with how much of the OS runs seamlessly on an Intel CPU already. To the end user, I don't think the Intel switch is going to appear like much has changed. The OS X interface and underlying technology will continue to just work, and the Mac look and feel will still be there."
As for Aspyr's games, she said that "the older a game is, the harder it is to bring up to XCode and recompile on the latest OS. Right now, we believe most games that came out before 2004 will run acceptably on Rosetta. The difficult position will be for some of the less popular games that required a G4 -- we may not be able to spare resources to port those to Intel since we will need to concentrate first on the big games like The Sims 2 and Doom 3.
"We've run a few older titles under Rosetta," she continued, "and have had some success even with the early version of the emulator. A game like Space Colony, which doesn't require a G4 or any heavy 3D graphics, runs great and very fast."
The Road Ahead
Many prognosticators have predicted a short-term dip in Mac sales, which will hurt developers of all stripes over the next year to year-and-a-half. Mr. Smith agreed with that assessment, adding, however: "Given how functional the Intel Macs were at WWDC, and how relatively smooth the porting process seems to be, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's published timeline wasn't a bit modest. If anything, the wait for Intel chips might be the reason for the timeline."
If software sales drop, he expects Freeverse to "innovate our way through any downturn. We're coming out with some great stuff this year -- we'll be fine." And if Apple can gain even just a point or two of market share in the long run, he said, "that's a huge increase in our potential customers, and that's exciting."
Mr. Fothergill, however, thinks the "Mac games market is pretty much a goner" if Windows turns out to be easy to install and run on the new Macs, but "it'll take a while for the Intelitoshes to gain a sizeable chunk of the Mac gaming market anyway, so whatever happens, we've probably got a couple years to adjust." One thing he hopes the new hardware brings with it, though, is "actual hardware DRM [digital rights management] that lets us protect our games and apps against casual theft."
While Ms. Adams said she was "on a roller coaster that varied from excitement to despair" after Mr. Jobs made the big announcement almost a month ago, she now says she's "cautiously optimistic this will be a long-term positive for Mac games. If they can succeed in the transition and grow their market share to 10% or 20%, the market for Mac OS X native games will easily be two or three times the size it is now.
"I still think there are some pitfalls Apple and OS X developers are going to have to avoid in this transition," she cautioned. "It's going to be very important for Apple to brand OS X native software and evangelize users on why it's better than running a Windows application or game under a virtual Windows machine on an OS X Intel box."
Observer Comments
Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:11 pm Subject:
Especially since it doesn't really make sense to call it that. The Mac in Macintosh has nothing to do with the chip inside.
68K chip inside >>Macintosh Not Mototosh)
60X chip inside >>Macintosh (again, not Mototosh)
GX chip inside >>Macintosh (not Mototosh or IBMtosh or Freetosh, which sounds like a drunk ordering snack food)
x86 derivative chip inside >>Macintosh
From the article:
"While Mr. Fothergill and Mr. Smith both agreed with Ms. Adams that dual-booting into Windows could hurt the sale of high-end titles to hardcore gamers..."
The phrase "hardcore gamer" and "Mac" rarely appear in the same sentence, and certainly never conjunctively to suggest that a hardcore gamer uses a Mac. It's hyperbole to suggest gaming ranks anywhere above cottage industry levels on the Mac. The real game manufacturers shouldn't be even remotely worried, but I do think that the small shops putting out casual games on Macs are in big trouble.
Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:29 pm Subject: Native app’s will live long and prosper ( Y )
QuoteI think WINE or CrossOver will be more popular than dual booting into Windoze because they're cheaper (and probably faster).algr wrote:
Even if putting Windows on a mac is relatively easy, you'll still have to pay for the thing - the total cost would be as much as a game console. Will people really spend that much just to run a PC game on their mac?
I think the fears of non-native software killing MacOS development are extremely exaggerated (in games and other markets as well). Native MacOS app's have a better look and feel to them, and so people will want them. Demand for native app's isn't going to significantly diminish because of the availability of non-native versions/options.
Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:38 pm Subject: Re: Hardcore Gamers on Macs? Suuuuuure...
QuoteAnonymous wrote:
From the article:
"While Mr. Fothergill and Mr. Smith both agreed with Ms. Adams that dual-booting into Windows could hurt the sale of high-end titles to hardcore gamers..."
The phrase "hardcore gamer" and "Mac" rarely appear in the same sentence, and certainly never conjunctively to suggest that a hardcore gamer uses a Mac. It's hyperbole to suggest gaming ranks anywhere above cottage industry levels on the Mac. The real game manufacturers shouldn't be even remotely worried, but I do think that the small shops putting out casual games on Macs are in big trouble.
However, as also stated in the article, most of the casual games will work just fine in Rosetta, since they don't really stress the system that hard. Eventually even these small shops will change over to the new architecture, or be satisfied with running in Rosetta (most people probably won't notice the speed difference anyway, again because the system isn't being pushed that hard).
Also, as game consoles improve in their capability, some are predicting that PC gaming, as a whole, will start to take a hit. Hardcore gamers may be modding their xboxes and PS3s instead of their homebuilt PC gaming machine. Don't know if it will really happen that way, but it is a possible outcome.
I hope not 
I call them that because calling them MacIntels or Intel Macs or whatever doesn't really roll off the tongue and everyone seems desperate to have a name for them.
Hopefully people will get fed up of trying to come up with names for them and start calling them Macs again (but remember to tell us what type if you're sending in a bug report!). In theory, from the user's point of view at least, no-one should need to worry what CPU is in the box.
Aaron Fothergill
Tue Jul 05, 2005 5:50 pm Subject:
I don't think WINE will be great for games, but I do think most people will be coughing up the $99 for a copy of windows if intel macs can support Windows applications directly without rebooting, either through some clever VMWare work, using WINE, or both... gotta get those small businesses to be able to run their custom VB apps they had built in the late-90's ya know?
Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:24 pm Subject: Repulsive Monikers
Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:35 pm Subject: Re: hopefully apple supports wine
QuoteAnonymous wrote:
I don't think WINE will be great for games, but I do think most people will be coughing up the $99 for a copy of windows if intel macs can support Windows applications directly without rebooting, either through some clever VMWare work, using WINE, or both... gotta get those small businesses to be able to run their custom VB apps they had built in the late-90's ya know?
To my mind, that would be preferable to installing Windows on the machine, mainly due to the "corrupting the whole drive" possibility. At least with VMWare or VPC, the Windows OS could be sandboxed to prevent large-scale problems, like viruses (since virii ain't a word) ruining the whole system and corrupting the MacOS part.
If WINE can prevent that also, that would be a good thing.
Tue Jul 05, 2005 8:31 pm Subject: want to get myffed?
Get myffed at the developers who decided to stick with the crap that is Windows for the past 15 years instead of porting to Mac and being on MacOSX by now. The ONLY MS made software that is strictly PC based is Access and yes, it would be handy to have it work correctly/natively on my mac. It's slow under VPC. All things are slow under VPC, even on dual processor machines with 2 G of RAM.
As for games, who gives a flying rip. Macs are for work. Productivity has always been much more the Macintosh mantra, not games. Macs appealed to 1. Education; 2. Graphic Designers; 3. Scientists; 4. Anybody with a brain who doesn't want to have to rebuild their systems every other week. (at least XP fixed THAT problem)
And moving to Intel, as much as I was against it in the beginning, will probably turn out to be a big yawn. The BIG news will be if SJ ever allows other hardware to run MacOS again (my money is on HP!)
Just babbling... I am a low level programmer, and I have to deal with the 86 chip in windows quite a lot with both ASM and C. I really don't see what all the fuss is with software from pc. The problem with getting software to work across the systems is not the chipset so much. Ok the ibm chip has more registers, but they all ready have the software to accomodate that. I think the main problem is the different APIs etc of the operating system. One can simple cross compile their software for pretty much any chipset they want, BUT if they want it to work with a particular OS its needs to support that particular set of APIs. There are already emulators for both mac and pc.
I have to say that this developement is intresting tho'. I am constantly harrassed by users who have no understanding of computers who have to tell me about how macs are better then pcs. At least I can tell them that the hardware is i bit more simular now.
>As for games, who gives a flying rip. Macs are for work. Productivity has always been much more the Macintosh mantra, not games
I remember a time when IBM meant work and Macs were laughed at as toys for non-serious work. Now it is the other way around.
As for hardcore gamers on the Mac, there are some, or at least they are more hardcore than casual gamers. Adams was using the term relatively. PC games are already seeing a dip due to consoles, and many PC gamers are already having to make due with console ports just as we've made due with PC ports of the big titles. Console games have outsold PC games for several years already.
An excellent article. It'll be interesting to see how all the speculation pans out over the next couple of years -- who makes it, who doesn't, and why.
I'll bet you'd be amazed how many Mac sales are lost due to games. Computers for the home, computers for college - many of these folks might buy Macs instead of PCs if they knew they could play the latest games at equivalent speeds. Remember, games aren't just for kids - a great number of gamers are now in their 40s.
As for the future of Mac (native) gaming, I'd venture to say that if Mac games come out within a month of their PC counterparts and perform roughly the same, most Mac owners will gladly buy Mac versions. So if I were Glenda Adams, I'd be trying to see just how much easier Intel chips might make the process, and would be devoting all my resources to try to achieve these goals (which I imagine she's doing). If it can be done, this will probably be a very good thing for Mac game developers in the long run. If not, then it's going to hurt badly.
Wed Jul 06, 2005 8:29 am Subject: Compatibility
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet (apologies to anyone whose comments I missed, if I did) is any discussion on how the move to Intel will affect cross-platform compatibility in online games.
Blizzard does a great job ensuring that Mac gamers can play online with their PC friends. But for a lot of other online games, Macs and PCs can't play nice together. That's certainly a factor that has influenced my decision whether (or not) to buy a game.
My guess is that the shift to Intel will make it easier for Mac gamers to connect with their PC friends in the future. If that's the case, it will definitely encourage people to stick with their Mac for gaming.
Wed Jul 06, 2005 9:02 am Subject:
QuoteFliedermaus wrote:
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet (apologies to anyone whose comments I missed, if I did) is any discussion on how the move to Intel will affect cross-platform compatibility in online games.
Blizzard does a great job ensuring that Mac gamers can play online with their PC friends. But for a lot of other online games, Macs and PCs can't play nice together. That's certainly a factor that has influenced my decision whether (or not) to buy a game.
My guess is that the shift to Intel will make it easier for Mac gamers to connect with their PC friends in the future. If that's the case, it will definitely encourage people to stick with their Mac for gaming.
The shift to Intel won't do anything for online gaming. The big problem there is actually GameSpy, which last year raised the rates it was charging the Mac game publishers, forcing them to drop GameSpy support for all but the top titles. Instead, you have to use GameRanger, which is a nice service but is Mac-to-Mac only.
And Blizzard does a great job because they develop the Mac and PC versions of their games simultaneously and ship them on the same disc. For the vast majority of games, though, we have to deal with the game coming out on the PC and then waiting 6-9 months while a Mac publisher ports it.
Unfortunately, some major titles haven't made it to the Mac because of greediness by the original developers, some of whom have asked for insane licensing fees. Also, the Havok physics engine doesn't work on the Mac, and that's not going to change any time soon, so any PC game that uses it can't come to the Mac.
Dual booting is not that attractive, at least to me.
While there are no virii on the mac, there are plenty of virii on the Windows world. Dual booting would allow virii access to the computer and potentially corrupt any drives in the box.
I still remember the day when I was installing a triple boot system and putting DOS on one separate HD and the MSDOS installer located a non-MS formatted HD and automatically started formatting it.
Unless you physically remove the drive, a virus can randomly write or format a separate drive. Most windows users do not know what administer priviledges are and any user can have complete access. That would in turn allow the virii to destroy or corrupt the mac partition.
We won't have to worry about people installing windows on their macintels and playing the windows versions of the games. The reason is, no mac is going to come with a graphic card that supports DirectX. Even if you can get windows running on a macintel. What hardcore gammer is going to want to play a game in software rendering mode?
I belive it is DirectPlay, not ActiveX, that causes a lot of ports to be Mac to Mac only. Yes, and GameSpy. If you want to interact with hardcore mac gamers, spend some time in the forums over at Inside Mac Games - it's not an oxymoron at all actually. There are people who are committed to the Mac platform, who also game heavily. Many or most of them do have either a PC or a console in addition to their Mac, however.
Wed Jul 06, 2005 7:40 pm Subject:
QuoteBookman wrote:
I belive it is DirectPlay, not ActiveX, that causes a lot of ports to be Mac to Mac only. Yes, and GameSpy. If you want to interact with hardcore mac gamers, spend some time in the forums over at Inside Mac Games - it's not an oxymoron at all actually. There are people who are committed to the Mac platform, who also game heavily. Many or most of them do have either a PC or a console in addition to their Mac, however.
Actually, re-reading the other post, I misunderstood about "online gaming". I read it as games played online through a browser (like at pogo.com and other sites) rather than multiplayer games like Unreal Tournament and such.
My mistake.
QuoteI thought that Apple used pretty much the same video cards as everyone else these days? In any case, might not Microsoft decide to add support for those cards, if it opened up the places their API could get a hold? I think the biggest threat to Apple from all this is that Microsoft might decide to try OS/2ing them (to invent a verb).We won't have to worry about people installing windows on their macintels and playing the windows versions of the games. The reason is, no mac is going to come with a graphic card that supports DirectX
Thu Jul 07, 2005 10:57 am Subject:
QuoteRGE wrote:QuoteI thought that Apple used pretty much the same video cards as everyone else these days? In any case, might not Microsoft decide to add support for those cards, if it opened up the places their API could get a hold? I think the biggest threat to Apple from all this is that Microsoft might decide to try OS/2ing them (to invent a verb).We won't have to worry about people installing windows on their macintels and playing the windows versions of the games. The reason is, no mac is going to come with a graphic card that supports DirectX
The may possibly use the same graphic card, but not the same firmware on the card. Macs us Open GL, not DirectX. So even if Microsoft adds support for these cards, without firmware on the cards that support DirectX, there won't be any windows games using DirectX running with 3D acceleration. Software rendering will be all thats available. Even with windows emulation software running, games require HARDWARE 3D acceleration, not software. As stated above, "What hardcore gammer is going to want to play a game in software rendering mode?" I think mac gaming is safe. If anything, the processor switch decreases the port time.
Wed Jul 27, 2005 8:23 pm Subject: can i format a macintosh computer to use windows xp instead?
hi im wondering if it is possible to reformat a macintosh computer to run windows xp instead..... please let me know if this is possible and what i would need to do to do it.... please email me at dwfireclaw@lycos.com
Wed Jul 27, 2005 8:32 pm Subject: Re: can i format a macintosh computer to use windows xp inst
QuoteAnonymous wrote:
hi im wondering if it is possible to reformat a macintosh computer to run windows xp instead..... please let me know if this is possible and what i would need to do to do it.... please email me at dwfireclaw@lycos.com
So you can farm e-mail addresses?
I don't think so.
And no, you can't.
Comments are currently closed. Please email the author instead.
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