Gas Powered Games, EA DICE Talk Mac Game Plans

Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor and EA DICE’s Karl Magnus Troedsson this week expressed interest in bringing their companies’ games to the Mac via Steam, which Valve is releasing for the Mac next month, along with its entire catalog of games. Gas Powered released the real-time strategy game Supreme Commander 2 last week, and EA DICE is responsible for the Battlefield series of first-person shooters.

Both men were happy to hear about Valve’s Mac support. “I love it,” Mr. Taylor told The Escapist’s Greg Tito, and Mr. Troedsson tweeted: "Steam for Mac - Gabe, we like it." The Universal Gaming Database (UGD) asked Mr. Troedsson to elaborate and he said: "We're currently investigating the possibility of making BFBC2 [Battlefield Bad Company 2] available on Mac." UGD noted that BFBC2 on Windows brings more players online than the PlayStation 3 and Xbox editions combined. The last Mac title released by EA DICE was Battlefield 2142 during the summer of 2008.

Asked for additional thoughts, Mr. Taylor commented that the Mac’s market share growth “is really picking up speed. That's super exciting, we need that in the world. We need that kind of balance in our market." And while much has been made about the various difficulties in porting games to the Mac – particularly those that use Microsoft’s DirectX for graphics – Mr. Taylor felt that the hardware similarities between Macs and PCs meant that the former is “a very easy platform to bring PC games over to."

Mr. Taylor wouldn’t commit completely to bringing Gas Powered’s games to the Mac, but he did say: "We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward. We're in 100% support of it. Absolutely."