
Could Apple be preparing the way for Mac gaming? - raju
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1780
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mlinsey
The Mac as a gaming platform should have most of the advantages of PC's and
consoles: The advantage of consoles are standardized hardware, and the
advantages of a PC are the openness and not having to pay royalties or operate
at the whim of the console manufacturer. (Sony, MS, and Nintendo exert even
more control over console game developers than Apple does with the iPhone)

Of course, the high cost of Macs and the lack of intersection between the
gamer and Mac demographics has kept all of the medium-sized game developers
away; only the very smallest developers (eg shareware writers) and the very
largest developers (EA, Blizzard) bother to pay attention to the platform.

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wanorris
> The advantage of consoles are standardized hardware

One central part of this is that any given console has a particular GPU that
you can optimize the crap out of. Even Apple has many more than that over a
2-3 year period.

Honestly, I can't imagine Apple bothering to go after the gaming market unless
they can find a way to collect royalties on the games. Jobs goes after markets
only when there are profits to be had.

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rainface
No. zdnet is one of the most miss lead online journals available. This debate
has been peaking its head for the past 5 years. Again and again companies walk
away fed up with Apple's 'we are good enough, deal with it' attitude toward
game developers. I don't think Apple will be willing to couture to game
developers because they will ask Apple to change its course ever so slightly
and Apple will change for no one but its own will. That and Apple is currently
advertising it base model workstation for $2799.

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jcromartie
> preparing the way for Mac OS X-based gaming

What?

OS X has all the tools necessary to host game development, let alone the
consumer side of gaming. It ships with full fledged OpenGL (even going so far
as to give non-shader-enabled cards shader support), and even help pioneer
some really nice GL extensions that make game dev easier. You can use
virtually any programming language you would ever want to build games with
(sorry, no DarkBASIC...).

My MacBook can play World of Warcraft and Half Life 2, and that is more than I
could ever hope to build as an indie developer. All of the other "pro"
machines, and the iMacs, have come with good discrete GPUs for a long time
now.

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pkaler
My psycho-analysis of Steve Jobs is that he blessed the iPhone to avenge the
Newton. Avenging the Pippin is probably on his list too.

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dbreunig
Has anyone considered that gaming has made it's way to the mainstream about
the same time Apple has? Seems like the two met halfway...

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mrtron
Blizzard's games have played on macs for years. Who plays any other games?

(awaiting SC2) edit: Starcraft 2

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stcredzero
By SC2, do you mean Star Control 2? Probably not, since this retro game has
been available on OS X for years now.

<http://sc2.sourceforge.net/>

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cstejerean
just from browsing the apple store I've noticed that the amount of games
available on the mac has increased to a decent number.

