

Will the success of games on the iPhone encourage ports to the Mac? - amichail

The iPhone is attracting developers who have never developed for the Mac before.<p>Will some of these developers start porting their games to the Mac now that they are familiar with development on the Mac and already have iPhone versions of their games?
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kailoa
The success of the Mac is the only thing that will encourage ports to the Mac.

Developer familiarity doesn't seem to be a big problem with games. Most PC
games are written in DirectX, which doesn't have a real alternative on the Mac
side. Similarly, the real novelty of the iPhone is the UI. The Mac UI is
fundamentally the same as the PC.

That being said, as long as Mac market share keeps ticking up a point or two a
year, more developers will invest.

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hunterjrj
That's a tough question to answer. The big game studios, for the most part,
focus on console titles simply because console titles are wins, economically.
They are harder to pirate, etc. Even id Software considers the PC a secondary
platform, which does not bode well for Mac gaming. If you are only going to
reach a minuscule number of customers, why spent the effort putting out a Mac
version of the software?

I have no idea how the smaller game studios view the Mac, however keep in mind
that the iPhone and Mac are very different platforms, and games that work well
on a phone may not translate well as a desktop gaming experience, especially
considering what people expect of their games in this day and age.

