It's No Game At Apple 175
Mac Observer is running a piece by John Martellaro looking at why Apple isn't into gaming. It's just one man's opinion, but he makes some interesting arguments. From the article: "The reality is that Apple has struggled for a long time to avoid the perception that Macs are toys, and so their principle emphasis is on science, small business, education, and the creative arts. All very grownup stuff. If a market doesn't appear on Apple's main page tab, you can be sure it's a secondary market."
The reality... (Score:5, Informative)
Science? (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone know of any current Mac science applications?
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Science? (Score:5, Informative)
I am particle physicist / cosmologist, and macs are widely used in my field -- both for number crunching, and as personal machines.
To provide some anecdotal data, I was at a conference last month and I would guess that at least 50% of the speakers were using Macs, and that ratio has been climbing steadily over the last few years. With the exception of Mathematica, all the "technical" software I compile from source, and these packages almost always assume you have access to a Unix commandline of one sort or another. Moreover, I have friends in the bioinformatics world, and many of them seem to be working with Macs.
(FWIW, I am looking forward to buying an intel Mac Book -- I bought an HP laptop for my post-doc, which he uses with Linux, and it runs circles around my G4 powerbook.)
Re:The reality... (Score:4, Informative)
Pippen was not sold as a game console. It was demonstrated as an Internet box similar to WebTV. I think there was also some CD-ROM type shovelware titles for it and maybe some edutainment software. WebTV + CD-i.
Yes, it probably was developed originally as some sort of game box, but somewhere along the way Apple woke up.
Re:The reality... (Score:3, Informative)
Not much.
The thing about music and video is that they're very easy to convert into any given format. Apple can easily introduce products like the iPod that simply take data that other people have created and play it back. That's trivial. But games aren't. Games have to be designed to run on a certain platform, not the other way round. Would Apple be able to convince people to develop games for this "iGame"? Unlikely.
So they'd have to make it a clone of someone else's platform, or license someone else's platform and brand it. Your "iGame" would either be an overpriced Apple-branded DS, or it would be restricted to playing crappy Java games designed for mobile phones. Either way, it's hard to see who exactly would want one.
Re:Science? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a huge list of all the scientific applications available, from the Apple Site: www.apple.com/science/software/ [apple.com]
Re:The reality... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is going for low-hanging fruits... (Score:4, Informative)
IMHO, Apple wouldn't mind having a game market but, unlike Microsoft, they are not willing to suffer to get it. The first 2-3 versions of DirectX sucked! The first version of Game Sprockets made more sense than DX3. But Apple gave up when large numbers of game developers didn't immediately switch to Sprockets.
I think now Apple would rather fight for markets that it sees open (i.e. the ones Microsoft doesn't own yet).
Re:They Can't Ignore WoW (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Science? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think Macs have much of a foothold in the life sciences (about which I know very little), but they're quite popular in the physical sciences.
Re:Moral high-road? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, but this article is pure drivel.
Agreed.
The real reason Apple doesn't dive into the gaming market is because Apples don't offer any drastic advantages over PCs in that arena, and until they do, Apple doesn't have enough market share to get the big business of gaming interested in developing a game solely for Macs.
Apple, until recently, would need to make a huge investment to get gaming on the mac equal to gaming on the PC. This would be either building dev tools that made games for mac and PC using OpenGL, or an easy way to port DirectX games, and/or buying game companies and rolling their own exclusive titles. More likely, they could partner with Nintendo or Sony to get console games on the Mac. Times, however, are changing.
Game Publisher: "Hmm... I can get hundreds of millions by releasing this on PC, or I may hit two or three million by going for the Mac market." No brainer there.
Actually the choice is, develop portable code that does not rely upon MS's DirectX and reach PCs, macs, and consoles easily while having better quality code and being less beholden to MS, or develop for Direct X, using less talented coders and count on the money that comes in to hire someone else to let us port it to macs and consoles if it is successful.
The former is what most of the best game companies do, like Blizzard and ID. The latter is what cheaper operations, with less certainty of success do. There are a lot more of the latter than the former, although most you never really hear about, since their games end up in the cheap bin.
Now, however, Apple has the OpenSource WINE project as well as several VM technologies to make use of. Additionally, the new Intel chips contain hardware virtualization tech. For a much smaller investment they can provide tools to quickly port Windows software including games, or run them under OS X in a VM at reasonable speeds. Even if Apple does nothing, third parties will certainly provide both of these options. It is just a matter of time and seeing what Apple decides to build in.
Re:Science? (Score:4, Informative)
I see a lot of replies to this talking about scientific fields that have a lot of macs. I can tell you in biological sciences and biochemistry labs my girlfriend works at, most of the machines are macs and some of the big, expensive machines can only be accessed using a mac. What surprises me, though, is that no one has mentioned computer science. I work at a company that develops specialized network security devices, and over the last few years macs have gone from maybe 5% of the machines to more like 55%. For that matter, NANOG is going on right now. What percentage of the laptops there are macs, do you suppose? I don't have numbers, but I know there are a lot of them.
Re:Creative arts? (Score:1, Informative)
I think he is refering to game playing.
Re:Apple has always been about Jobs (Score:1, Informative)
LocalTalk hardware was built into every Mac from the original 128K Mac until USB was adopted in the first iMacs. It was provided by way of the fancy serial ports (230,400 bit/s internally clocked, four times that speed externally clocked - although even the lower speed places enough load on the CPU to render a Mac Plus used as a filer server useless for any other job) - but the 128K thin Mac was never able to run AppleTalk due to a lack of RAM. 512K `fat Macs' (1984) are the oldest Macs able to run AppleTalk, but AppleTalk software didn't hit end users until System Software version 2.0.1, which came out after the Mac SE and Mac II were released in 1987.
Re:Mac's got games! (Score:2, Informative)
"We have cool games, like... Final Cut? And... Photoshop?"
Photoshop Tennis [wikipedia.org] is fun.
Re:Mac's got games! (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/games/ [apple.com]
In reality it's not a 'lack of games' for the mac, but a lack of timely release, advertising and retail support for the mac. There are studios [feralinteractive.com] out there that actually do very little except port PC games to the Mac...