Apple are directly responsible for the dire gaming opportunites on the Mac platform. For a long time they simply looked down their noses at the rest of the industry. They wouldn't use anything but their own locked in hardware for a long time, wouldn't port their OS to other platforms, and and never really supported game developers. They pretty much left the market wide open for Microsoft to gobble it up. Now Macs are unfortunately a niche market, and Mac gamers are an even smaller niche market, so it is not very attractive for publishers/developers to market their games on that platform.
Don't misunderstand me here...I know there are a lot of games that have been ported to the Mac over the years, and now with the introduction of Intel processors it is somewhat easier to port other games to the platform, or run Windows on a Mac and get them working that way.
But if the Mac is ever to become a large and viable gaming platform, it needs to be driven from above, and I don't think the will is really there to do so. Taking on the might of Microsoft is a headache for any company - it's like David taking on Goliath, unless you're smart you're going to feel a lot of pain.
I'd love to see both Macs and Linux platforms become viable alternatives to Windows for gaming needs, but that would require a massive groundswell movement within the gaming industry to embrace more open standards (like OpenGL) and a willingness to port games to other PC platforms, just as they would with different consoles. That has to be seen to be financially viable, and at the moment it just isn't. Maybe with the relatively poor response to Vista, more PC users will be looking for alternatives to Windows in the future. Personally I've been exploring Linux distros like Ubuntu and OpenSuse, which have matured a great deal from when I last tried them. There is still a way to go before they can pass the idiot test, ie, the everyday consumer being able to pick them up and use them on a day to day basis without having to worry about jumping through hoops to get hardware to run. Giving credit where it's due, Windows has been a very accessible and user-friendly platform (for the most part), and the same has not been true of Linux until recent years.
I think many developers will be watching Id Software to see if they can actually turn a profit on the Mac. Maybe then other developers will take a cautious step out of the Microsoft closet and explore new possibilities. It's good to see the likes of Nvidia and ATI taking Linux more seriously by providing more robust drivers. If only other hardware vendors would follow suit, I'm sure Linux distros would be more widely utilised, and thereby increase the potential gamer market on those platforms.
Apple could do much more to open up their own platform, and actively seek to support the gaming industry. One way to do that would be to increase support for a wider range of hardware, and free their OS from being tied to just Macs. Increasing OS market share would have a dramatic knock-on effect and make it a more viable platform for game development in the long term.
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