Yes they are, Mac OS X is just much further along the evolutionary track than windows. PCs and consoles, however have hardware differences that lend themselves to different genres.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console?
// P.S. As an aside the last two games I bought were PS1 to play on my Powerbook G4: Ah the good old days of CVGS.
If you wish to play games buy a Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360.
You'll get far more games, no hardware hassles and they aren't that expensive.
Who wants to have to buy and install expensive new graphics cards in a PC, fiddle with sound card settings etc every few months to play the games: only a very few geeks.
I only know one person who plays games on his PC and he wouldn't deny being a geek.
Actually, fiddling with sound- and videocard settings is a Windows problem. That's exactly why the Mac could become a very powerful gaming platform. It offers a lot more choice and has considerably more utility than a console, yet doesn't have all the problems Windows is struggling with. That's probably also what Newell had in mind when he said the Mac could own a lot more gaming marketshare, than it does today, if only Apple (read Steve) wanted to.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console?
I don't think it's about can or can't, it's about ease of playability. I'm not convinced that the RTS type of game can be nearly as efficient on a console.
If you wish to play games buy a Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360.
You'll get far more games, no hardware hassles and they aren't that expensive.
Who wants to have to buy and install expensive new graphics cards in a PC, fiddle with sound card settings etc every few months to play the games: only a very few geeks.
You are hurting my brain by posting this nonsense.
Even if you were totally ignorant of PC hardware, had you actually read the thread, you'd see from my post on page 2 that you get a *good* graphics card for $130 today. Wii and basic accessories cost $300. A 360 costs $350. Want to play online games? $100+ a year for XBox Live, $0 for PC gaming. Way cheaper games on the PC. Do the math.
You'll have to "fiddle" with graphics card drivers (that is, you have to install them) every 2-3 years, when you buy a new computer.
The overwhelming majority of gamers play with integrated sound and do not even have a sound card.
I don't think it's about can or can't, it's about ease of playability. I'm not convinced that the RTS type of game can be nearly as efficient on a console.
^ +1... Add FPS and Flight Simulators to that list.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console.
It isn't so much that you can't play most genres on consoles, it's that you can't play some of them that well on console. FPS is better on PCs (sorry, Halo-series). And RTS is pretty much a rout for PC over console... a lot fewer RTS games available on consoles, and even when they are available, they tend to suck in their implementation... ask anyone who played Starcraft64 on console vs Starcraft on a PC or Mac. \
Finally of course, there's MMORPGs. Sure, they exist on consoles, but, would you rather play World of Warcraft on PC/Mac, or Final Fantasy XI on a console? Even if you're one of the few who said Final Fantasy, guess what? It's on PC also.
Well the Mac and Windows platforms are certainly not the same thing. Why does everyone seem to thing that the Mac platform has to ape Windows to improve?
I don't think that providing adequate support to gaming is really an 'aping Windows thing', it's more of a common-sense thing. Should Apple not do things based on being afraid of looking like they're "aping Windows"? \
The sad thing is, it's not like Apple would have to do all that much... game developers can see that the Mac is a platform on the rise, thus more and more of them want to bring their stuff over to the Mac.
^ +1... Add FPS and Flight Simulators to that list.
Its really about the controllers that are and are not available based on the popularity of the genre. Keyboards are rare because TVs, even HD ones, aren't quite as good with text at the usual seating distances.
Flight Sims are such a small segment of gaming these days and most serious ones expect a good $$ layout in joystick, throttle, pedals, etc. vs keyboard and mouse.
A MMORPG for the console would have to be voice oriented vs chat oriented. WoW is pretty close given most folks use voice for raids. Most game mechanics in a MMORPG are simplified anyways that game pad vs keyboard isn't that big a deal. CRPGs do well enough on consoles.
We'll see a 1st tier MMORPG on the console soon enough.
In regards to keyboard / controllers. The problem just isn't the tvs. It's also the environment a tv is used. 9 out of 10 the tv is in a bedroom or living room. How could you possibly use a keyboard / mouse comfortably?
I agree on the flight sims, but it still counts.
I doubt we'll ever see an MMORPG as big as wow though. It would really take something extremely ground breaking. As much spite as I have towards wow, gotta give credit where credit is due. It has wrangled all sorts of gamers... people that have never played games in their life play wow.
In regards to keyboard / controllers. The problem just isn't the tvs. It's also the environment a tv is used. 9 out of 10 the tv is in a bedroom or living room. How could you possibly use a keyboard / mouse comfortably?
I agree on the flight sims, but it still counts.
Sure. But with the Wii gun games might make a come back given most light guns don't work on flat screens. That's a genre that never was on the PC and on par with the flight sim niche.
Quote:
I doubt we'll ever see an MMORPG as big as wow though. It would really take something extremely ground breaking. As much spite as I have towards wow, gotta give credit where credit is due. It has wrangled all sorts of gamers... people that have never played games in their life play wow.
You mean in general or on a console? I would agree that it will be a long time before we see another WoW (on either platform) since there the planets aligned with a good francise that wasn't too niche with a developer with both budget, attention to detail and gameplay, a good sense of balance between hardcore and not lose focus on what was important to the franchise in the first place.
Had LucasArts had given BioWare the MMO license rather than Sony and they based it on KOTOR vs the original trilogy then you might have seen a WoW like numbers before WoW. Maybe. Jury is still out whether BioWare can transition from CRPG to MMO gameplay but I'm going to say that they never would have made the focus on crafting or limited the ability to be a Jedi or Sith. Duh.
LOTR is IMHO as limited as SW:G in that its history is fully constrained and you will always know you're a bit player on the larger canvas. It just doesn't suck so its going to be a lot more successful. It would have, IMHO been better set into a later or earlier age than LOTR itself.
Potter doesn't lend itself to a MMO so there aren't any big franchises, either movie or game, that jump out at me. Maybe trek but a military or pseudo military structure is just too hard to make appeal to a wide audience. Everyone wants to be the important bridge crew, not the janitor. Meh...I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
But to say that?s why Valve isn?t on this platform is a load of horse-hockey, as far as I?m concerned. Valve?s absence on the Macintosh ultimately has very little to do with Apple?s gaming strategy, and everything to do with money.
Valve has certainly been approached by Mac game publishers in the past who want to see Half-Life 2 and Valve?s core engine technology come to the Macintosh. And Valve has either rebuffed those advances outright or asked for such an absurd amount of money that no Mac game publisher with an ounce of sense?or any hope of making a profit?would ever say yes.
Valve, like Id and Epic, licenses its game-engine technology to other developers. So it?s not just a case of Valve Software?s games not being on the Mac ? it?s a case of every other developer who uses that technology not being able to bring their game to the Mac, either.
Id and Epic both work with Mac game publishers (Aspyr Media and MacSoft, respectively) to bring their titles to the Macintosh.Id Software co-founder John Carmack has been known to talk with Steve Jobs in the past, and has certainly used his influence to make sure that Apple?s efforts developing OpenGL as Mac OS X?s core graphics technology don?t go to waste. What?s more, Id relies on the brain trust of Aspyr?s own internal game development studio to make sure that its games are well optimized for Mac OS X. Epic employs a very resourceful and enormously talented developer named Ryan Gordon who handles much of its Mac and Linux conversions.
What?s more, have a gander at Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the enormously popular game World of Warcraft. For years, Blizzard has kept Mac and PC development happening simultaneously, employing a small but talented group of Mac programmers who work on their games and keep them up to date, making sure to expose new Apple technology whenever it?s available. Blizzard demonstrated World of Warcraft working as a Universal binary the same week that Apple introduced Intel-based Macs in January, 2006, for example, and was one of the first companies to employ support for multithreaded OpenGL, which boosts 3-D graphics performance on multicore Intel Macs.
The problem with the comparison between Valve GOING to Apple and Blizzard being on apple boils down to one thing: Software Design.
From the start for every project Blizzard KNOWS they are releasing on the mac. They plan on this from the very beginning. This is not the case with 95% of the software developers out there. They create games on Windows because Windows has an incredibly attractive gaming API. They don't necessarily think about the mac until after their title has shipped or during development. If it's during development it's too late unless they go back to the design stages (which works in a waterfall / spiral methodology).
IMO if there were better software engineers out there instead of computer programmers, it wouldn't be as difficult for gaming companies to do simult. releases.
IMO if there were better software engineers out there instead of computer programmers, it wouldn't be as difficult for gaming companies to do simult. releases.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
If you know you're Windows only you can leverage a DX only engine or develop specifically for DX. Otherwise you need to look at cross platform engines that have their own set of tradeoffs or use OpenGL or build your own abstraction layer (better to just buy an engine eh?).
But that initial decision is a business one.
IMHO software engineers vs programmers is overrated. I say that with a Masters in Software Engineering. Give me an uber-coder any day of the week vs a SEI CMM Level 5 Six Sigma Black Belt "software engineer".
Hero based, good enough software FTW.
Assuming good management anyway. Then we can argue about agile PM methods vs PMBOK/PRINCE2 methods at the project management level.
Above that level, well, sometimes you have Steve Jobs, sometimes you have Jack Welch but mostly you have Kenneth Lay...
The problem with the comparison between Valve GOING to Apple and Blizzard being on apple boils down to one thing: Software Design.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
This is exactly what the article says. Half Life was originally planned for the Mac. The reason it did not make it to the Mac was a management choice not an engineering one.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
If you know you're Windows only you can leverage a DX only engine or develop specifically for DX. Otherwise you need to look at cross platform engines that have their own set of tradeoffs or use OpenGL or build your own abstraction layer (better to just buy an engine eh?).
But that initial decision is a business one.
I think you might be underestimating how much existing talent and investment in code counts. If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework. Even though management has the final word in whether it's done, it's engineering that tells management what it's going to cost.
If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework.
Valve would not have to deal with DirectX and OpenGL. That is the reason they license the game engine to another company who does all of that work.
I think you might be underestimating how much existing talent and investment in code counts. If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework. Even though management has the final word in whether it's done, it's engineering that tells management what it's going to cost.
I'm not underestimating that...I'm just saying that its a decision you make from a business perspective as a company. It's not something that having "software engineers" vs good "programmers" will have much impact on.
A "good" software engineer or a "good" programmer would both have made a decision on engine/middleware/graphics API based in part on target platforms. If the target platform is PC only there's little reason to pick OpenGL over D3D and many reasons to pick D3D over OpenGL.
Granted that if all things were equal both would pick a multi-platform solution but all things are never equal.
It's certainly easier if you are starting from a clean slate but you can't let your current expertise and workflow keep you from switching to the best of breed technology when the benfits outweight the costs. Even if it causes some turnover in staff and breakage in process flow.
Comments
Yes they are, Mac OS X is just much further along the evolutionary track than windows. PCs and consoles, however have hardware differences that lend themselves to different genres.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console?
// P.S. As an aside the last two games I bought were PS1 to play on my Powerbook G4: Ah the good old days of CVGS.
If you wish to play games buy a Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360.
You'll get far more games, no hardware hassles and they aren't that expensive.
Who wants to have to buy and install expensive new graphics cards in a PC, fiddle with sound card settings etc every few months to play the games: only a very few geeks.
I only know one person who plays games on his PC and he wouldn't deny being a geek.
Actually, fiddling with sound- and videocard settings is a Windows problem. That's exactly why the Mac could become a very powerful gaming platform. It offers a lot more choice and has considerably more utility than a console, yet doesn't have all the problems Windows is struggling with. That's probably also what Newell had in mind when he said the Mac could own a lot more gaming marketshare, than it does today, if only Apple (read Steve) wanted to.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console?
I don't think it's about can or can't, it's about ease of playability. I'm not convinced that the RTS type of game can be nearly as efficient on a console.
If you wish to play games buy a Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360.
You'll get far more games, no hardware hassles and they aren't that expensive.
Who wants to have to buy and install expensive new graphics cards in a PC, fiddle with sound card settings etc every few months to play the games: only a very few geeks.
You are hurting my brain by posting this nonsense.
Even if you were totally ignorant of PC hardware, had you actually read the thread, you'd see from my post on page 2 that you get a *good* graphics card for $130 today. Wii and basic accessories cost $300. A 360 costs $350. Want to play online games? $100+ a year for XBox Live, $0 for PC gaming. Way cheaper games on the PC. Do the math.
You'll have to "fiddle" with graphics card drivers (that is, you have to install them) every 2-3 years, when you buy a new computer.
The overwhelming majority of gamers play with integrated sound and do not even have a sound card.
I don't think it's about can or can't, it's about ease of playability. I'm not convinced that the RTS type of game can be nearly as efficient on a console.
^ +1... Add FPS and Flight Simulators to that list.
Games console hardware lending itself to Games and PCs to other tasks. What genre of game can't you play on a console.
It isn't so much that you can't play most genres on consoles, it's that you can't play some of them that well on console. FPS is better on PCs (sorry, Halo-series). And RTS is pretty much a rout for PC over console... a lot fewer RTS games available on consoles, and even when they are available, they tend to suck in their implementation... ask anyone who played Starcraft64 on console vs Starcraft on a PC or Mac.
Finally of course, there's MMORPGs. Sure, they exist on consoles, but, would you rather play World of Warcraft on PC/Mac, or Final Fantasy XI on a console? Even if you're one of the few who said Final Fantasy, guess what? It's on PC also.
.
Well the Mac and Windows platforms are certainly not the same thing. Why does everyone seem to thing that the Mac platform has to ape Windows to improve?
I don't think that providing adequate support to gaming is really an 'aping Windows thing', it's more of a common-sense thing. Should Apple not do things based on being afraid of looking like they're "aping Windows"?
The sad thing is, it's not like Apple would have to do all that much... game developers can see that the Mac is a platform on the rise, thus more and more of them want to bring their stuff over to the Mac.
.
^ +1... Add FPS and Flight Simulators to that list.
Its really about the controllers that are and are not available based on the popularity of the genre. Keyboards are rare because TVs, even HD ones, aren't quite as good with text at the usual seating distances.
Flight Sims are such a small segment of gaming these days and most serious ones expect a good $$ layout in joystick, throttle, pedals, etc. vs keyboard and mouse.
A MMORPG for the console would have to be voice oriented vs chat oriented. WoW is pretty close given most folks use voice for raids. Most game mechanics in a MMORPG are simplified anyways that game pad vs keyboard isn't that big a deal. CRPGs do well enough on consoles.
We'll see a 1st tier MMORPG on the console soon enough.
I agree on the flight sims, but it still counts.
I doubt we'll ever see an MMORPG as big as wow though. It would really take something extremely ground breaking. As much spite as I have towards wow, gotta give credit where credit is due. It has wrangled all sorts of gamers... people that have never played games in their life play wow.
^ +1... Add FPS and Flight Simulators to that list.
Also add anything with mods to that list. A lot of times the original game is just the tip of the ice berg.
In regards to keyboard / controllers. The problem just isn't the tvs. It's also the environment a tv is used. 9 out of 10 the tv is in a bedroom or living room. How could you possibly use a keyboard / mouse comfortably?
I agree on the flight sims, but it still counts.
Sure. But with the Wii gun games might make a come back given most light guns don't work on flat screens. That's a genre that never was on the PC and on par with the flight sim niche.
I doubt we'll ever see an MMORPG as big as wow though. It would really take something extremely ground breaking. As much spite as I have towards wow, gotta give credit where credit is due. It has wrangled all sorts of gamers... people that have never played games in their life play wow.
You mean in general or on a console? I would agree that it will be a long time before we see another WoW (on either platform) since there the planets aligned with a good francise that wasn't too niche with a developer with both budget, attention to detail and gameplay, a good sense of balance between hardcore and not lose focus on what was important to the franchise in the first place.
Had LucasArts had given BioWare the MMO license rather than Sony and they based it on KOTOR vs the original trilogy then you might have seen a WoW like numbers before WoW. Maybe. Jury is still out whether BioWare can transition from CRPG to MMO gameplay but I'm going to say that they never would have made the focus on crafting or limited the ability to be a Jedi or Sith. Duh.
LOTR is IMHO as limited as SW:G in that its history is fully constrained and you will always know you're a bit player on the larger canvas. It just doesn't suck so its going to be a lot more successful. It would have, IMHO been better set into a later or earlier age than LOTR itself.
Potter doesn't lend itself to a MMO so there aren't any big franchises, either movie or game, that jump out at me. Maybe trek but a military or pseudo military structure is just too hard to make appeal to a wide audience. Everyone wants to be the important bridge crew, not the janitor. Meh...I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
Vinea
But to say that?s why Valve isn?t on this platform is a load of horse-hockey, as far as I?m concerned. Valve?s absence on the Macintosh ultimately has very little to do with Apple?s gaming strategy, and everything to do with money.
Valve has certainly been approached by Mac game publishers in the past who want to see Half-Life 2 and Valve?s core engine technology come to the Macintosh. And Valve has either rebuffed those advances outright or asked for such an absurd amount of money that no Mac game publisher with an ounce of sense?or any hope of making a profit?would ever say yes.
Valve, like Id and Epic, licenses its game-engine technology to other developers. So it?s not just a case of Valve Software?s games not being on the Mac ? it?s a case of every other developer who uses that technology not being able to bring their game to the Mac, either.
Id and Epic both work with Mac game publishers (Aspyr Media and MacSoft, respectively) to bring their titles to the Macintosh.Id Software co-founder John Carmack has been known to talk with Steve Jobs in the past, and has certainly used his influence to make sure that Apple?s efforts developing OpenGL as Mac OS X?s core graphics technology don?t go to waste. What?s more, Id relies on the brain trust of Aspyr?s own internal game development studio to make sure that its games are well optimized for Mac OS X. Epic employs a very resourceful and enormously talented developer named Ryan Gordon who handles much of its Mac and Linux conversions.
What?s more, have a gander at Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the enormously popular game World of Warcraft. For years, Blizzard has kept Mac and PC development happening simultaneously, employing a small but talented group of Mac programmers who work on their games and keep them up to date, making sure to expose new Apple technology whenever it?s available. Blizzard demonstrated World of Warcraft working as a Universal binary the same week that Apple introduced Intel-based Macs in January, 2006, for example, and was one of the first companies to employ support for multithreaded OpenGL, which boosts 3-D graphics performance on multicore Intel Macs.
So what makes Valve special? The answer: Nothing.
From the start for every project Blizzard KNOWS they are releasing on the mac. They plan on this from the very beginning. This is not the case with 95% of the software developers out there. They create games on Windows because Windows has an incredibly attractive gaming API. They don't necessarily think about the mac until after their title has shipped or during development. If it's during development it's too late unless they go back to the design stages (which works in a waterfall / spiral methodology).
IMO if there were better software engineers out there instead of computer programmers, it wouldn't be as difficult for gaming companies to do simult. releases.
IMO if there were better software engineers out there instead of computer programmers, it wouldn't be as difficult for gaming companies to do simult. releases.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
If you know you're Windows only you can leverage a DX only engine or develop specifically for DX. Otherwise you need to look at cross platform engines that have their own set of tradeoffs or use OpenGL or build your own abstraction layer (better to just buy an engine eh?).
But that initial decision is a business one.
IMHO software engineers vs programmers is overrated. I say that with a Masters in Software Engineering. Give me an uber-coder any day of the week vs a SEI CMM Level 5 Six Sigma Black Belt "software engineer".
Hero based, good enough software FTW.
Assuming good management anyway. Then we can argue about agile PM methods vs PMBOK/PRINCE2 methods at the project management level.
Above that level, well, sometimes you have Steve Jobs, sometimes you have Jack Welch but mostly you have Kenneth Lay...
The problem with the comparison between Valve GOING to Apple and Blizzard being on apple boils down to one thing: Software Design.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
This is exactly what the article says. Half Life was originally planned for the Mac. The reason it did not make it to the Mac was a management choice not an engineering one.
Except that being multiplatform or not is a management and not an engineering decision.
If you know you're Windows only you can leverage a DX only engine or develop specifically for DX. Otherwise you need to look at cross platform engines that have their own set of tradeoffs or use OpenGL or build your own abstraction layer (better to just buy an engine eh?).
But that initial decision is a business one.
I think you might be underestimating how much existing talent and investment in code counts. If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework. Even though management has the final word in whether it's done, it's engineering that tells management what it's going to cost.
If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework.
Valve would not have to deal with DirectX and OpenGL. That is the reason they license the game engine to another company who does all of that work.
I think you might be underestimating how much existing talent and investment in code counts. If you have a shop that is DirectX only or OpenGL only, with a complete engine and toolchains, it's going to be a very big deal to switch to work across frameworks or just the other framework. Even though management has the final word in whether it's done, it's engineering that tells management what it's going to cost.
I'm not underestimating that...I'm just saying that its a decision you make from a business perspective as a company. It's not something that having "software engineers" vs good "programmers" will have much impact on.
A "good" software engineer or a "good" programmer would both have made a decision on engine/middleware/graphics API based in part on target platforms. If the target platform is PC only there's little reason to pick OpenGL over D3D and many reasons to pick D3D over OpenGL.
Granted that if all things were equal both would pick a multi-platform solution but all things are never equal.
It's certainly easier if you are starting from a clean slate but you can't let your current expertise and workflow keep you from switching to the best of breed technology when the benfits outweight the costs. Even if it causes some turnover in staff and breakage in process flow.
I would really like better video cards thou.