Back in the late 80’s when most PC games involved rudimentary graphics or were text-based games, Apple’s reined supreme in non-console gaming with graphically intense and gorgeous games like “Falcon”, a flight simulator that PCs took a decade to catch up with! Since then, times have changed and game developers have treated the Macintosh platform as a secondary port to PCs, if game developers entertained the Apple market at all.
Now it seems gaming developers are starting to warm back up to the Mac platform as big names like Electronic Arts announced games like “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, “Battlefield 2142” and “Madden NFL ’08” for the Mac. As a further push of confidence from EA, the anticipated game “Spore” will be released for the Mac and PC simultaneously.
With gaming developers coming back around to the Mac platform, only time will tell if hard-core gamers, or even casual gamers, will develop new perceptions about Macs not to mention the ability to tweak the computer’s performance with higher end audio and video cards not to mention overclocking the processor to squeeze every last bit of performance… for the same price as a PC.
My take on Mac Gaming is that switching to the Intel platform was a positive step for gamers, but game developers are watching the demographics of Mac users and the share Apple holds of the computer market (estimated at 10% currently) because in the end they are only going to make games on platforms that will provide profit. While market share is increasing, those “converts” are not gamers unless they have their gaming PC sitting next to the Mac.