Peter Cohen and Chris Holt from Macworld have posted a simplistic look at Mac gaming in 2009:
Circumstances can change very quickly in the world of gaming. This time last year, for example, you didn’t hear from too many game developers when it came to their iPhone plans—there wasn’t even an SDK to plan for 12 months ago. And yet, mobile gaming turned out to be all the rage in 2008. Some would say that just proves attempting to predict where a market is headed is a foolhardy proposition. We say we’re just the fools to undertake the job.
I don’t mean to be a finicky arse here, but the article basically states that there’ll be more of some things and less of others. Not exactly an in depth prediction.
At the same time, I understand Cohen and Holt’s dilemma. Predictions are a bugger, especially when Apple are so secretive and the market so prone to change.
Cohen and Holt: MMOs, like World of Warcraft, will continue to make up a strong percentage of the gaming market, as 2009 sees the release of many previously PC-only MMOs onto Mac.
Granted, online gaming will increase, but will it be significant increase? World of Warcraft has been dominant on PC and Mac for years. EVE still remains popular, but is a more hardcore option. It’s possible City of Heroes will gain some popularity, but I think it’ll be a niche title in Mac gaming. It’s difficult to top the sheer artistry and masterful production of WoW.
Cohen and Holt: We foresee Mac users having to keep a patient vigil potential announcements of Mac launches of major sellers like Call of Duty 5, Prince of Persia, and Red Alert 3. We list these three only because history has shown us that these are likely (but not guaranteed) to be eventually ported to the Mac platform.
Prince of Persia – Sands of Time could possibly come to the Mac? Why, because Transgaming have brought Prince of Persia – Two Thrones to the Mac, three years after it’s release on PC? The real news is that so far Transgaming have successfully leveraged Cider to bring older titles to the Mac.
Transgaming haven’t changed the face of Mac gaming. And as many people I’ve spoken to from the various Mac porting houses have said, Transgaming aren’t doing anything radically different to existing games developers. Every Mac games developer has some process to bring Windows games to the Mac. Granted Transgaming’s technology could bring Mac titles released on the same day as their PC counterparts, but when has that happened? Once, with Spore.
I have beef with Transgaming ever since BF2142 for the Mac shipped, one of the first titles to come to the Mac via Cider. To this day the game does not function properly on a single Mac I own. I’ve tried and tried to resolve this with Transgaming, but nothing ever comes of it. Bah. The days of BF2142 are over anyway, it’s just sad that I could never enjoy the title on the Mac.
Is there any good news?
Yes! We’ll see better hardware from Apple. The Snow Leopard and OpenCL drive will get better hardware in your Macs and make the existing bits better. Looks like the Mac Mini won’t be gimped come it’s refresh in January 2009 and will get a 9400M. Hopefully the iMac will have a beefier GPU too, higher end range of the NVIDIA line, something 9800 perhaps? If Apple want to seriously leverage OpenCL and give advancements all round, we need better GPUs and we need them more regularly. The under the hood improvements of Mac OS X are preferable, to me at least, to visual changes or new GUI implementations like Spaces.
Apple also appear to be moving to NVIDIA hardware in every Mac, for GPU and chipset. This means no ATI cards in the consumer and laptop line, at least for the time being. I always thought it odd why Apple never chose to offer the HD3870 card for the Mac Pro as it’s a solid card for the Mac gamer that wants to use Ciderized titles and straight ports. But hell, Apple are gatekeepers, we’re just the users!
2009 could potentially see releases of Gears of War and Unreal 3 for Mac. Destineer and Ryan Gordon have been working on these titles for about a year now, with no word on their progress. There is some sort of delay, who knows what or why? I just hope that when these titles are released they are still relevant to the majority of Mac gamers. Many Mac gamers use Windows via Boot Camp or own a console. Chances are you’ve played these titles already and have moved onto bigger and better things.
id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic racer, Rage, could also be released. Early screenshots and movies look promising, but here’s hoping it doesn’t play like Doom 3 or Quake 4. Emphasis on story please and not rinse-repeat, plastic looking environments.
The iPhone will undoubtedly continue in popularity, especially if rumours of a cheaper, iPhone Nano are true. I agree with Cohen and Holt on this one:
With so many iPhone and iPod touch games out in the world now, the question isn’t if the iPhone is a viable gaming platform; instead, it’s how far the iPhone will be able to go as a gaming platform. Our guess? Pretty far. Expect a lot more companies to get involved, and a lot more titles to be available, with a lot of diversity and—unfortunately—a lot of copycat ideas.
After Macworld I think I’ll contact Apple a bit more aggressively regarding Snow Leopard and their official line on games. Snow Leopard is potentially the most important advancement of OS X ever, perhaps boosting the performance of games and other applications to be equal or beyond PC performance. Once we’ve got some non-gimped GPUs and perhaps the OpenGL framework in OS X has been optimised, well, maybe 2009 will be the year for the Mac gamer.
