When I was growing up, we didn’t have a household PC. My parents met while working at an Apple distributor, and uphold a shocking level of brand loyalty to the company to this day. My first desktop was an iMac G4, which meant that I didn’t have access to most games. I’d play games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Zoombinis growing up, because my parents wanted me to know how to use a computer and also be really good at puzzles.
After that, I moved on to Newgrounds games far too gory and violent for a child to be playing. As I got older, I gravitated towards console gaming, as any games I managed to download on my desktop were terrible Mac ports that only worked if the wind was blowing in the right direction and the moon was in the right position in the sky. When I got to the age where I needed a laptop for school, it was a Macbook, and it could only run less technically-demanding games – that’s why I played a lot of indies growing up, instead of triple-A games that are now nostalgia-bait for everyone. It’s also why I struggle with Windows UI to this day.
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It was because of the lack of games available on Mac that I understood Mac gaming was a niche industry. Even today, developers aren’t really keeping Mac users in mind when they make games. It takes too many resources and gives too little payoff, so most developers just skip that entire platform. I can’t blame them, but it looks like things might be changing.Eurogamerrecently reported on Apple’s new Game Porting Toolkit (GPT), a tool that essentially translates games to the Mac OS, with the ability to run high-end games at decent frame rates. The summary of the experiment is that it’s fairly easy to set up the GPT, but it takes longer than using a PC. There aren’t any major graphical flaws, and frame rates aren’t always consistent, usually ranging from 30fps to 60fps. Not all games run well, but that might be due to the quality of specific PC ports.
It’s also important to note that the majority of titles didn’t boot or couldn’t make it past the introductory video files, and it’s definitely more inefficient than if you just played on a PC. But this does mean that it will be easier for developers to make official Mac ports of Windows games with the GPT, which could be a big deal for Mac users. Macs have always been awful for gaming, with a sorely limited range. I had to buy a PC when I started writing about games for a living, because most things just aren’t available without one.
I don’t really feel bad for Mac users – unless they are a six-year-old in 2002 using their parents' iMac, it’s their choice to lock themselves into that ecosystem – and Macs really aren’t built for gaming. My Macbook Pro still crashes when I try to play games on it, even indies. But considering how many peopledouse Macs, it still makes sense for developers to be gearing launches towards those people too, as long as it makes logistical sense to, and this toolkit could make that a lot more possible. Mac users, maybe in a few years big triple-A games won’t be skipping you over. Then you can be mad about the quality of games ported from consoles like all the other PC users.
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