The state of Mac and Linux gaming | Hacker News Reader

The state of Mac and Linux gaming

blog.wolfire.com

60 pointsalexyim30 comments

As a Linux user, I don't like to buy commercial games for Linux. I did participate in the recent Humble Bundle, but I'd known about and decided against buying at least three of the bundled games previously.

If I buy a book or a CD or a DVD that I like, I can be pretty sure that in five or ten years if I want to experience it again, or share it with a friend. If I acquire a Free Software game that I like, the same applies - I can enjoy it for years to come. Even if they're not Free, games that are written to a VM can last if there's a Free runtime for them, such as ScummVM or the various text-adventure interpreters. Some games are written for hardware that's simple and standard enough to be a de-facto VM, such as older game consoles (NES, SNES) and PCs (Apple II, Commodore 64). Some games are popular enough that people have written sufficiently-similar re-implementations (FreeCiv, Neverball, Lockjaw).

Most commercial games probably won't be around, though. Linux has never been particularly good about binary ocmpatibility, and even when it's possible, the odds that then-modern systems will be set up to handle old software is slim. Of the two Humble Bundle games I've played with so far, neither has working sound and one actually hangs on exit in the sound code - and those games are comparatively recent!

Compared to other forms of entertainment available to me, commercial games seem to have a much, much shorter shelf-life, and hence seem to be a worse use of my entertainment dollar.

I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Mac OS only license) despite being a fairly avid gamer (and game design major) and using Mac OS as my primary OS, because buying a Mac game means that I've effectively tied my purchase to a weaker gaming platform. I think this is part of the reason for the high rate of piracy of Mac games. I would love not to have to reboot into Windows to play games but the reality is that there are a few problems with Mac-only games:

1. They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. Many of them will either a) not run due to OS version incompatibilities or b) run poorly due to being PPC-only and running on Rosetta. If you're lucky there will be a Universal patch, but due to the small market, they often don't have parity with the Windows version in terms of patches. For OS 9 (or earlier) games, you're SOL. Its far easier to run a DOS game on OSX with DOSBox than even a much newer OS 9 game.

2. They are overpriced. Well, okay that's not fair. They don't have a big enough market to benefit from the kinds of bargain prices that PC games get down to, even only 6 months after release. The exceptions to this are games that are released in a Windows/Mac combo SKU, but these are rare (The Sims 3 is a notable recent-ish one).

3. I might actually want to run the game on Windows some day. As someone who flits back and forward from one OS to another, owning software that's locked to one platform is annoying. Free software covers me for a lot of things, but not for games. At least with a Windows copy of a particular title, I can run it with a Wine-based wrapper (there is a dedicated group of people at http://www.portingteam.com/ who release customised Mac wrappers for individual games, and they work pretty well).

My hopes for the SteamPlay feature of Steam for Mac are very high. It would mean that I could buy new games to play on my platform of choice, with the knowledge that I can always take them back to Windows if things go south. I'm just hoping that more developers get on board. While it's unlikely for the moment, if other developers/publishers were to honour previous Steam purchases of Windows games with their Mac versions, they might actually have a decent library of SteamPlay titles on the release of Steam for Mac.

I doubt that is much of a problem for indies: most of the open source game engines run on both direct x and opengl, so all you need is mac to test on.

The point I was trying to make was more along the lines of: "If you want to sell me a Mac game, be sure you're selling me a portable multi-platform licence for that game". I guess I wasn't exactly succinct.

> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006.

As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch.

Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.

The Castle Fight crashiness appears to be the result of a file format hack the map author's used to "protect" the map -- custom unprotected versions work fine.

Cool. What hack? The only ones I know about are replacing some of the world editor files with zero byte files, and moving the jass file into the scripts directory. But I'm pretty sure those are mac safe.

BTW I played Castle Fight under the name curi.

I'm not clear on the details, but there's some information on the map forum: http://eeve.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3560

If I had more spare time on my hands, I'd try to figure it out by disassembling those map files and comparing them. But I don't, so I won't. :)

"They often spend more on launch advertising than on actual development-- for example, Modern Warfare 2 spent $50 million on development, and $150 million on launch advertising"

i wish it would have been the other way around...

Personally, I just think of the corollary: If a game or a product is good enough, they won't need $150 million in advertising.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/#anchor_demos

Enter the ambient world of Osmos: elegant, physics-based gameplay, dreamlike visuals, and a minimalist, electronic soundtrack.

Your objective is to grow by absorbing other motes. Propel yourself by ejecting matter behind you. But be wise: ejecting matter also shrinks you. Relax… good things come to those who wait.

Progress from serenely ambient levels into varied and challenging worlds. Confront attractors, repulsors and intelligent motes with similar abilities and goals as you.

Osmos is 100% DRM and region free.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5892502&server=vi...

The above post was random but Osmos is worth playing. It can be relaxing, though gameplay varies from slow and methodic to frenzied.

Thing is with Blizzard games is that the performance suffers on a Mac, especially if you've had a chance to compare Warcraft 3 and the Starcraft 2 Beta on both Windows and OSX on the _same hardware_

Probably something to do with OpenGL vs DirectX, but, the performance difference is stupid.

Im hoping that Steam won't be the same.

Blizzard, Id, and Valve must be riding on Apple to fix this because 10.6.3 had a large focus on improving OpenGL and driver performance, and supposedly the beta for 10.6.4 does also.

Hopefully its the start of a continuing trend and not just a temporary thing.

In some ways Apple is really positioned well to facilitate really great 3d graphics performance on the Mac, due to the fact that they only have to support a relatively small number of hardware configs, especially only a few GPUs, and only one 3d graphics API (OpenGL). They just have to give a shit about games for once.

A question about PC gaming. It can be irritating to have to keep the game disc inserted in order to play, even after the install. One reason is that children frequently empty the drive trays and discs can quickly get scratched. Is there a way around this or am I being hopelessly naive?

NoCD cracks are intended for piracy, but there's generally nothing stopping you from using them with legitimate copies of games.

I've seen this question raised so many times on games forums, that I speculate more CD cracks are used by legitimate users than pirates.

While there's certainly a nontrivial number of legitimate users that use CD cracks, I highly doubt they're the majority. Reports on PC game piracy rates vary greatly, but they tend to be in the range of 40-90%. Even at the low end of 40%, you'd need two-thirds of the legitimate users using cracks just to have equal numbers of legitimate and illegitimate. If the piracy rate is over 50%, then it's flat out impossible.

These days the main method is to use an optical drive emulator like Daemon-Tools, although in the last few years there has been a bit of a game of cat and mouse between games blacklisting virtual drives and tools that allow you to 'hide' them (or disguise their virtual nature).

The other alternative is just making a really accurate duplicate of the original disc, by ripping and burning it with a utility like Alcohol 120%, which can make perceptibly identical copies of the game media.

What games do you buy that are still on a disc?

>"As you can see, the Mac version was released a year after the Windows version, as customer interest and awareness was reaching an all-time low. I realized that the Mac percentages are so low not because the Mac versions sell poorly, but because the Windows sales are artificially inflated by the marketing campaign."

I think this hits the nail on the head. By the time the game comes out for the Mac, my PC friends have mostly moved on. Throw in that many Mac ports can't play online vs. the PC version, and there's a lot less incentive to buy the game.

>"The NPD survey shows that Mac users make twice as many electronics purchases"

Unfortunately, this also means they're more likely to have a Mac and a game console.

I'm eagerly awaiting:

Rage by id Software

Diablo III by Blizzard

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty by Blizzard

These are all going to be simultaneously released for Windows and Mac.

Notably, the StarCraft II beta is almost twice as large on OS X as it is on Windows. (At least, last time I checked.)

At least some gaming companies have realized that launching on windows, osx and linux just means that anyone and everyone can play your game.

I'm a big fan of Heroes of Newerth, which plays great on my linux box, but it also runs on osx and windows. Its also only $30 bucks and launches in a few days.

http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/

Linux is always getting more popular, and I think more companies will realize that it makes sense to provide a working solution to all users, not just on windows.

I wouldn't use flash game sites as an estimate of the number of linux gamers. Flash is probably the worst way to experience anything on linux. (Unfortunately, I don't have a better idea for how to measure it.)

It is very likely that Steam is releasing it's client for MacOs sooner or later. Some even say it will be available for Linux.

I think this shows the market is changing. The OS will be unimportant.

May 12th. Four days.

Just wanted to throw in, if you object to the browser method of collecting OS permeation- while it is true not all machines have browsers or browse (like servers), there are practically no modern computers that game but don't have browsers.

i bought the indie pack only because i wanted some games to play in linux

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