Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Mac gamers have long suffered from PC envy. But this year their holiday spirits are unexpectedly up.
Dec 19, 2001 | It's the season, all right. Game console fans are taking to heart the president's patriotic call to consumerism, buying Xboxes and GameCubes in big numbers; even the year-old PlayStation 2 has seen a significant jump in sales. Billions are being spent to shoot aliens on a ringworld, bust ghosts or play as a mulleted secret agent. But what might come as a surprise is that in the almost-marginal world of games for the Macintosh, the kids are pretty much all right.
It's a surprise because the irrelevance of the Mac in the business world, in the consumer market and in the education world is an evergreen topic, as are the regular stories heralding either the death of Apple or ruefully noting that the company is not bankrupt -- yet.
The game market especially, Doom and beyond, has been owned by consoles and the PC since the Apple II's obsolescence. As many have noted, 1990s-era Apple management reacted to taunts in the business world that the Mac was merely a toy by purposefully distancing itself from games and game developers. Today, a solid seller in the Mac market may rack up one third of the unit sales of an A-list PC title -- perhaps 30,000 boxes instead of 100,000 -- with breakaway hits such as Tomb Raider or The Sims being a rare exception. This doesn't seem to bode well, especially for a computer that sits on over 30 million desks worldwide.
And yet, call up a Mac game developer today, ask them how it's going, and you'll hear them say things like "it's been a great year" and "we're optimistic."
The release of Mac versions of new PC game sensations will still usually lag behind, frustrating Mac fans no end, but over the last year, there has been a healthy growth in companies catering to those who want to spend some particularly unproductive hours in front of their Macs. In marked contrast to the events of a few years ago, when game giants Sierra On-Line and Interplay forsook the Mac market, new companies are picking up the slack and some steadfasts in the field are adding staff.
One, United Developers, even went so far as to license the venerable MacPlay name -- under which such games as Castle Wolfenstein and Descent were produced -- from Interplay. The company also runs subsidiaries Mumbo Jumbo and Rogue, both of which are turning out Mac versions of titles that sold like hotcakes on the PC side. Henry Price, MacPlay's director of sales, is happy.
"It's been a great year for us," he says, "though software is bounded by the economy, which has been weak, and there are two new game consoles. And," he adds somewhat smugly, "this year has been considerably down on the PC side, year total."
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