Playing games with Apple

First up is the 9/11 argument: People are turning to relatively trivial entertainments, especially home-based ones, in the wake of horrible events. But this doesn't account for why PC games don't seem to be doing as well. It could be that the events of Sept. 11 have sparked a sudden sales downturn for some of the more violent titles that are sales linchpins of the PC market. Or perhaps the heavy promotion for PS2 and Xbox verions of some currently selling Mac games is resulting in a coattail effect.

But the most likely explanation is the growth of a more focused business model for producing, distributing and selling Mac-specific titles.

Tuncer Deniz, the editor in chief of the Web site Inside Mac Games, points to what some call the bad old days. "In the past, PC game publishers tried and failed miserably in the Mac market," he says. Since they viewed the Mac market as just a small subset of their regular business, they put minimal effort and dollars into the attempt. Their inattention was partly understandable: There was little financial incentive to invest the time and effort for the modest (to them) profit a Mac title might show. The most telling example of where this trend would lead came last year when Sierra On-Line decided to shut down the work that was almost done to bring Half-Life, a tremendously popular PC game, to the Mac. At the time, the company cited future costs of supporting another version and maintaining both to ensure cross-platform online play.

This is just one example, says Deniz, of companies "releasing poorly done ports, providing awful customer and technical support for their Mac games, and putting zero dollars into a marketing campaign."

Today, larger companies such as Activision, Electronic Arts and Eidos Interactive have learned to outsource their porting and publishing to specialized businesses. The porting houses, like Westlake Interactive, are comprised of programmers who know the Mac operating system inside and out rather than Windows experts trying to stuff that particular peg into a differentially sized hole. And the smaller publishers, including MacSoft, Destineer, MacPlay, Aspyr and others, not only maintain closer contact with Mac users and their targeted media outlets but also can react with more flexibility to bugs or, in a worst case scenario, when an update to the Mac OS breaks compatibility with their games (it happened most recently with MacPlay's Giants: Citizen Kabuto and OS X 10.1).

What's more, notes Deniz, this works out well for both the original PC and the contracted Mac publishers. By handing off to the Mac-centric companies, say, the work to bring Tony Hawk: Pro Skater 2 to the Mac, "Activision gets a nice check from Aspyr and doesn't have to worry about the porting, the publishing, the marketing, etc," says Deniz. "Aspyr, on the other hand, makes a decent profit since their overhead costs are low (it's a small company of about 10 people or so), they have really good distribution in the Mac market, and know how to market the product in a Mac world."

Compared to initial development costs that can run into the millions, porting even an A-list title totals between $100,000 and $500,000, according to Destineer's Tamte.

It seems like a no-brainer, but it took years and plenty of failures before some companies learned to give up day-to-day control of some of their products. (There are exceptions -- Blizzard Entertainment maintains its own in-house Mac porting and testing group and has seen solid successes with their Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo franchises.)

Finally, there's one more mystery factor to evaluate for the present and future of games and the Mac: the ever-popular Mac OS X.

Next Page: Will OS X usher in a new era for games on the Mac?

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