The Elder Scrolls: Steam for OS X

[Vincent D]

Truly, I just would love to see these games ported, and with Steam OS X just being released, it's seeming a bit more reasonable to think that games will begin to be developed with the Apple market in mind. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Actually, it is of no significance to me, as I am not lacking in ways to play them; but wouldn't opening up your products to another market be the savvy thing to do?

[AZUL]

I was just watching a demo of portal on the Mac OS x. Unluckily it doesn’t run nearly as well as on windows 7 in boot camp. So for the time being you’re going to have to use BootCamp. As well portal is the only 3d game currently available and it looks like unless valve redoes half life 2 that it will be that way for awhile. Developers will have to recode their games to use openGL if they don’t already or optimize them and they already do that with the most popular games. The problem is that those games get released on Mac sometimes years after their initial release. I pretty much see steam as being an online market for any games released for Macs which is what I am assuming they are going for.

[RockOn]

I have a cider port of Morrowind and it works surprisingly well. Not as well as the windows version since it pauses every time the music changes which is really frustrating in the ash lands when a rat attacks you every couple of minutes. But other than that, it runs just fine. I think games should run on Mac without a problem but these programmers have spent their entire life working with Microsoft so it’s taking them time to adjust which is why portal sucks so bad on Mac.

[Squibbit]

They are going to be releasing their entire library. By porting Portal, they have essentially done more than half the work of getting Half-Life 2 ported, as Portal contains many of the assets. It doesn't work well most because the Mac notebooks' video cards are underclocked for the sake of battery life. However, it is also due to Apple's terrible, terrible drivers. If Steam really hits it off on the Mac platform (which is very, very likely), Apple will definitely see to making their drivers on OS X more gaming-friendly.

[Wyvern]

I certainly hope it takes off like a rocket. Although I am not a Mac person I am fully aware that lots of games are being consolized and any added market share to the computer side, even if its Macs, is certainly welcome. My only concern is that no one that has a Mac uses it for any serious gaming unless they utilize BootCamp which defeats the purpose of valve making games Mac OS friendly. To be honest I don’t know why people wouldn’t just use BootCamp anyways. I don’t own a Mac and although I have piddled around with them my experience in the technical side is limited to swapping some parts out for some friends.

[ApplePowerPC]

BootCamp is fine, but (apologies for praising Macs- I know some of you consider that a sacrilege) it isn't as vastly powerful as the Mac side of the computer. Mac runs a descent PC, but not a great one. For instance, I never got MGE to work great on BootCamp. If you use Crossover Games to install Steam and play Prey, it will play more than twice as well as it would on BootCamp. I had it on Ultra High (my Macbook Pro is a year old, as well), whereas I can only manage medium on my Windows partition, because there is next to nothing going on in the background to consume RAM.

[MacIntel]

Well it's kind of a win or lose situation. The more platforms they put their game out on the harder it is to support the game because they're could be lots of bugs that you'd find playing on a Mac but on a pc the bugs would be nonexistent. Which they then necessitate to make patches for as well as hire more people for support. But since Macs have a low number of different hardware types it makes making the patches easier than it would be for Windows in some ways. As everyone else has said though the Macs are much slower because of the lack of good drivers and under-clocked GPU. Even more of a challenge might be that I don't think the Gamebryo engine is built for Mac development, although I have seen a few games that use it available for Mac, but I am not certain of the time it took them to port.

[Abbie]

An actual trouble is that Microsoft makes it easy for you to get locked in to using Microsoft proprietary technology. They make COM, DirectX, DirectSound, .NET, etc. easy to use and develop code for. They carefully lock that code in to using those features, to the point that changing them to use others means introducing a compatibility layer or a major rewrite to use portable technologies like OpenGL and OpenAL. Game developers who have become addicted to Microsoft tools and runtime features take a look and see a lot of effort to serve a small market, then just don't go there.