bmax, MAC, and the market

Does anyone know what the MAC market is like? Reason I ask is that I've never used a MAC but I am considering purchasing a mac laptop from a guy at work to compile any games Gellyware creates for the Macintosh market.

So Basically, What I am looking for is:

1) Is there a decent MAC market?

2) How difficult is it to have the same code that compiles for the pc ..... compile on a mac?

1) for shareware games, there is a reasonable market. garage games reckon they sell 60% to mac users

2) if you are using blitzmax, not very difficult.

Cheers
Charlie

Yep, the Mac market is definietly a good target audience for casual game developers.

To compile BMax for a Mac, you simply need to own a Mac.
There may be a few little details that will need to be patched up to make it work. (Is MacOS case sensitive?).

It's extremely easy to port to Mac with BMax. I really love how far things have come with cross platform development. I'm hoping that a few of my little projects can make a big splash with the Mac audience.

Unfortunately I think the mac as we have known it on PPC is on it's way out. With Mac crossing over to intel and the majority of their passionate advanced users following suite I'll be surprised if there will be much of a mac market left in 2 years time. Unless it's for ageing systems and super simple casual games that most of us won’t want to make games for them anyway.

I'm inclined to ignore the PPC mac, or at least watch closely and see how things develop with intel macs. Do they meld somewhat with traditioal PC's like the hardware has. Or do they go their own independent route as they have before.

In recent years Apple computers have been relying more and more on following the PC and adapting to the PC's market that going out and doing things on its own. At least where computing is concerned.

They have a lot more success with consumer electonics and gadgets like the ipod range, or medium power notebook PC’s.

Supposedly. There's a lot less people using Mac's than there are PC's, but there's also a lot less people developing for the Mac, so fewer games you'll be competing with. All things being equal, it would be easier for your game to get noticed on the mac than it would be to get noticed on the PC.



Using blitzmax, it's trivial. As long as you keep a couple of basic things in mind (case-sensitive filenames, little endian/big endian when dealing with binary files, using OpenGL) the same blitzmax code should compile without changes on both Windows and Mac.



Yes, similar to Linux.

But all things considering, the PPC mac market is bound to shrivel up to next-to-nothing over the next couple of years, with the release of the intel-based Mac's. so you will have to make a choice:
1) Get a PPC based mac to service the current install-base of mac users with the knowledge that it will only shrink over time
2) Get an intel-based mac which will have much better future prospects, but only a small current install base.

Your entitled to an opinion evak, but none of that is remotely fact.

Use pngs for all your gfx - and you will need different font formats for PC and Mac. If you've got a game in Max that doesn't need a load of dll's etc its so easy to port to Mac that it would be well worth your time. Don't get a Mac until you've got a finished product though - the old Macs will be going for pennies soon.

Looking at some sales stats, quite a lot of cross-platform games seem to get over the "normal" 10% Mac Sales which is often quoted. If the game is good, it seems that Mac users will be crying out for it due to having less available games. However, as more and more developers cotton onto this, it will be harder to make lots of Mac sales.

Also worth considering is the type of person that uses a Mac (generalising here), if they are designer/arty types they might not be into casual puzzle games and might prefer clever, fancy looking action/retro games of some kind. For example Titan Attacks did v. well on the Mac.

Any game will sell if its good, you still have to make a good game. I never said it was anything other than an opinion One Eyed Jack. I full expect it to be proven right and all there will be are simple casual games on the old PPC macs in a couple of years time.

They didn't come with good enough GPU options as standard to warrant making decent 3D games. Not that there isn't a casual market, but thats boring to develop for.