Is Mac Worth Supporting?

Right, I wonder if we can have a discussion about wether MacOS is actually worth making games for?

Ground Rules (as these types of threads can get heated)

1) This is NOT a arguement about which OS is better

2) Any statistics or figures given must be backed up with evidence

So, here is a hypothetical situation to discuss:

One of us makes a game using BMax on Windows, and is thinking about releasing it on MacOS. Would it be worth them buying a intel mac and a ppc mac and spend time (how ever much that will be) to make sure it works on Mac. Or just move onto another game for Windows?

Would the return from releasing it on Mac out do the initial investment, or is it better to just move on?

What I am hoping here is that some people who have debated this with themselves and taken the cross-platform route could post up and tell us if they thought it had been worth it, not just in money, but in time and effort.

Even though I don't really know how I feel about this (the reason for starting this thread) I am goign to take the initial stance of it not being worth it, give that:

A) MacOS as only an 8-9% market share http://www.techworld.com.au/article/255741/mac_os_x_market_share_growth_stumbles

B) It would cost around $800 in equipment (price of second hand intel + ppc mac on ebay) which would mean if you game sold for $10 on portals (with a commission rate of 50%) it would take 160 copies before you saw a return (not including tax), not inluding time and effort. So realistically your looking at 300-500 copies on mac to make it worth your time.

Please prove me wrong (with evidence)

That's not particularly relevant as I'm led to believe that Mac games have a higher conversion rate, presumably due to there being far less choice than on the PC.

I have heard something similar big10p. I can't seem to find any evidence on this though. However, I did find this, which seems intresting:

http://www.macworld.com/article/56669/2007/03/www.idgconnect.com (of course, the source for this information is Mac World)

Not only that, but Mac users will part with cash more readily than PC users will. You have to be that way to buy a mac in the first place.

Anyway. I'd do the PC version first. If it does well and you can justify the outlay, work on a Mac version afterwards. Consider it a long-term investment that you don't have to make every time you develop a new game.

I can confirm from personal experience (but I cannot share the reports due to contractual reasons) that Mac games convert at twice the percent as PC games. Also a good Mac game can definitely make plenty of sales, easily enough to cover the cost of my Macbook Pro £1400 (last year)... Fairway sold loads on Mac via the portals and was #1 game download on apple.com. I know someone else on this forum who made a Mac game that they sold directly that did really well, I was astounded by their sales income.

So yes it is worth it IF you game is good enough in the first place and providing you can do the marketing (or get someone to do it for you).

Some genres do better than others on Mac. Bullet Candy, for example does not do well on OS X, in the last 3 years or so i guess i've sold 200 or so copies, which is pretty poor compared to windows, where i've sold thousands. I guess the Mac audience isn't really into shooters?

Cheers
Charlie

Here's my opinion on this.

I just bought a new Macbook Pro. It's my first Mac, and I bought it because 1) I wanted a good XP machine, and 2) I wanted to play around with OSX and see what was available. I do not like Vista, so that has prompted this purchase.

Anyways, I've been looking around a bit, and there are so few games available for the Mac I would have to think a good/great title will get noticed. With the PC it is easy to get lost in the crowd, especially in certain genres.

Now the real question, of course, is whether you can SELL to a Mac audience. I don't have any answers to that. Personally, I am just doing this for fun, but I feel that if I were to get BlitzMax I would be able to make some very popular games for the Mac. Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I just see a completely open hole that could be filled here.

On the other hand,... maybe Mac people just are not into games as much?

this is a grey area so sorry if it offends
if you buy a mac os version of bmax and dont have a mac to do the conversion, whats the moral ground of a mac blitzmax user compiling the port? it negates the initial outlay of the mac untill you know you need/want one

i say buying a mac os version as its a safer moral stance than just asking someone else to compile for you

but having said that you have to trust the other party to do whats right for you and the game and fingers crossed they wont have to do much osX tweaking

Uh? What do morals have to do with this? You can buy any version of BlitMax and then are entitled to use any other platform version.

oh i thought it was buy win/mac/linux seperatly

my thought was re blitzplus demo user asking for an exe thread many moons ago
that got some varied responses, mostly in the "its not a nice thing to do go buy bplus"

so i guess its down to trust between the win coder and the mac 'porter' then

Another option is to do what I did - buy and Intel mac and make it into a triple-booting machine, with Linux, Vista, and OSX. I can create binaries for 3 platforms on one computer. I would not choose to put Windows XP on it because you have to think toward the future and XP is going to be phased out.

For a while, we also had a PowerPC iMac, but it died a few weeks ago - it had been struck by lightning a few years back and I think this shortened the life of the motherboard. So I can no longer create PowerPC binaries, except for Panther on my very slow and almost deceased G3 iBook. See here for some Intel vs PowerPC stats:

http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hwstats/pages/web-2008Q4-cpu.html

About 85% of Macs (that used the Unity web plugin) are Intel macs, only 15% are PowerPC.

As to the issue of Macs only having x% market share - I wouldn't think so much in terms of percent but in terms of dollars, and whether you are looking for maximum profits or `enough` profit. You could make plenty of money on the Mac, but not as much as on Windows.

Also I think you need to consider the mindset/values of Mac users, because they are different to Windows users and Linux users - they might reject your game more if it seems `like a windows game` - and I do think there is a difference. Each has a personality.

My free adventure game, Armand and the Foppish Hat, gets significantly more downloads on the Mac than on Windows. It's a short, free, 2d adventure game with very basic graphics. I do no advertising for it, but it is on several download sites (including apple.com, cnet, download.com, softpedia, etc). Here's the download stats from so far this month:

Mac Version - 1816
Windows Version - 712

My shareware board game, Senet, gets more purchases on the Mac side than the Windows side. Once again, it's not much graphics-wise, and I do no advertising for it. It's on all the same download sites as the Armand game. It's not a huge seller, but I get at least a few sales every month. I'm not going to give you the sales numbers, but I will give you rough percentages since January:

Mac Version - 65%
Windows Version - 25%
Mac/Windows Bundle - 10%

I'm not making a living doing this, as I am purely a hobbyist making the kinds of games I like to play, but I've found the Mac side to be pretty successful for the low budget games that I make.

I think that it's important to consider if you are planning on making more than one game or not. If you are planning on several, the Mac is a one-time (essentially) investment and you don't necessarily have to recuperate the costs right at first...

I am definitely not a huge gamer, but being a PC user until switching to Mac a few years ago, I can say that I personally would be more likely to buy a particular good game for Mac than I would have been for PC. The selection being less, a typical Mac user would likely jump on a good opportunity.

I don't think you can use Steam/Unity stats to show anything as they are massivly swung by the developers....eg, high powered macs will feature much more on unity stats , as the IDE is mac only so = more developers etc, not actual end users.

If its reasonably effortless and inexpensive to release on another platform (ie with bmax, mono C#, java etc ) then of course its worth releasing on as many as possible. Plus, the less used linux and mac markets are not saturated which gives your product/game much more visibility.
Even if only a few purchase it, it all adds up.

Eventually.

But Vista is not due to be end-of-lifed until 2014 on Microsoft's time-line: They'll continue to release security patches etc. until that point, and you know that there are plenty of people vouching to hold on to XP for dear life.

While the XP market share will obviously continue to shrink as time goes by, I really don't think it is going to go away altogether any time soon.

Firstly i'm going to appologise for not reading all of the thread (it's midnight i'm tired i'm going to bed in a second...).



When I was learning BlitzMax I knocked up a simple 2D game, I published it on Windows and Macintosh as freeware and promoted it on various freeware listing sites.

The browser stats for downloads on the file (it contained both versions) showed that 3/8ths of my downloads where from Mac users.

Conversion of the code to Mac was not difficult. I had some issues with graphics RAM because my Mac was very old and did not have much, so I made a low rez option and otherwise it converted easily.

Since then I made a simple cross platform app with MaxGUI+Mini3D and found that conversion was more troublesome, gadgets are spaced differently on the two platforms so I had to rework the interface to support two sets of co-ordinates for the buttons which was messy.

I found 1 3D blend mode was not supported on the Mac which might have some repurcussions for special effects, although I guess that might have been a bug with Mini3D at it was an earlier version? For me it was no big deal and I didnt make a note which mode it was.

In all converting your program to Mac is made very easy by Blitz. I had some knowledge of the system anyway, I guess if you are totally new to the Mac it might take some more getting used too.

I still preffer to develop on Windows, I find it more productive.

I had no joy at all working with Blitz in Linux, but that's a nemesis I intend to go back and conquer one day :P

My Mac sales are 8 times that of my PC sales on my own site. From portals, the sales are about even. I have to say from my experience the Mac porting is definately worth it.

I have a question, I wanted to do this a while back when I had a Mac (I no longer do) and I couldnt for the life of me see how to get 3 OS' on to the machine with bootcamp, I assumed it wasnt possible but obviously I didnt think about the issue long enough!

What's the process for doing this, bootcamp to Windows then install Linux and so linux effectively becomes invisible to OSX? Or does bootcamp now support multiple alternate OS' ?

Sadly I dont think I can afford a new Mac any time soon, but when I do I would love to do this.

TBH I would support Mac and Linux when coding with BlitzMax mainly because most of the code is there anyway and for the little adjustments its two extra platforms to sell to. More sales means more advertising.

Banshee see my triple-boot post in the OSX forum. I sort of detailed the process I went through, but I recommend you read plenty of the guides on the web to get a really good understanding of what you need to do and in what order, as you really don't want to mess up your computer. If I remember, I installed OSX first, then Linux as a second partition, and then Windows as the last partition (apparently this is important). You are limited to only 3 concurrent os's due to the file system tables/whatever. But yes it's possible. I am using OSX Leopard, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu 8.04 Linux (I had terrible trouble with 8.14 Linux, it just wouldn't work, so skip that).

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=77192

Here's what you do assuming you have win/mac/linux.

1. develop the game on your preferred OS.
2. release it on that OS first and fix bugs.
3. release the 2 ports in order of your next prefered OS.
4. charge full price on mac, half price on win and free on linux.

Why free on linux?
I buy commercial software for linux. I dont mind paying for games or unique software, especially if its just a small-medium sized software outfit.

I say charge the same for all of them.

tbh I would have a fixed price across the board, if the game is worth buying it should be the same for everyone.

Interesting read. Thanks for all the data.

So, what about Linux? Any experiences on sales and such?

>Why free on linux?

Well that was kind of a joke, seriously I would charge like the way BMax is sold, one sale for 3 OS versions.

I once got MacOSX to work in VMWare, and it ran pretty decent too. 3D support was pretty week though.

But with a little ingenuity, getting MacOSX to run on a PC shouldnt be too hard.
And it costs what.. $100 or something? thats more affordable than a real mac, if your hardware is compatible that is ;)