Apple Gaming

Introduction
Apple is certainly has in the last few years really taken off in terms of profitability and general consumer awareness of their products. There have been a number of radical and aggressive moves undertaken by the management, many of which have proved to be successful. Despite the surges in profit and market share in the last few years, and the popular marketing campaigns, Apple has failed to entrench itself as a serious competitor against PCs in terms of market share. Apple’s 2006 Year over Year market share increase of 16%, while massively out-weighing the industry average still only results in an increase from 4.4% to 4.8%, Hardly a major threat to the PC platform.[digg=http://digg.com/gaming_news/Why_Apple_Gaming_Sucks]

I had the fortunate privilege of working for Apple last summer as an intern, and I can tell you the company is just as phenomenal from the inside as they seem to be from the outside. Having never used a mac before working there, I was definitely a fan of the smooth interface and the elimination of the “Death by a thousand paper-cuts” experience that one often finds using Windows (or Linux, for that matter). Despite this, at the end of the summer I couldn’t bring myself to buy a Mac, even though I needed a new computer, and I could leverage employee discounts. The reason was simple. Gaming.

Why should Apple Care?
Before we look at why serious gamers will nearly always choose a windows PC, lets take a look at why Apple should care. Gamers are generally very computer-savy people. If you’re a game junkie, chances are that your PC is one of the top of the line models. Video games are one of the few applications that actually push the type of computer equipment one finds in a household to the limits of its potential (the other really major one being video and graphics editing, a field in which Apple dominates the market). To a certain extent video games are one of the driving factors of the entire hardware industry. If your computer use is limited to watching DVDs, reading email, and surfing the web, you can pretty much get away with whatever the lowest end computer your retailer of choice happens to be offering. As gamers are generally much more familiar with the PC Hardware landscape than the general public at any given point in time, they will often be the people their friends come to for advise on which computers to buy. Gamers are, as a group, generally not using Macs. People who don’t use Macs don’t usually rave to their friends about how amazing the system is. Many analysts believe Microsoft’s market share in home computing has been significantly strengthened by the amount of time they’ve spent attracting the gaming industry to their platform. Additionally, many gamers want to buy a Mac, but aren’t willing to because of the hassles involved. It’s never good to have a segment of the market who want your product, but aren’t willing to commit because of particulars.

Why Gamers don’t buy Mac
The major reason gamers aren’t willing to go Mac is because the game selection is greatly limited compared to Windows. Almost any game which come out for PC, comes out for Windows. If the game is particularly successful, there is a chance it will get ported to OS X. In the event that this actually does occur, it happens months after the Windows release in almost every case (Blizzard games being the only ones that come to mind as an exception). Much of the hype and excitement surrounding a game has died down by this time. An excellent example of this is Civilization 4. A highly anticipated title, by the time Civ4 was released for OS X in June 2006, the expansion pack for the Windows version had been released (The title was released for Windows in October of 2005).

Gamers also tend to upgrade their machines much more than regular users do. Having a high-end machine is not a cheap endeavor, and staying on that edge requires regular upgrades. These upgrades allow gamers to save cash buy simply replacing a graphics card instead of throwing out an entire system. The most frequently upgraded components for a gamer are the RAM and Graphics card. Apple only offers one machine in which graphics card upgrades are a possibility.

Recent Advances
Apple hasn’t entirely jumped ship in the Gamer field. There are certain factors which have come about in the last few years that make Mac gaming a much more viable possibility. In the days of Yor, porting games to Mac was an unholy nightmare. The reason for this was that Macs used the PowerPC architecture instead of the Intel x86 architecture used by PCs. This creates major headaches for porting teams. This problem has been solved since Macs finished the move to Intel last year. There are still a number of PowerPC systems out there, but if you have a PowerPC Mac, you’re probably not interested in gaming anyway.

A second coup was Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop. Boot Camp is a tool which allows Mac owners to Dual-boot their systems, effectively allowing them to run an operating system other than OS X. As an Intel-based Mac is effectively a shiny PC, this would allow a user to run Windows on their Mac. This work-around allows those who REALLY want a Mac to play Windows games on it, however I would say that much of the “Mac Experience” is using OS X. Booting into Windows also requires a reboot of the system (pain in the ass) and requires you to obtain a copy of windows on your own (so add another $200 to your bill).

Parallels is a virtualization engine which effectively simulates a windows environment inside of OS X, so there’s no need to reboot. It is not at present optimized for gaming, so you can’t run 3D graphics it. As I understand it, this is because it does not have the linkages to convert DirectX calls into OpenGL calls. Parallels is developing a version of their software which will be able to run games inside the environment, however I remain skeptical. Emulating hardware is extremely processor intensive, and as many games push the hardware to the limit as it is, I highly Parallels will ever be able to offer the same kind of performance you would get from running the game natively (and I didn’t pay $2000 to watch my games stutter).

There are two major companies which have contributed major advances in porting Windows games to the OS X environment. The first of these, Aspyr, owns 60% of the Mac Gaming Market. That said, Aspyr staffs a mere 5 developers. The reason for this is because the Mac Market Share is so small, and since Aspyr only makes money from game sales, that their margins are very thin. Nevertheless, without Aspyr, Mac gamers would have very small offerings indeed.

The second player in the market is a Canadian company called Transgaming who offer a product called Cider. Developers who are creating a windows title simply wrap their code in the Cider engine, which emulates an optimized version of the Win32 and DirectX API, and then links into OS X functions. This effectively allows the developer to maintain a single code base but develop for both platforms simultaneously. This theoretically creates a solution which eliminates all the problems with porting games to Mac, but unfortunately it’s not one that’s frequently used. The reason for this is the licensing scheme Transgaming offers. Instead of the traditional licensing system where developers pay upfront some large sum (as they do with, for example, graphics engines), Transgaming only offers a revenue sharing scheme. This is a great option for Indies who don’t have cash upfront, but for major developers can be much, much more expensive. Nevertheless, it is a significant achievement which greatly simplifies the process of porting games to Mac.

Current Problems
OS X is a defining feature of the Mac experience. If you’re running Windows on your Mac, you are effectively using a really shiny PC. This is not what users want. They want to run games in OS X. Additionally, Booting into Windows is a pain in the ass, as you need to shut down everything, reboot, and repeat the process to get back to OS X when you’re done. Parallels could in theory fix this problem, although the current version doesn’t support gaming, but no virtualization will ever compare to running the game natively in terms of performance. If you’re paying $2000 for a computer, performance is likely a priority for you.

Almost all PC games use DirectX. OS X does not support DirectX, only OpenGL. If Mac gaming is to flourish, OS X needs to be able to interface with DirectX calls, or convince a lot of developers to use OpenGL instead (fat chance).

There are no “killer titles” for OS X. Any titles that exist on the Mac are ports from Windows, or nobody has heard of. If gaming is to be a major issue for Apple, they need to have a game which people really want to play, and they can only play it on a Mac.

The delays in porting games from Windows to Mac are ridiculously long. Few gamers are willing to wait months after a possible opportunity to play a game so that they can have the privilege of owning a Mac.

For developers, the margins for creating video games are slim as it is. Apple doesn’t control enough market share to be worth developing games natively for Mac. For developers who port games, like Aspyr, the limited market share allows them to survive, but they can’t flourish until the margins improve.

Gaming Computers cost a lot of money. Apple only offers one system which has an upgradable graphics card, the Mac Pro (all other systems have integrated graphics). The entry point for the Mac Pro is over $2100 USD before tax, with no monitor. A system more appropriate to a gamer would require an upgrade in RAM to 2 Gig, a 250 Gig HDD, and the Radeon x1900 XT Graphics card, bringing the price up to a whopping $2750 before tax, and still no monitor. This is too expensive for a non-upgradable gaming system.

Solutions
Apple could become a gaming powerhouse, and at the same time massively increase their market share. Here’s some things they could do.

Make it easy to develop games.

• Create a gaming API (Perhaps call it Core Gaming?). Make it easier to use, with more features and higher performance than DirectX provides.
• Buy Transgaming. Offer Cider for free to anyone who wants to use it. Alternatively develop interfaces for DirectX which would feed directly into Core Gaming

Make it easy to upgrade your Mac

• In future Mac Products, make it really simple to upgrade graphics cards and RAM
• Build a system priced between the Mac Pro and the iMac (Perhaps call it the Mac?). Use a Core 2 Duo Chip instead of Dual Xeons (overkill much!). Ensure the entry level hardware is sufficient for normal gaming, but allows for upgradable graphics, RAM, and Storage.

Increase game offerings for the Mac

• Mac needs a game people desperately want to play. They need a Diablo, a Halo, a Zelda. This game must be available exclusively for the Mac. In the current situation, nobody in their right mind would develop a game exclusively for the Mac. The market share is too low to recoup the costs of game development. Apple, however, also benefits by getting sales revenue from increased sales of Macs due to this exclusive game. As such, the only company that has the opportunity to profitably develop a AAA title for the Mac is Apple. Apple continually positions themselves as a company full of creative talent. I see no reason why this is out of the realm of possibility.
• Apple can use iTunes to increase sales of existing titles. iTunes could be modified to work in a similar fashion as Steam. The issues surrounding DRM on Music and Video do not apply in the same ways to games, because games are designed to run only on one system by their nature. As such DRM could be implemented in a similar manner as Steam as well, thus reducing the liklihood of Piracy, a major issue for PC developers but more especially for Mac developers who have slim margins as it is.