I'm not so sure that a Mac port makes sense financially. According to NPD (October 2009)...
http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_091005.html 12% of U.S. households owning a computer, own an Apple computer. Lets assume all of those are Macs with OSX and not Apple IIs. :) Of those Apple users, 85% *also* own a Windows PC. This means that many of those Mac customers who wanted to buy Portal or Half-Life2 or Left 4 Dead probably already own it, which means that you aren't going to have much of an increase in sales by supporting OSX. Any customers that bought it on PC who instead buy it on OSX just reduce the total sales numbers for the PC (because they are buying it for a different platform now). I really like the Mac and OSX. I've done some iPhone development on the Mac... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4HZT-gKDVU ...so I'm not an "Apple hater" or "Mac hater". I think OSX is really neat. It is *very* user friendly and has a lot of really nice features (which Windows Vista and Windows 7 clearly "borrowed" from), but I just don't see supporting OSX as making much sense financially. Here's the way I think things went down... About 6 or 8 months ago, Gabe was looking to buy a new computer. Gabe is a Microsoft guy from *way* back, and had never really messed around much with Macs, but this time he decided to get a Mac running Snow Leopard. After a few minutes of playing around with it, Gabe goes running down the hall to grab people and tell them how AWESOME the Mac was!!! Gabe said "OMG! We HAVE to port our games to this platform!!1!11!". Some people replied and said "But Gabe, we're not going to be able to make any money selling games on Macs and it's going to cost us money to port our engine and all of our old games to OSX." Gabe said "I don't care. We make enough money from Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and revenue from all the Steam sales to cover it. I want to see some of our games running on a Mac within a year." So a small team was formed to look into what it would take to port all of the engine DirectX and shader stuff to OpenGL and get the engine game code ported to OSX. Gabe decided they should pick something smaller that would appear more to "Think Different" type people and everyone agreed that Portal was the one game that would most appeal to Mac-types. As I said above, I like OSX, but Valve's decision to support Macs still has me scratching my head. Maybe Valve is doing this "out of the goodness of their hearts", or maybe Valve sees it as more of a public relations benefit. It still doesn't seem like a money making venture to me. Maybe it will encourage other engine and game developers (I'm looking at you Epic) to support OSX, but I doubt it. On 3/10/2010 4:49 PM, Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen wrote: > Well, Mac support makes a lot of sense really. According to wikipedia > Windows covers 88% of all desktop computers, and Mac OS X 6%. GNU/Linux > only is only 1%. If you look at this pie chart > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Operating_system_usage_share.svg you > can clearly see that if Valve supports Windows and Mac, they support > almost every desktop computer able to run their games. I am really glad > Valve are expanding the market for digital distribution to other > platforms as well - personally I see Steam-like systems as the future of > gaming. So whether how much I would like a linux port, I can perfectly > see why they should focus on a Mac OS X port first. > > As for the whole no gaming on GNU/Linux thingey - the main reason > developers don't make games for the platform is because gamers don't use > it, and the main reason gamers doesn't use the platform is because the > huge games don't get ports for the platform. If Valve shipped their > Source games for GNU/Linux-based operating systems I am sure it would > cause more gamers to use the platform, including myself. > > Again, I am really glad Valve is doing a Mac OS X port of Steam and > Source and I appreiciate their efforts put into this. > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
