I have been using my Wii U a lot recently. It has pushed me into finally finishing a few games that I have been meaning to beat for a while; Golden Sun, Earthbound, and Super Mario Galaxy. The Wii U also has me playing new games. I never play “new” games! I usually wait until the games are at least 20% off and even then I don’t actually play the games until 5 or 6 years later. But, one game got me back into dat new shit.
Mario Kart 8 got me to buy a full priced, sixty dollar game – my eternal resting place is experiencing a cold front, I believe. I have been having a lot of fun with MK8. Today, after getting home from work, I downloaded the Mercedes DLC pack and have been having fun with those new additions to the game – some new tires and 3 Mercedes cars. Even though I haven’t been that excited for this free content, it’s a good decision to have this kind of alliance for NIntendo. I would like to see more collaborations like this for Nintendo.
Polygon’s Jenna Pitcher wrote an article on the announcement of Modern Warfare 2 and 3 for OSX. I was completely flabbergasted when I read this article. Who are the diehard Mac fans who have been waiting for this release?
I am a hardcore Mac user, but I gave up the platform to Boot Camp long ago. I know that Aspyr Media has been doing god’s work (porting games to Mac) for years now, but isn’t it a little too late? Does Aspyr recoup the cost associated with converting these games? They must or else they would have been flushed long ago.
When I contacted Aspyr Media, Sales Manager Michael Blair told me that the company housed a nimble staff of 50 Mac developers and QA staff. Just for context, Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, said in an interview with Polygon that Gearbox employs between 100 – 300 people. So, Aspyr have a pretty small staff of Mac evangelists and, since they have been in business for over ten years, they must be making enough to keep them in the Mac business.
Steam + Mac = True Love
Even with Steam’s push to make games playable on many different operating systems through Steamplay Mac has not been able to branch out much. They still have Civilization and there are tons of indie games and casual games that need to be distributed on every platform imaginable to make a buck, but they have never really been able to stand up next to the PC as a gaming platform. (They might be closer to Ouya.)
I am glad that Aspyr Media is out there porting games to Mac. Even with the Intel chipset becoming standard in all Apple computers and Boot Camp being a completely viable option to run Windows on a Mac, can they really sustain this kind of business model?
Mr. Blair thinks that his company’s business will continue making games for the Mac platform for the foreseeable future because of the hardcore Mac community that won’t play games on a Window PC.
Mac ABSOLUTELY is a viable platform and I urge you to launch Steam again to see the myriad of AAA titles now on the Mac along with a great number of impressive indie titles. Sure, its hard to see a future where Mac is as big a platform as the PC, but like many other Mac users, I can’t see a future of me ever using a PC. So there will always be an opportunity for gamers like you and myself.
Modern Warfare 2 and 3 were released 3 and 5 years ago respectively for other platforms. I would assume that their release for the OSX platform would be moot at this point. But according to Mr. Blair there are a lot of Mac gamers who have been waiting with bated breath for these games to be released.
I asked Mr. Blair how many concurrent players were playing Modern Warfare 3, the newest of the two games, he wrote back saying, “Usually, there are about 6-7k concurrent players on MW3 thanks to cross-platform multiplayer with the PC.” So, even if we forget that many of those people could be PC players, that is only 6000 – 7000 people. I know that many people do not even go online with many games, but that still seems like a pretty low number.
“Nuh uh! _______ is way better,” said every fanboy ever.
I am truly in awe that there are developers out there porting games to the Mac platform. As a long time Mac addict, I am always excited to play games in OSX, which in my opinion, is a superior operating system to others on the market. But, in the end, I am just too avid a gamer to wait for games to be released on the Mac.
I have been using my Wii U a lot recently. It has pushed me into finally finishing a few games that I have been meaning to beat for a while; Golden Sun, Earthbound, and Super Mario Galaxy. The Wii U also has me playing new games. I never play “new” games! I usually wait until the games are at least 20% off and even then I don’t actually play the games until 5 or 6 years later. But, one game got me back into dat new shit.
