Mad Macs
“…is OS-X a good platform for making games or making money as a game developer?”
Spoiler Alert: Jeff doesn’t exactly come down in favor of continued Mac support. He doesn’t say that developers should give up Mac support entirely. But you can feel the vibe: Mac support is on trial.
Me…I want to support Macs. That was a key bullet point when selecting to use Garage Games’s Torque Game Engine (TGE) for my current Paintball Net project. TGE-based projects can, with a bit of tweaking, be compiled and run on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. I like that.
Of course, in the name of Full Disclosure, Mac support was only a part of my TGE decision. I also liked having a solid 3D renderer, an existing content pipeline, excellent multiplayer networking, and a decent scripting language.
In fact, I would also love to have a Mac version of my bread-and-butter product,
The Journal. I get a handful of requests each month for a Mac version.
Being cross platform means I get to sell to more people. And the Mac has always been starved for both games and for smaller user-oriented applications. If you can make those available, Mac users will buy them.
On the other hand, I understand Jeff’s question. How much does it cost to pick up those additional customers? With TGE, the cost of the port (vs the cost of entire development) is minor. Unfortunately, for The Journal, the cost is much higher (Delphi for the Mac, please? Borland? You listening, you silly gits?).
However, Jeff’s post carries other implications. My plans for Paintball Net are to build the first version with TGE. GG has the Torque Shader Engine (TSE) in development. Someday TSE will be finished. I have faith.
My plan had been to port PBN to TSE at that point, because cel shading and other spiffy 3D effects are much more efficient when you can use shaders. But if GG is pondering skipping Mac support for TSE, then they might also be planning to skip OpenGL shader support. After all, if they’re ditching cross platform support in favor of Microsoft OS’s, they don’t really need OpenGL anymore.
In other words, it looks like I might need to make different future plans. Porting to TSE is one thing. Porting from OpenGL is another. Losing Mac support is still another.
It all adds up, and not necessarily in a pleasant, warm fuzzy kind of way.
Of course, this is just speculation. Scary speculation. And I’m still about a year from finishing the TGE version of Paintball Net.
So we’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds.
-David
