OK, I may be wrong about Ambrosia (no need to get your knickers in a twist about that). But my beef with Apple is that if you look at most, if not almost all the games coming from PC to Mac, they are coming from porting houses and not the original devs/publishers themselves. This creates a limitation on what can be played on Macs, because a porting house can only do so much with staff and budget. The original reasoning for it, an incompatibility with the PowerPC platform, is now erased due to the incorporation of x86 processors. A lot of the other reasons that held itself up originally (market share, OS incompatibilities) are starting to decay, especially since now Apple is the #2 comp manufacturer, and OS X has a 20% share of the market now (which is nothing to sneeze at). Further, when you look at the money dropped on porting a game from console to console (which is a beast in comparison to OS porting), it's not like the major publishers aren't strapped for cash when it comes to porting something like that. Further, the Mac OS X computer platform has a much smaller range of products to test, making QA and beta testing much simpler. So, tell me, what exactly gives that publishers besides EA and Blizzard aren't knocking on Apple's door?
You're the one who kicked up a stink about this to start with. Right: first off, what exactly do you mean by 'porting houses'? I can't think of ANY games brought over to Mac which have been ported by an external company, even IV's games are ported in-house by John and published through Ambrosia. The whole PowerPC/x86 issue is bollocks anyway, people should design with endian issues in mind from the start for easier porting. To your last port, they're both publishing games on OS X, Blizzard has done since the original Warcraft I believe. A long time, anyway.
I haven't been entirely certain, but something tells me through what Valve's Gabe Newell said about the Steam platform never coming to OS X that Apple has a lot to do with it. For starters, let's look at the product mentality on most of these comps: WYSIWYG. A fine idea, lowers costs, except that with gamers it means that two years down the line a comp won't work with a specific game because, say, the graphics card isn't good for it, and you can't effectively replace it. There was a recent controversy involving the new edition Mac Pros, in which the nVidia 8800 GT was available not only to new edition Mac Pros, but also available in an "upgrade kit" form for older Intel Mac Pros. Except that upgrade kit didn't work initially, causing censorship on the Apple forums (which they've been doing a lot of lately), and a well-crafted but nasty letter to El Jobso that he actually responded to. This never would have been an issue if nVidia and AMD/ATI spent a little money (prolly less money than making these OEM cards) creating Mac variants of the ForceWare and Catalyst drivers, respectively. So why don't they? Because then on Apple's end, they would have to suck up and deal with tech issues on their end that they're not willing to spend money on.
Yeah, it's slightly annoying that we can't swap in new GPUs easily, but it's not a big deal really. If things like IV's games didn't use immediate mode (*glare*) they'd run fine on older machines, and even top GPU-intensive games can have fallbacks to lower quality.
Furthermore, there is a quality control/approval issue that Apple is zealous about. You may have noted this with the whole iPhone SDK fiasco, in which all products from the SDK can only work with Apple's approval, literally. Same thing is applicable to OS X, though. Before anything gets sold as an OS X product, a licensing fee has to be paid, and some "quality control" testing needs to be done for it. Considering the upgrade period between OS X versions are relatively short (at least, in comparison to, say, Windows), this doesn't give developers a lot of time to make sure the current OS X works with their product. DigiDesign is one example: As of 5 months since Leopard's release, ProTools is only compatible with Leopard on the HD version, version 7.4, on the "current 8-core Mac Pros" (their words, not mine). Considering that last part is new, this makes ProTools only available to a few hundred out of tens of thousands of ProTools customers from HD to M-Powered. It took a several weeks for Adobe to make CS3 work with Leopard, and I think CS2 and CS still don't work.
Do not touch the Digidesign issue, I might be forced to visit you and stab you in the face. I am seriously pissed at them now with the Leopard thing because I was told
by one of their representatives, in person, that Leopard compatibility would be ready by December 2007. It's bullshit.
People who don't do screwy things with the system in their apps, however (ie, 99% of developers) have compatibility straight off the bat. Oh, also:
Before anything gets sold as an OS X product, a licensing fee has to be paid, and some "quality control" testing needs to be done for it.
Bullshit.
Finally, OS X doesn't have its own gaming API or middleware platform for which devs can work with to port easily and effectively without going through hoops. The majority of all PC games run on the DirectX API, with very few games per year being compatible with the OpenGL and OpenAL standards that Apple supports. This makes porting unnecessarily more difficult and tedious than it should be. Apple releasing a variant of DirectX, an OS X form of gaming API, or even an official middleware platform ala Cider that allows some degree of DirectX compatibility would resolve this problem, effectively reducing the gap to at most a month between releases.
DirectX is a boil on the arse of humanity and should have died out like the piece of crap that it is about 10 years ago. People should be using OpenGL and OpenAL from the get-go, and they should certainly be abstracting their rendering enough that it's possible to swap between the two relatively easily. Seriously, folks, writing a GLSL->HLSL convertor isn't that difficult. It's the developers themselves that are responsible for this.
By no means were my words vindicative of IV's decision on the Mac port, nor of Ambrosia's capability to port. My words were against Apple, because there is something seriously fucked-up about how they approach games. It is almost like Apple before had poked the platform with a stick to confirm its gaming capabilities. The deal with EA and the creation of the Cider middleware platform are steps in the right direction, but Apple has to address some its own issues before it can be taken seriously on the matter of games.
Funny how John Carmack has always supported OS X, then.
