Valve on Mac prompts interest from other game developers
updated 09:45 am EST, Wed March 10, 2010
DICE, Gas Powered Gas titles likely?
At least two major game developers are now considering Mac ports in the wake of Valve's move to offer support. Among these is Gas Powered Games, known for titles like Dungeon Siege and most recently Supreme Commander 2. "We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward," says company founder Chris Taylor. "We're in 100 percent support of it, absolutely."
Taylor insists that it is relatively easy to port Windows games to the Mac, as both platforms rely on Intel processors and ATI- or NVIDIA-based graphics hardware. The developer further tells The Escapist that the Mac has become more attractive recently because of a surge in system sales during the last year. "It shows that the OS X platform is really picking up speed," he comments. "That's super exciting, we need that in the world. We need that kind of balance in our market."
While GPG has no specific titles in mind, Swedish outfit DICE says it may be ready to do a Mac port of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, just recently launched for Windows and consoles. "We're currently investigating the possibility of making BFBC2 available on Mac," says one of the company's lead developers, Karl-Magnus Troedsson. Like Valve, DICE could be a major aid to the Mac due to the popularity of its games as multiplayer titles.
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Joined: Dec 2004
Great News
Hopefully this will turn out to be great news for more reasons than are immediately apparent. For one thing, it might help coax video-card manufacturers to release cards and drivers for the Mac, and to produce proper software to control those cards. Game controller manufacturers may also look at the Mac again. Most importantly, maybe Apple will finally see the value in allowing consumers to upgrade video-card hardware on most of their desktop models. Until these things happen however, anyone who really loves to game will still be stuck gaming in Bootcamp. (For example, my additional ATI video-card and my game controller aren't supported on Mac OS X, but of course work fine when running Bootcamp. For this reason alone there is no way I will be buying any Mac games in the foreseeable future. I wish it was different, I would very much like to support Mac game developers, but until we have feature-parity with Windows the reality is that I'll be sticking with Windows for my games.)