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With these developments in mind, and considering the massive gains of this graphics performance update, the Mac’s gaming future looks pretty bright. I don’t think anyone besides the most zealous of your gaming friends could blame you for getting your shades ready.
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Inside Snow Leopard Graphics Update’s surprising gains | Games | MacUser | Macworld
Like David, I’m optimistic about the future of Mac gaming. However, there are some very big challenges ahead that I believe will slow Mac adoption as a gaming system.
As Dave points out, the largest challenge is hardware; particularly not hardware that can be upgraded without a huge investment in the first place. Apple’s non-upgradeable systems aren’t exactly much better either given the higher price you pay for a decent system. Pricing out a Macbook this last weekend getting even the lowest end Apple laptop cost as much as $400 more then similar PC laptops in terms of CPU, GPU & RAM. Granted, you’re going to get stuck with a crap case/size, keyboard and trackpad, not to mention battery life. High specs aren’t that important to a lot of Mac users, other then organizing large photo libraries or watching Flash videos they’ll rarely see their CPU’s jump (they might run out of RAM though). Gamers are a lot less forgiving, they live by the power of their machines and they will often pay a premium for high performance hardware but typically at heavily budgeted prices by building and upgrading their own systems.
Until Apple addresses this market it’s going to hold the platform back. Existing Apple users will start gaming on their Apple hardware, but gamers won’t go out and buy Apple hardware unless they find other features compelling.
The other issue is that we need to see more game developers join the fray, Valve (and Blizzard) is big, especially for PC gamers but they are hardly the only AAA developer that needs to get on board before the Mac gaming platform is fully legitimized. The rub here is that while PC gaming is experiencing a bit of a resurgence lately it is still shadowed by cheaper and more accessible consoles. If PC is a niche of gaming how much more so is the Mac? A lot rides on the next few years and particularly what and when the next generation of consoles will arrive to catch up with the quality higher performance PC’s can produce. OnLive is another big question mark, if it’s adopted widely and cloud gaming grows that could change the playing field significantly.
