What sort of games do you play on your Mac/Apple device?
I (sadly) have a Mac for work because I have to do some dev for iOS. I surely don't play on it.
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It's interesting results so far. I can understand game developers prioritizing Apple ports before Linux ports due to Apple holding the higher market share, and looking more profitable from statistics - but the results so far are showing that Apple owners are less likely to game on them. In my personal experience I've known Linux users to be more "serious" gamers, but again, that could just be a quirk of my social circle.
I pity you for having to work like that btw. ;)
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Gladly I also have a PC to work on, so I only use the Mac for iOS dev and do all the rest on my "normal" computer 🙃
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Since the false dilemma of "Macs vs. PCs" became redundant ten years ago, they've become like less-supported Linux gaming rigs, but with worse device drivers. Linux gamers are generally well versed in making games run on wine, or in Windows installs on VMs.
Gamers need to jump through a lot of hoops to get games working on Macs as easily as Linux, but when they do, the games run okay. I don't know of any games which run on Mac OS and not on Linux. This might be why native apple ports are more in demand than native Linux ports. I also don't know any Mac gamers, although a couple of my friends don't play games on their macs.
Developers go through a lot of effort to get into Apple's "walled garden" too, the kind of effort that involves lawyers and money. Macs are just overpriced tools for "non-computer people", and always have been. (Sorry to that iOS dev up there who doesn't know you can install xcode and stuff on your MacOS VM and distribute apps to itunes or whatever)
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Hehe, you're absolutely right. These days a Mac is a PC that pretends not to be. ;)
Theoretically publishing a Linux version when a Mac version is already available should be simple work, but sadly alot of devs don't seem to want to go that extra mile. Elite: Dangerous is one such example (and I was really disappointed about that one). :(
Currently on the Steam Store filtering by Mac OS X only gives 393 pages, and SteamOS + Linux 250 pages. Although alot of devs have gone above and beyond to support Linux, I've found alot more "casual" games for Linux than for Mac too. We'll try not to make this too technical, but given Linux's better OpenGL support this makes no sense to me, other than market share showing there being more Mac users on Steam than Linux users. :/
(On a sidenote, I've been given the option for the Steam hardware survey three times - once while running it through WINE to see how well it works, and the other two while running idlemaster in a VM running Windows) ;)
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yeah, it seems like I only get the Steam HW survey on my Windows box, despite using my Linux box (and starting steam on that one) much much more frequently and having my Steam Link connected to my Linux box several times per week.
I think I recall having read online somewhere that this is just due to the randomness of the survey and that other Nix users have gotten it. But for myself, I had the survey on at least 3 occasions last year; all of which were on the Windows box and never once on Linux.
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Sorry to that iOS dev up there who doesn't know you can install xcode and stuff on your MacOS VM and distribute apps to itunes or whatever
Since you can't legally do that, any professional work requires the use of real Apple hardware. Plus working with a hackintosh VM can be a pain at best. It's fun for hobby projects but not a good way to get actual work done.
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Macs are just overpriced tools for "non-computer people"...
Not for the many of us who are programmers and sysadmins and techs who consider OS X/macOS to be the best desktop UNIX on the planet.
Yes, there are a lot of things that are problematic about the Apple ecosystem, but the stereotype is false in a lot of ways.
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It really blows my mind that anyone would choose this inflexible platform to do programming or network administration work from. Everyone I've ever met who espouses MacOS as "the best" just doesn't have a choice, due to necessary work software or lack of confidence in their ability to teach themselves something more powerful. Since when is MacOS UNIX?
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OS X is a BSD derived OS (originally based on NeXTSTEP) which is IEEE POSIX and Open Group UNIX 03 certified.
It can run almost anything you can run on any other UNIX or GNU/LInux OS. Don't let the standard interface fool you.
If you had ever used it or seen it demonstrated by someone who knows UNIX, you'd know that.
To me, it provides the best combination of slick interface and open source/free software tools in a desktop. Obviously, GNU/Linux and Windows Server are the kings on servers, so I'm only talking about it as personal desktop OS.
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To cut a long story short for anybody interested in the history of this, BSD chose an open source license for their OS which allowed ANY use (as in, you can change it, make it closed source, and sell it).
From my short periods playing around on other peoples' Macs it feels like a *NIX with less freedom to the user.
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I have a Macbook Pro that I got through work - it isn't something I'd have bought for myself, but I do use it as my main laptop and as I do a lot of travelling I've done a fair bit of gaming on it. I play the kind of games I'd usually play on my desktop - I just have less choice. Borderlands 2, Civ 5, XCOM EU, some of the Telltale titles, Half-Life, Portal and other Valve games are all stuff I've spent time on.
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It's a nice computer, I just wouldn't buy one because they're too overpriced. Out of my housemates, friends, etc who consider themselves gamers almost all use consoles - mostly Xbox. I know three people in real life who use Steam - two are fairly casual gamers and use Windows PCs and one uses a Mac (which he got the same way as me) and he plays mostly Borderlands and CoD. Beyond that I just know people who do casual mobile gaming and the main platform would be Android with a few iOS users. I'm the only person I know who ever uses Linux for gaming. I don't know how much that helps your survey - but I'm not sure you'd get the most the most representative sample just asking here.
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Heh, you're probably right there (about not getting the most representative sample from SG), but of all the options it seemed the most appropriate place to get honest answers without starting an OS war. I was very careful with the wording in the original post to try and make it understood that this was an honest survey, and not a competition.
Most of my real life friends on Steam use Linux for gaming, and a few that I've met through SG/other forums, but the rest probably are on Windows.
I'm mostly curious why Apple seems to be getting priority for ports (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, the more choice the better), but from my personal experience I've found Linux users to be more "serious" gamers, and found it odd that Apple seems to be getting priority.
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I'm mostly curious why Apple seems to be getting priority for ports...
It's the halo effect from iOS on phones and tablets as well as income stats. People perceive Apple users as having more disposable income and a greater willingness to spend that income, so OS X/macOS gets targeted because of that and the insane success and profit margins of iPhones and iPads, especially with mobile gaming.
Basically, many developers go where they perceive the money to be, and a lot of them think that there's more potential from OS X/macOS than GNU/Linux.
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I'll just leave it here…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiAgrrwL_mk
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I used to play a lot of WoW, Starcraft, Civilization and xcom (1 and 2), I'm not big on MP games, but used to play a bit of L4D2 with some friends. I've also played through all of the valve games on it - portal, halflife etc.. as well as a fair bit of Elite Dangerous, borderlands, and a bunch of others ..
But there was (it is improving) a serious lack of games, it's not due to the hardware, it was just the publishers .. I ended up buying a pc purely to play games on, (actually, I bought it when Fallout 4 got announced as PC/Console only), and use the Mac for more serious stuff now, coding, drawing, pretty much anything that's not gaming.. Admittedly I could have ran windows on the Mac, but I'd rather keep different os' on different machines .. I also much prefer the OSX desktop environment than any other..
As other people have said, they are expensive, but I kept my iMac from 2009 - 2015, and it was still good, I've never kept a pc that long in my life, I find that they seem to wain after about 3-4 years .. I think the bonus that you get, is that because Apple controls the ecosystem entirely, they only have to develop an OS to suit a very limited range of hardware, whereas with PC, you might have an intel chip, a gigabyte motherboard, a soundblaster soundcard. an MSI graphics card, a Dell monitor, a Razer Keyboard, a logitech mouse .. etc.. etc.. but that has the flipside of limited upgrade-ability .. as in, you pretty much can't, and you straight up can't at all with the newer machines.
Anyway, that's a lot more than the two lines I was going to write ..
Kharn out ..
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Yeah, I spent from 1991 - 2000 or so playing Elite and FE2 .. Was on an Amiga.. Never played FFE though, I heard it was quite buggy?
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Buggy is an understatement. Basically I liked FFE because it was FE2 with more ships.
Some of the bugs were crazy. In FFE This was the blue and green planet we call "Earth" :/
http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Earth/brown_earth.gif
Also... as an FE2 player, you know just how wrong the engines on this ship are...
http://community.fortunecity.ws/wembley/trafford/74/images/pictures/ffe/courier3.gif
The missiles still couldn't launch properly either :/
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This might not mean much, but according to the last Steam survey, 3.31% of users are Mac users, and 0.80% are Linux users.
By the way, the percentage of users who are "serious" gamers isn't what matters, but their absolute number. Mac might have a smaller percent of such gamers and still win big simply because it has a lot more users overall. As an example, the vast majority of phone players are casual, yet Final Fantasy 3-6 games sold in the hundreds of thousands each on Google Play (and I'd imagine even more on iOS).
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My point was that it makes little sense to prioritize porting "serious" games to Apple if they're less likely to sell (less profit), compared to the latest Bejewelled clone, and the opposite for Linux (more profit). I could be entirely wrong of course, I'm just hypothesizing here.
Btw, the Steam hardware survey is notoriously unreliable. I've been given the option for the Steam hardware survey three times - once while running it through WINE to see how well it works, and the other two while running idlemaster in a VM running Windows, never once has the native Linux client given me the hardware survey, and from what I've read SteamOS doesn't have the hardware survey at all. I imagine Linux users still make up a very small percentage of Steam's userbase, but I wouldn't trust the Steam survey. ;)
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My point was that 'less likely to sell' has to do with the absolute number of potential buyers, not the relative one. If there are 5 times as many Mac users as Linux users, then even if 10% of Linux users are serious games and only 3% of Mac users, Mac still has more people. This means that you might get an impression that Mac users don't play serious games that much even if on the whole there are more serious gamers there than on Linux.
There are a few possible reasons why people port to the Mac first, such as:
You're trying the last angle, and it's possible, but I think that there are Mac ports because they sell.
On Humble Bundle, Mac sales are typically about double the Linux ones. While that's also not completely representative of anything, it's yet another indication that the Mac is a bigger market.
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I do think we understand each other to a certain degree, but I have to disagree.
I'm going to exaggerate the math here just to make sure we're on the same page. ;)
In our given example (five times as many Mac users as Linux users), if 10% of Mac users are likely to buy a given FPS, wheres 90% of Linux users are likely to buy a given FPS, then the number of potential buyers for Linux is higher. This is however assuming that Linux gamers on Steam are more likely to buy more in the way of "serious" games than Mac users on Steam.
I have to disagree that Mac users on Steam pay more for games than Linux users (although in other places it may certainly be the case). On Humble Bundle I've regularly seen that Linux users donate the most, although for some reason I can't find the pie chart denoting donation by OS right now.
You are however, completely right, and I do agree with you agree with you completely. The Mac market is bigger (partially as there are more Mac ports than Linux ports), and so Mac users are more inclined to buy any given HB, when in the bundle there are more games they can play.
Being easier to port to Mac than Linux I'm not so sure about, could you please explain that one further?
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The possible reasons weren't necessarily real reasons. They're just suppositions. All I wanted to say was that there are most likely valid reasons for Mac being more attractive.
About easier to port, at least one reason would be much more limited hardware variations. Linux, like Windows, has a wide range of hardware (and drivers, and OS variations), which makes testing and optimisation harder.
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Ahhh I see. In that case we're in agreement. :)
And yes. the limited hardware variations between Mac models must make making a stable port for Macs alot easier than the mess of driver and distro support that creating a Linux port entails ;)
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You were comparing an extreme 10% of mac users compared to 90% of linux users.
Now, I'll grant that a high percentage of linux kinda makes sense - linux users are a lot more likely to be "nerds" or "geeks", and therefore much more likely to be "serious gamers".
But let's be slightly less extreme with our numbers.
Per the above, out of every 100,000 steam users, there 3,310 are mac users and 800 are linux users.
25% of those 3,310 mac users represents 827 people - which is more than all Linux users
20% of mac users represents 662 people, whereas 80% of linux users is only 640 people.
and I doubt the numbers are that bad for mac - not saying that mac users aren't casual gamers, but that very few casual gamers use steam. Which would explain why mac users are underrepresented - macs have 7.4% of market share, but only 3.3% of steam users. which is really amazing considering that most business computers are PCs, and most of those absolutely wouldn't have steam. Basically, there are significantly more mac gamers than there are linux gamers.
not gonna mention that I believe proportionally significantly more linux users have a PC than there are mac users that even own a copy of windows
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I was highly exaggerating the numbers to make sure me and ET3D were talking about the same thing
"I'm going to exaggerate the math here just to make sure we're on the same page. ;)"
You are right, less extreme numbers may have served the point better, but I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing.
For what it's worth, all the people I know that game on Mac don't use Steam at all, so that serves your point of Mac users being underrepresented on Steam compared to the actual market share.
Gonna have to call you out on one thing though, a PC running Linux is a PC. a PC running Wndows is also PC. A PC is a platform. not an operating system (I'm sure you already know this, but "PC/Mac/Linux") is a really... badly thought through argument. I remember running DOS and OS/2 on my PC, and Windows' roots in DOS and OS/2 left aside for a moment, DOS and OS/2 sure as hell weren't Windows.
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I use macbook for working purposes and play on it sometimes not-so-heavy games so it won't explode if I am on a business trip or smth, but mostly I use my windows home PC for that
also it's a usecase if I'm too lazy to sit on my chair and want to play something lying in my bed :P
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I game a fair bit on my MacBook Pro and/or my custom built hackintosh. Stuff I've played recently that would be more graphically intense includes Bioshock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and XCom:Enemy Unknown. I own a bunch of Xbox 360 controllers, so I also play local co-op games with friends pretty much every week. Noting too crazy and cutting edge, but I can run everything at decent settings even on my laptop.
I'm not a raving lunatic when it comes to apple, but I do like OSX. I will probably re-install windows on my hackintosh at some point to dual boot, but for now I have a fair number of good games to keep me busy.
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Interesting, I've never come across difficult to install games on OSX. The only game that hasn't run flawlessly for me is Bioshock Infinite (crashed a bit at first). My experience with gaming on Windows involves a fair bit of .ini file tweaking.
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Skyrim definitely needs a bit of tweaking, i remember fondly trying to squeeze out a few more frames through .ini tweaking to make it more playable on an ageing system.
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My experience is that most serious gamers who love Macs use their Macs for productivity and have a separate Windows gaming rig, or they dual boot and run Windows on their Mac when they want to game. It's really not that big of a deal, and points out a big flaw in the very asking of the question.
I personally do most of my lighter gaming on my Mac under OS X/macOS, and anything heavy on a Windows PC.
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Thanks for sharing your experiences, but I'd disagree with you that it points out a big flaw in the asking of the question.
If you have a market prepared to pull money from their wallet for more "serious" games, and another market who want their machines for work and/or casual gaming, which market does it make more sense to prioritise porting to? From a purely statistical viewpoint (ownership) I see the logic, otherwise I don't see the value in the decision.
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Serious games, AAA and indie. I play on a MacBook Pro with bootcamped Windows 10. For working (graphic/photo editing software) I use Apple OS. Games I've played recently: TF2, Fallout 4, Dungeon of the Endless, The Solus Project, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
I do really like my MBP, for sure there are stronger gaming rigs. I'm fine with both Apple machines and Windows computers. Both systems have their benefits.
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Looking at the amount of games on Steam that have Apple and Linux ports, I see that alot of the more "serious" games tend to prioritize Apple ports before Linux ports.
In my personal experience of people who use Apple devices they tend to be "casual" gamers, if gamers at all, and unlikely to buy and play more complex games, but that may just be in my personal social circle, so I'm putting this to the SG community.
So, as an honest question for Apple machine owners, what (if anything) do you actually play on your Apple? (NOT what do you play on your other gaming rigs)?
*Blacklist bait - one BL already for asking this question, who's next for asking what games they play? ;)
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