Posted by ReDDoT in Blue Milk & Cereal | 15 Comments
Blue Milk & Cereal: Would You Play TOR On A Mac If You Could?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
It is of no secret that the population of Mac users is consistently growing every year. It used to be that the market share or perceived hardware capabilities were reasons that many game developers steered away from the Mac. However, the times have changed – Macs are now spiced up with the same Intel chips found in any PC, and have access to the same 3D hardware as well, fully capable of running the modern games. There is a growing trend of more and more game studios supporting Mac OS natively. Valve is one of the largest and most lauded of them, and last year brought Steam, their back catalog, and all future games to the Mac. And needless to say, all Blizzard games have a had Mac version released day-and-date with the Windows version.
Yesterday during a Q&A panel with BioWare, we were told that there are no current plans for a Mac client, however BioWare confirms that SW:TOR “runs great” in Windows via Boot Camp. But, Boot Camp requires a user to purchase and install Windows on their internal boot drive. Not a cheap or pleasant option.
Personally, I will use a Mac to play TOR on-the-go. I am going to run Windows in a virtual client and hopefully be able to play TOR at decent settings. However, I would definitely appreciate getting a version of a game that runs natively on this laptop.
What about you? Would you want BioWare to release a Mac client for TOR? Do you have a gaming-capable Mac at work or home? Let us know below!
Editor’s Note: This isn’t intended to be a venue for a platform war, and the comments will be heavily moderated if it goes that way. This is simply to ask people if they would play on a Mac if it were an option. Keep the discussion on topic.
Loading ...
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I am hoping more games start to come out on all 3 major OSes. I know there are a lot of reasons that it is hard to make a game for linux, but a game like TOR running on the hero engine which has a lot of linux support makes me wonder about why Tor does not have linux support.
How many times can i vote for YES? ;)
But bootcamp will do the job.
As they said during the Q&A Session, and as Miysis said, Bootcamp does the job more than well =)
I just want to point out that Bootcamp requires purchasing and installing Windows on your computer. Therefore saying it runs on bootcamp is 100% equivalent to saying “This software runs on Windows”.
Whenever a developer says “We support Mac because their software can run on Windows via Bootcamp”, it is the same as them saying “we support Dell because our software runs on Windows installed on a Dell.”
If a developer actually made that second statement they’d think it was a joke: obviously you run on a Dell.
Since the parts that make it up (intel chips, nvidia/ati graphics cards, etc) are the same, the question is not does the software run on Apple hardware, but rather, does the software run on Mac OS X.
I would vote all 3 as the first comment said. Linux is on the rise not yet in the desktop market, but in the portable mark it is on fire. It’s even posed to become the worlds ‘most used’ os thanks to all those android phones, and now tablets. At any rate the market is changing and I think any company would be smart prepare for those changes. I image we will eventually see native Apple support. (And Linux support at least for the apps that will interface with TOR remotely, sort funny really. Chances are Linux is running TOR’s servers.)
I don’t have a Mac so no I wouldn’t. The vast majority of online users have Windows, the vast majority of gamers are Windows users, for a game at launch to spend the money for it to be compatible with any other system would be foolish in my opinion. Not in any way implying Windows is superior, that’s just foolish, it’s just a fact of life. When the game gets profitable I’m sure they will look at the option of expanding their reach by incorporating other systems.
As the article says, most major studios now or have long supported native Mac games. it’s not foolish, it’s a money maker, and only stands to get bigger as more Mac users are created every single day. It’s a huge market, hungry for good entertainment software.
More mac users aren’t created every day… unless you count iOS users, but I wouldn’t. It’s far from a “huge” market given their market share, the cost of redeveloping code for a native app most certainly doesn’t outweigh the % of a comparatively small market share.
Pretty sure there are more PS3s in the world than macs(pure speculation*).. probably better off developing for that, since you know 100% of that market is at least gamers(unlike the mac market which is still predominantly graphic processing/marketing users).
I’m glad everyone is weighing in with their opinions. But Joshua, I’m here to tell you everything you just typed is wrong. :)
This poll is just the beginning and I have a series of things planned to educate the community on the facts here, so stay tuned.
But just to address some of your points:
1) Yes. there are more new Mac users every day. Market share has been increasing year over year for about 8 years.
2) It’s a huge market. Huge. do you have any idea what 10-12% of the computer market equates to? The Mac market may be smaller. But it’s not small.
3) It doesn’t sound like you have the background in coding to be making statements like you did. The game is already created, and they don’t have to create it again from scratch… Display code, some net code… that’s it.
4) More Macs are sold each quarter than PS3 and Xbox 360 – combined. Also the Mac is a sneeze away from a PC… there are nearly zero barriers to bring it to the Mac vs. the consoles.
5) I will guarantee you that, percentage-wise, more Macs out there play games than Windows machines do. It’s a consumer market and Macs are consumer machines.
The amount of Mac gamers will be dispropotionate to the market share, and you can already see that trend manifesting itself in this very poll, as it has done time and time again.
Anyway, as I said, stay tuned… full dissertation coming soon™!
I’d prefer a Linux version :P, anyways MacOs is Unix too so if the game can run with OpenGL it will be easier to play on Linux but with wine beign optimistic.
I think lethality knows my stand on this. But to make it clear on why I voted no: I don’t use a max :D.
However in other news I might be getting one here shortly. Even then it’ll be a mac mini and I will not be playing games on it. My main rig now may be a mac-box after I get a new rig. That is tbd.
I also voted no simply because I do not have a Mac. It’s a hard issue, i think, for any game developer. For years the standard has been to develop for Windows. This created a frame of mind in which someone who wanted to play PC Games would build or purchase a PC for use with Windows. So it became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy as many gamers just stuck with Windows because it was the more diverse option.
Have things changed? Somewhat. Are things continuing to change? Sure. But that doesn’t change the fact that there is a stigma associated with Macs that they just don’t have the software options Windows has. I don’t see Macs becoming the dominant force in home computing in the next 5-6 years, or even the next 10. With that in mind, I can understand why they developed for PC. Though I agree with others that they will likely release a Mac version in the next year or so, if it seems necessary.
i play wow on my mac and would love it if i could play swtor the same way. not a fan of bootcamping, but i will if needed.
have a mac and wish it could be mac usable at release. I have to go the bootcamp route in order to play it
I absolutely would. Would save me from having to bootcamp into windows. TOR on a 27″ imac at 2560×1440 would be gorgeous.