The state of Mac and Linux gaming • Hacker News Board

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#21

Post by plorkyeran » Sat, May 08, 2010, 4:19 PM UTC

ovi256 wrote: post #16

plorkyeran wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NoCD cracks are intended for piracy, but there's generally nothing stopping you from using them with legitimate copies of games.

I've seen this question raised so many times on games forums, that I speculate more CD cracks are used by legitimate users than pirates.

While there's certainly a nontrivial number of legitimate users that use CD cracks, I highly doubt they're the majority. Reports on PC game piracy rates vary greatly, but they tend to be in the range of 40-90%. Even at the low end of 40%, you'd need two-thirds of the legitimate users using cracks just to have equal numbers of legitimate and illegitimate. If the piracy rate is over 50%, then it's flat out impossible.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#22

Post by xenophanes » Sat, May 08, 2010, 4:53 PM UTC

mambodog wrote: post #3

I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Mac OS only license) despite being a fairly avid gamer (and game design major) and using Mac OS as my primary OS, because buying a Mac game means that I've effectively tied my purchase to a weaker gaming platform. I think this is part of the reason for the high…

> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006.

As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch.

Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#23

Post by chewbranca » Sat, May 08, 2010, 4:59 PM UTC

At least some gaming companies have realized that launching on windows, osx and linux just means that anyone and everyone can play your game.

I'm a big fan of Heroes of Newerth, which plays great on my linux box, but it also runs on osx and windows. Its also only $30 bucks and launches in a few days.

http://www.heroesofnewerth.com/

Linux is always getting more popular, and I think more companies will realize that it makes sense to provide a working solution to all users, not just on windows.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#24

Post by mambodog » Sat, May 08, 2010, 5:31 PM UTC

slyn wrote: post #10

omarqureshi wrote: post #7

Thing is with Blizzard games is that the performance suffers on a Mac, especially if you've had a chance to compare Warcraft 3 and the Starcraft 2 Beta on both Windows and OSX on the _same hardware_ Probably something to do with OpenGL vs DirectX, but, the performance difference is stupid. Im hoping that Steam won't be the same.

Blizzard, Id, and Valve must be riding on Apple to fix this because 10.6.3 had a large focus on improving OpenGL and driver performance, and supposedly the beta for 10.6.4 does also. Hopefully its the start of a continuing trend and not just a temporary thing.

In some ways Apple is really positioned well to facilitate really great 3d graphics performance on the Mac, due to the fact that they only have to support a relatively small number of hardware configs, especially only a few GPUs, and only one 3d graphics API (OpenGL). They just have to give a shit about games for once.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#25

Post by yason » Sat, May 08, 2010, 5:36 PM UTC

linhat wrote: post #12

"They often spend more on launch advertising than on actual development-- for example, Modern Warfare 2 spent $50 million on development, and $150 million on launch advertising" i wish it would have been the other way around...

Personally, I just think of the corollary: If a game or a product is good enough, they won't need $150 million in advertising.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#26

Post by moultano » Sat, May 08, 2010, 6:24 PM UTC

thribbler wrote: post #14

A question about PC gaming. It can be irritating to have to keep the game disc inserted in order to play, even after the install. One reason is that children frequently empty the drive trays and discs can quickly get scratched. Is there a way around this or am I being hopelessly naive?

What games do you buy that are still on a disc?

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#27

Post by moultano » Sat, May 08, 2010, 6:26 PM UTC

I wouldn't use flash game sites as an estimate of the number of linux gamers. Flash is probably the worst way to experience anything on linux. (Unfortunately, I don't have a better idea for how to measure it.)

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#28

Post by duskwuff » Sat, May 08, 2010, 8:09 PM UTC

xenophanes wrote: post #22

mambodog wrote: post #3

I think a big part of the problem with the Mac games market is that to some people, Mac games are worth less. I myself would never buy a Mac-only game (ie, a Mac OS only license) despite being a fairly avid gamer (and game design major) and using Mac OS as my primary OS, because buying a Mac game means that I've effectively tied my purchase to a weaker gaming platform. I think this is part of the reason for the high…

> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch. Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.

The Castle Fight crashiness appears to be the result of a file format hack the map author's used to "protect" the map -- custom unprotected versions work fine.

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#29

Post by whimsy » Sun, May 09, 2010, 10:06 AM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #5

I'm eagerly awaiting: Rage by id Software Diablo III by Blizzard StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty by Blizzard These are all going to be simultaneously released for Windows and Mac.

Notably, the StarCraft II beta is almost twice as large on OS X as it is on Windows. (At least, last time I checked.)

Re: The state of Mac and Linux gaming

#30

Post by xenophanes » Wed, May 12, 2010, 1:12 AM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #28

xenophanes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't age well. Try playing a game from before ~2006. As an example, I play Warcraft 3 a lot. Basic ladder works, but a fair amount of custom maps are broken on Mac and work on windows. OS upgrades made things worse. For example, Snow Leopard somehow makes Castle Fight crash -- the same version of the map worked fine on Leopard. I have to use bootcamp a bunch. Fortunately Blizzard sells dual platform games.

The Castle Fight crashiness appears to be the result of a file format hack the map author's used to "protect" the map -- custom unprotected versions work fine.

Cool. What hack? The only ones I know about are replacing some of the world editor files with zero byte files, and moving the jass file into the scripts directory. But I'm pretty sure those are mac safe.

BTW I played Castle Fight under the name curi.