Mac versions, the business case

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I did a Mac version of my last game, thinking it was a no-brainer, because I had some previous Mac experience, was using SDL which already Mac-compatible, and perhaps because I just thought it would be cool.

In fact, the initial 'get it running' stage went quite quickly - a couple days maybe.

But overall, I invested quite a bit more time on the Mac version. It complicated issues of library choice (music playback and DRM) by limiting my options. The extra testing and tweaking was time-consuming. And adding that last 5% of 'Mac polish' features was a pain.

I'd probably put the effort of doing and supporting the Mac port at 10-15% of my total time spent on the project.

So, did it payoff? I'm not really sure, as I haven't gotten per-platform breakdowns from my publisher. Off my own site, Mac sales are roughly 16% of total sales, but my own site's sales are a small fraction of total revenue from the game (i.e. portal revenue), and I'd guess the Mac portion of the latter is small.

For those of you who've had a portal-oriented game that got into the major portals, and a Mac version of same, how have your Mac sales been? I'm interested more in the 'average' case, rather than the Mac afficianado who spends a lot of time marketing to the Mac audience, getting it in all the right Mac locations, etc.

[Andy]

Thanks for sharing pretty useful info Phil!

[Jack Norton]

I'd probably put the effort of doing and supporting the Mac port at 10-15% of my total time spent on the project.

Those problems happens if you don't use a readymade cross-library. My game PTK mac ports usually takes 10 minutes (5 to copy the files / assets, and 5 for the mac to compile, thanks xcode!).

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Those problems happens if you don't use a readymade cross-library. My game PTK mac ports usually takes 10 minutes (5 to copy the files / assets, and 5 for the mac to compile, thanks xcode!).

I know you're simplifying things, but still, I hardly believe it takes you 10 minutes to make and support a Mac version. Just adequately testing across a few different Mac platforms is a half day, if everything goes super-smoothly. Learning about the complicated processes for implementing self-extracting bundles (with several gotchas), supporting the Mac menu-ing system, and many other details, surely adds some time. Granted, with PTK, it might be far easier with a home-rolled engine, but overall, I'd say only about half my time spent on the Mac version was actually spent changing the code.

And XCode is no peach (If you're used to MSVC anyways). I'll leave it at that.

[arcadetown]

Developers tend to see a larger % of their direct sales from Mac since they can get good direct featuring on various Mac sites. From reports I've heard Mac versions never seem to account for more than 10% additional sales via most portals. Here they typically add 5% - 15% additional sales and sometimes up to 50%.

[lakibuk]

I noticed that your game was submitted to apple.com (most important download site for MAC games?) by PopCap.
Is it a common "service" by portals that they submit your game to download sites?
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/cards_puzzle/bonniesbookstore.html

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Yes, PopCap submitted it to Apple, and I *think* (not sure), put it on a portal or two that are Mac-oriented (GameHouse?).

But neither PopCap nor myself got aggressive in chasing down all the many sites/publications that cater to Mac gaming. From what I can tell, it's a small, insular community, and if a developer pursues it aggressively and/or with the right knowledge, they can get a lot of press, even for 'small' games that the PC press generally ignores. That's likely why some games put out by Mac-focused developers get ~50% of sales (or more) on the Mac platform. But I lack the knowledge/time/contacts to pursue that avenue agressively.

[cliffski]

why not partner with someone that *does* have experience of the mac platform and marketing? I did this for Democracy and was pleased with the results, although you were asking about more portal-friendly titles.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

why not partner with someone that *does* have experience of the mac platform and marketing? I did this for Democracy and was pleased with the results, although you were asking about more portal-friendly titles.

Can you disclose what your Mac sales were relative to your Windows sales, either pre- or post- giving the porting person their cut?

[Ryan Clark]

FizzBall is portal friendly, and it's also available for Mac (as was Fizzwizzle). For us, the Mac version of Fizzwizzle has definitely been worthwhile. We'd have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars without it, and it really wasn't much extra work.

Just by hitting up 3 Mac sites, you can generate thousands of dollars in sales:

apple.com
macupdate
versiontracker

I think the main hurdle for you (by the sounds of it) is that you use MSVC++ instead of GCC. I develop with GCC, regardless of the platform I'm working on (years ago I used Windows, then Linux, now I'm mainly a Mac user), which made ports very easy. You can try Dev-C++ (free) on Windows, if you're interested.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

I'd probably stay with X-Code, because I've used it before.

But it is NOT user-friendly, IMO - lots of hard to find, but vitally important, switches and stuff.

And my two Mac systems are both PowerPC, so I'd probably have to at least buy an Intel miniMac as an additional tester - more pain/cost there.

We'll see - maybe I'll get inspired :)

[linchear]

Did you have to do any special packaging with SDL?

I implemented SDL/Mac support with my game, but am curious if I have to ship SDL libraries along with the game. With Windows, it's just a matter of packaging the DLL files and the LGPL license.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

Yes, you can't put the SDL libraries loose in a folder - you need to include them in the package, whch is a bit tricky for a non-Mac head. (Not insurmountable by any stretch, but one of many small details you need to learn and get right on the Mac)

[val]

Frankly speaking, online sales of Mac version of Tank-o-Box were higher that version for Windows. So we were glad that we started porting it to Mac OS X.

But yes, now I am think it's better to use good multiplatform engine for development purposes rather than port the game from its roots.

[Jack Norton]

My reference to xcode was hilarious - I think is a horrible compiler, not good at all :)

PTK isn't just "a library". If you check the showcase:
http://www.phelios.com/ptk/showcase.html
you can recognize some topsellers - not my games, but what about LDW or Arcadelab or Funpause titles?
It is a *tested* library. Don't know the exact figures but try to guess how many copies were sold from the 3 developers mentioned above all together... ;)

[Sillysoft]

One great thing about the mac side is that it's pretty easy to go direct to consumers. Just hit up the 3 sites Ryan mentioned (plus macgamefiles.com) and they will all list your title for free, without taking any commission. Those tops sites will cover the majority of macusers looking for software. If your publisher has an exclusive then maybe you can't submit directly, in this case you're giving the publisher their cut for doing the very simple task of filling out a few web forms.

Apple is the biggest portal on the mac side, and you don't need a publisher to get listed with them. If you're doing the dev work to port to mac, my advice is to just go direct to the top mac sites.

[Emmanuel]

It takes us more than 10 minutes to port titles to Mac but it's definitely less than a day for porting as universal binaries here, and then a few days of testing. Since the codebase is absolutely identical (the couple of endianness issues for our games being addressed in code I haven't touched since A1), and I can test how OpenGL rendering looks like compared to D3D even on PC with the comfort of Visual Studio, we've yet to encounter mac-specific odd bugs using ptk.

Sales-wise, those couple days of work are incredibly worth it. For funpause, it allowed us to build a targeted customer base that is much easier to reach than PC customers, and it brought in tens of thousands of dollars through direct sales. Mac titles will generally convert higher than the PC version (although it still has to be a good game, obviously) but you will get many downloads easily. As Ryan said -- mac traffic is very concentrated and you just need to hit a few sites to get going.

For BFG, we've ported Mystic Inn and Atlantis Sky Patrol and both are top Mac sellers. We're growing a significant Mac channel (see my signature), so we'll be happy to consider Mac games or Mac versions of your titles as you submit them to us for distribution on our platform, as a complement to your own site's sales.

As for ptk, I'm obviously biased, but besides say, ASP, where we get virtually no support issues and a huge conversion rate, Mac games like Fish Tycoon and Virtual Villagers use ptk and are huge sellers -- they're fantastic games and that's the primary reason for purchases, but ptk seems to work well enough on all Macs to not lose sales to it.

Whatever engine/framework you choose to use (there obviously are also top selling SDL titles on Mac like Jewel Quest or Betty), porting is trivial in comparison to creating a great game mechanic, balancing it, paying for the art, audio, etc. Why limit your return on investment when you can reuse all of that and it will only take days to put your title on a ton of new channels?

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[tretmike]

Developers tend to see a larger % of their direct sales from Mac since they can get good direct featuring on various Mac sites.
I totaly agree with Brian. From our experience, it is more easily to get attention in Mac world when in Windows one. Rainbow Web (http://www.SugarGames.com/rainbow_web/) was featured on Apple site for a long time that gave us a lot of downloads and sales.

From reports I've heard Mac versions never seem to account for more than 10% additional sales via most portals. Here they typically add 5% - 15% additional sales and sometimes up to 50%.
I agree again. We released Mac version in June and have 6-7% additional sales. However I don't know yet the results of sales from some portals like gamehouse.com, etc.

[cliffski]

I'd guess my sales were around the 10-20% mark for Democracy. I havent totalled exact figures though.

[Arthur]

We like supporting the Mac, but we also look at the Mac versions as a hedge.

It is much easier to gain visibility on Mac, and certainly to secure direct sales from your website. Because of this what we have seen is that when your Windows product is doing poorly or so-so, the Mac will likely be pulling in a significant percentage of your sales relative to what you are selling on Windows. Even 50% or more, as has been mentioned. The better your game does on Windows, however, the smaller that Mac % is going to look until you start getting close to that 5-8% we hear about.

Windows is much noisier as a marketplace, but if you manage to get decent penetration there your numbers will resemble hardware demographics more and more, which is obviously mostly windows.

[Red Marble Games]

My business is porting Windows games to the Mac and then marketing them (I did the Democracy translation, for example), so I can't give you Mac sales as a percentage of Windows sales. But I thought it worth posting to say that I have found the Mac market to be somewhat fickle, so that in evaluating the statistics people report, you also need to consider the games they're selling. The Mac/PC percentage likely varies widely from game to game based on genre, (not to mention obvious things like production values etc.). I guess the same is true on the PC side, but I'm still trying to work out the magic formula that makes a game popular. Democracy has been a good seller, and that surprised me a little; other games I have translated that I thought would be big hits have not moved the needle much.

I guess the point is that there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to the question "Is a Mac version worth the effort?"

Mark

[Bad Sector]

...i need to get a Mac...

In other news: XCode is not a compiler but an IDE that uses GNU GCC for compiling and GNU GDB for debugging.

Hey, that's a good one: i use GNU GCC in Windows (MinGW) and Linux (obviously). When i get a Mac, i'll use that in Mac too. So long for compiler incompatibilities.

Really, i don't understand why one would want to not use GCC at all... (okay, the lack of a decent IDE for Windows is a good excuse).