Why you should support Mac OS X and Linux

[Jeff]

I thought this might be interesting to you guys. I was looking at David's sales data and Lugaru actually sold more copies on OS X than any other platform.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/12/why-...s-x-and-linux/

I'd be curious to hear what other cross platform developers have experienced.

[Jack Norton]

That's nothing new. For many people Mac OS provides much better sales than pc. Before I was doing proper marketing was the same for me: you put your mac games on apple.com and 3-4 other sites and you get incredible coverage (something that can't be done anymore on Pc).

Don't worry though, soon Mac will become like the PC market...

[princec]

Yup, we sell more on Mac than PC.

Cas

[GolfHacker]

Ditto for Mac sales. The sales ratio for my games is about 60% Mac, 35% Windows, and 5% Linux.

For affiliate sales, with all of the affiliate games we feature on our site, about 95% of those sales are for Mac.

[vjvj]

I'm buying a Mac this week for precisely this reason.

[siread]

This is good to hear. At the moment New Star Soccer 4 PC sales outweigh Mac by about 10 to 1. However, this is the first title in the series to get a Mac release and we have a big PC following. Hopefully it's a case of building up a mac fan base and getting the word out there.

[Cray]

Interesting stats Jeff & everyone who've shared. I saw this on Digg a little while ago by the way

At the moment all our games are windows only. Is adding support for another operating system (to a 2D game) very difficult other than the QA/testing involved?

[Xiotex]

Good job I am developing my latest game on a Mac primarily

[GolfHacker]

Originally Posted by Cray

At the moment all our games are windows only. Is adding support for another operating system (to a 2D game) very difficult other than the QA/testing involved?

Depends. It is very easy if you already wrote your code using cross-platform technologies like OpenGL, SDL, Java, and the like to develop your game. If you wrote it using MFC, DirectX, or some other Microsoft-specific libraries, you've got some potentially significant rewriting to do to your code (particularly if you did not restrict your Microsoft-specific calls to a limited set of very low-level classes or functions).

[Jeff]

A lot of people here swear by proprietary technologies that make it very difficult to support non-Windows platforms. That is actually what prompted this post -- to help evangelize open standards through our sales data.

If you stick with cross platform friendly technologies, then it's a piece of cake. If you are locked into proprietary technology, it can be really hard, if not impossible without a significant rewrite.

[Sim9]

Plus, most servers are running some variant of linux/unix, so supporting this platform allows users to run dedicated server builds of your game (if applicable) on a much wider range of available hardware.

[Bad Sector]

Originally Posted by Jeff

A lot of people here swear by proprietary technologies that make it very difficult to support non-Windows platforms. That is actually what prompted this post -- to help evangelize open standards through our sales data.

If you stick with cross platform friendly technologies, then it's a piece of cake. If you are locked into proprietary technology, it can be really hard, if not impossible without a significant rewrite.

It can be hard but not as hard as you describe it. For example, when i was working on a game company another programmer ported our engine from Direct3D+Windows to OpenGL+Linux/Mac in less than two weeks. The rest of the engine took months to be made.

[GolfHacker]

Depends also on how familiar someone is with Mac or Linux. If you've never seen or touched a Mac before, then there is a learning curve involved too. That was the case with me. I spent several weeks with a Mac for Dummies book and my new MacBook when I first got it. Some things are fairly standard, like the file browser, desktop paradigm, and so on. But other things are very different, like no right mouse button on laptop trackpads or Apple mice, the Command key, the dock, the way the menu bar works, etc.

Then there is the development environment. Figuring out what tools you need and where/how to get them takes time. Xcode takes some getting used to, because it is quite different from Visual Studio or other Windows-based IDEs you may have used. You need to learn about packaging (universal binaries, frameworks vs DLLs, dmgs vs installers), big endian vs little endian, etc.

So expect to spend some time learning about Mac if you've never used one or developed on one. It took me about 2 months to get Dirk Dashing up and running on Mac, and I had written it to be cross-platform from day one. Most of that time was spent learning the Mac platform and everything I described above.

One invaluable resource I found was the indie game developer community at idevgames.com. I found answers to lots of questions by searching through the forum posts, and there are several really helpful folks there who answered my other questions.

[cliffski]

You can always pay someone on a revenue split to port your games. That way, they can handle marketing and tech support for that port too. I've done this with 4 games now, and it works out ok for me.

[Red Marble Games]

If you don't mind a shameless plug, my business is porting Windows games to the Mac -- I've done Democracy 1 and 2, Kudos, and Kudos Rock Legend for Cliffski, nearly all of HipSoft's games, and work for Reflexive, Oberon/iPlay and others as well. I've been programming the Mac since 1988, and started Red Marble Games in 2002.

Cliffski's games have all been bestsellers on the Mac, and since I do all the tech support for the life of the game and as much (or as little) marketing as you want -- in addition to sales from my own growing site -- it can be a pure source of passive income with zero extra effort on your part.

OK, end of the advert.

Mark

[cyrus_zuo]

I very much agree with the article. I've mentioned it before, but I think, especially for indies, Mac is an amazing opportunity. It's what the PC market was 10 years ago.

I also would recommend Mark's work.

I can't imagine doing a game today and not doing a Mac version as well...but then Reflexive released 9 Mac games in 2008 (2 we actually published). I think 9 Mac games in 12 months kind of speaks for itself .

[GolfHacker]

Mark, do you have an affiliate program for your Mac ports, or know how I could get some of those games on my site? Unfortunately, they're not all available thru Reflexive or Big Fish, and I couldn't find them in Plimus or BMT's product lists. I'd love to add Snowy, Go-Go Gourmet, Turbo Subs, and a few others to my catalog as they are very family-friendly.

[desmasic]

Originally Posted by Red Marble Games

If you don't mind a shameless plug, my business is porting Windows games to the Mac -- I've done Democracy 1 and 2, Kudos, and Kudos Rock Legend for Cliffski, nearly all of HipSoft's games, and work for Reflexive, Oberon/iPlay and others as well. I've been programming the Mac since 1988, and started Red Marble Games in 2002.

Cliffski's games have all been bestsellers on the Mac, and since I do all the tech support for the life of the game and as much (or as little) marketing as you want -- in addition to sales from my own growing site -- it can be a pure source of passive income with zero extra effort on your part.

OK, end of the advert.

Mark

Only 2D games ports? (curious)

[Alistair Hutton]

Is there a flash to fullscreen product similar to sxfXXL for the Mac?

[Xiotex]

MDM Zinc I believe. Not tried it though.