Mac New Games 2014
Play Games Online at WildTangent Games! Play 1,000's of Casual Games, Enthusiast Games and Family Games! Try, Buy, or Rent! New Mac games and new Mac game releases from Big Fish Games! Stop by daily for new game releases and new game downloads for your Mac.
Over the past 30 years, it's safe to say that the Macintosh has had a .. complicated .. relationship with gaming. While it's unlikely that the Mac will ever be a premiere gaming system like a console or even like a PC, 2014 brings a certain equilibrium, along with a lot of room for improvement.
A brief history of Mac gaming
Games abounded on the Apple II, which in its day was the most popular computer in the world. Many hobbyist programmers had parlayed their experience writing games into careers, and companies (and fortunes) were founded. But the Macintosh's introduction in 1984 changed things. It was radically different from computers before it.
The Mac arrived with pre-made software (including a game called Through the Looking Glass, made by Apple, pictured above). But uncustomary for its time, the Mac without a built-in programming language, which made it a tough sell for hobbyist programmers and others interested in making video games for the nascent system. As programming tools improved, as developers gained skill and as more people bought the Mac, games inevitably followed. But games on the Mac never obtained the critical mass that they did on the burgeoning PC platform. As the Apple II waned, so did Apple's influence in the game development market, and the result was a shift in both industry development and consumer buying habits to PC games.
- Aug 20, 2014 The 2014 MAC football season is nine days from the announcement of this new deal, and since this deal involves the reworking of the final three years of the MAC's old deal, it was important for.
- 91 rows Feb 01, 2020 DoTA 2 is another risk-free game to test the waters if you’re new to Mac.
- Is the new $499 Mac Mini powerful enough for Steam gaming!! Is the new and just released 1.4 GHz Mac Mini powerful enough to play games on Steam. I'm assuming that Steam is 'online' and the all the computing and processing takes place on Steam's servers remotely, but I wanted to double check.
Point click adventure games mac and cheese. Mac games have been a sideline business ever since. There have been a few Mac-only and Mac-first developers (Bungie, Halo's creator, famously started on the platform), and a few others that treat the Mac equally with the PC (such as Blizzard). But there's no original high-profile game development on the Mac.
Instead, the Mac game market — outside of the indie scene and the outliers like Blizzard who do do Mac and Windows versions together — is dominated by companies that license popular games from publishers on other platforms, convert the games to run on OS X, and sell those games independently.
Changing distribution
As big box computer retailers like Comp USA slid into irrelevance, changing tastes and a diversified Apple product line also forced game boxes from the shelves of many Apple retail stores. By 2010, commercial Mac game publishing was on life support. But two things happened to change the fortunes of Mac game makers dramatically: Steam and the Mac App Store.
It's the rise of digital distribution that has really revitalized the Mac game scene. Valve's Steam game service, and accompanying development tools released by Valve, have led to a steady stream of commercial and indie game releases on the Mac. Valve also deserves credit for implementing Steam Play, which enables users to buy a game once for one platform and use it elsewhere — so people who have already bought PC versions of games don't need to repurchase them for the Mac.
The Mac certainly isn't on even footing with the PC, but Steam has lowered the barrier to entry for some game developers who didn't have either the programming expertise or the marketing acumen to reach Mac gamers before.
The Mac App Store was another sea change for Mac game publishers. It provided a purchasing and distribution mechanism that millions of Apple product owners were already familiar with — the Apple ID used to make purchases from the iTunes Store and App Store — and applied it instead to Mac apps.
These days, Mac games can be found through an ever-increasingly number of download services, and most game publishers are only too happy to offer up their titles to new services if it means increasing their distribution. The biggest problem many of them have — even Apple and the Mac App Store — is gaining the trust of the customer enough to garner payment details. With all the stories of identity theft, consumers have every reason to be gun-shy about giving out their credit card information online.
Still, digital distribution has breathed new life into a business that, only a few years ago, was almost totally moribund. Mac game publishers like Aspyr and Feral regularly dominate the Top Ten list of paid game apps on the Mac App Store, and Transgaming often works with leading PC publishers to create Mac versions of games, as well. Both companies see their products sold alongside their PC counterparts on Steam, and have a fairly wide digital distribution network besides.
Changing tastes
It's also worth noting that consumer buying habits have changed. Many more people own Macs now than used to, but they come to the Mac with a different set of expectations than they once did. And gaming is the last thing on many of their minds.
Instead, they're buying Macs to get online, to create files they need for work, to avoid malware, or because they need a computer and they don't want the hassle of dealing with a PC. Games are typically pretty low on their list at all. They may have a game console, or they may find gaming on their tablet or smartphone to be perfectly sufficient.
Overwhelmingly, Mac owners don't self-identify as gamers. It's entrenched behavior for gamers to get systems made for gaming, and for many of them, that means a PC that can run the latest cutting-edge games. Admittedly, PC sales are in the toilet, but that hasn't stopped PC game sales from surging in recent years.
So for the truly game oriented who choose to use Macs, Boot Camp has become a go-to solution to help them get their jones for games that never make it to OS X. Boot Camp lets you run Windows on your Mac natively, and it turns out that Macs are pretty good Windows PCs. In fact, the Windows version of the same game will often run better on Boot Camp than it will on OS X, thanks to differences in the way that graphics drivers and other core system elements are handled.
There's also another big reason why PC gamers stay away from the Mac - the device architecture itself. PC gamers are shade tree mechanics. They love to tweak their systems with upgraded video cards, better CPUs, faster components. That's by and large something you simply can't do on the Mac. And that's something that Apple is unlikely to change, certainly not to fit the needs of a fairly small niche of users.
Will Mac gaming ever achieve critical mass?
There are a few things working against the Mac platform ever achieving parity with PC or console systems — installed base, developer expertise and developer support are among the most prominent.
Despite the surging popularity of the Mac, it still remains a niche. So for many publishers, it simply still doesn't make business sense to divert resources into Mac game development and publishing if it means taking away from a core business selling to PC and console gamers. That's changed, as the sales of Macs have risen, and more and more companies are taking a serious look, but for many, it's still not worth it.
That leaves the prospects of companies like Aspyr, Feral and Transgaming safe — they have years of experience managing Mac conversions, assuming the risk themselves. The downside is that this has often led to a delay in the time between a game's debut on other platforms and its release on the Mac.
Developer expertise is another critical issue. At this point, generations of game developers have grown up playing and making games on PCs (and consoles), while the talent pool for Mac games is a lot smaller. A lot of the same principles apply, and there are a lot of cross-platform 'middleware' tools to simplify the process, but code development is art and science, and it's very easy to make a mediocre or bad Mac app, and much more challenging to make a good one. That's best left to people with experience, and those are still few and far between, especially in the game development world.
To that end, Apple could certainly be doing more to attract game developers. Apple has dedicated developer relations staff, and some of its developer relations people work with game developers, specifically. But there's no uniformly coordinated effort to improve the OS X platform for gaming, as there was years ago at Microsoft when they developed their DirectX API.
In the end, perhaps gaming shouldn't have any higher a priority at Apple than anything else — it's hard to argue with the results. They're the most profitable computer company in the world. But speaking as a long-suffering gamer and a Macintosh user, I'd love to see Apple do better here. However, even I have to accept the changing face of gaming. I do less and less of my gaming on a computer and more and more on my mobile devices. And I'm far from alone.
How about you? Do you game on your Mac or do you use something else? Let me know in the comments.
Fishing timeC.J.'s next Fishing Tourney will be in July
There are four Fishing Tourneys each year in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here's when they are and what the rules are for participating.
New Game
A few weeks ago, Apple updated its iMac desktop line with 'Retina' displays—an Apple marketing term used to denote LCDs with a pixel density high enough that individual display elements are invisible to the unaided eye at typical viewing distances. On Apple’s iPhones, the 'Retina' moniker means a PPI of at least 300; for MacBook Pro portables, it means about 220. The new iMac’s 27' 5120x2880 LCD panel has a PPI of 218, putting it just below the 15' MacBook Pro’s 220 PPI.
Those numbers translating into a stunning screen is unsurprising, and now that I’ve got one on my desk to play with, I’ll absolutely add my voice to the chorus of other reviewers saying that the new iMac looks amazing. I haven’t yet attached a colorimeter to the display and gone to town—that’s coming in the next few days—but here’s the color space information right out of the box:
In spite of how sharp and beautiful the screen looks, I was hesitant as I pulled the thing out of the box. After all, I’m that rarest of rare birds: a PC gamer who also happens to do most of his gaming on a Mac. My personally owned desktop is a 2013 iMac with all of Apple’s built-to-order options checked (except RAM, of course—there’s no reason on a desktop computer to pay the Apple tax on RAM when third-party stuff works just as well), which couples a 3.5GHz Haswell i7-4771 CPU together with a 4GB GeForce GTX 780M. It’s certainly not the fastest gaming rig, but it’s more than enough to drive the 2560x1440 display at native resolution with high settings (along with AA and AF) in most games.
In spite of the strides OS X has taken in recent years, though, I do the majority of my gaming booted into Windows. I’ve resisted the idea of a Retina iMac for years because of the potential impact it would have on gaming performance. It’s one thing to stuff a video card into an iMac that’s powerful enough to smoothly display the OS X interface with the resolution-independent scaling tricks the Mac does these days—but it’s quite another to reboot into Windows and actually try to game at native resolutions.
So that, dear readers, is precisely what I did when my review iMac arrived on Saturday. I unboxed it, snapped photos—after a few years working at Ars, I now compulsively photograph basically every piece of gear I unbox, sometimes without even realizing I’m doing so—and then fired up the Boot Camp assistant to get Windows 8.1 installed.
The hardware
Apple sent us an upgraded review iMac. Our review unit trades in the stock 3.5GHz i5-4690 CPU for a quicker 4.0GHz i7-4790K, along with a quicker Radeon R9 M295X GPU (replacing the stock R9 M290X). The two additions each tack $250 onto the iMac’s base $2,499 price, bringing the total up to $2,999 (plus tax, depending on your location).
New Games Online
This is a steep price to pay for a desktop computer, but don’t forget that 5K screen. A similar panel from Dell is expected to run you $2,499 just by itself when it becomes available this quarter.
Cinebenching it
Mac New Games 2014 Online
Before departing for the land of Windows, I wanted to quickly hit the new iMac up with Cinebench, a free and readily available cross-platform graphical benchmarking tool that we’ve used before on desktop devices. Straight away, the Retina iMac’s Radeon R9 M295X and i7 posted much higher numbers than my loaded 2013 iMac:
Mac New Games 2014 Free
With these numbers out of the way, I bounced into Microsoft-land.