ak™;1108032 said:
Your missing the point. I'm speaking specifically of why a developer would choose to support these platforms in general, and not about multiplayer games that require license keys. This concept doesn't apply to steam or or specifically, but devolving games as a whole, and porting them to these Mac and Linux platforms. I know you probably don't hold as much excitement as I do for the future of game development for open source platforms (I may be wrong though), I would love a world in which I didn't have pirate some proprietary garbage winblows winfail machine in order to play some decent game. I would much rather run an open source free operating system which actually performs more efficiently with the CPU than either windows or osx.
Buy a new computer and the OS comes included... why you'd feel you need to pirate something rather than actually pay for it is beyond me.
In regards to why more game developers make games more for Windows than Mac, it's simply more to do with the fact that the market is much larger for Windows based computers than Mac computers.... ie: there's more customers in one group than the other.
Making a video game just for Mac.... even if it's the best game out there today, that won't be enough to entice people to go out and purchase an expensive Mac to play that game.
Even if they were going to make the game for both Mac and PC, they need to look at the overall cost to them and whether or not they can actually make a profit or at the very least, break even based on the amount of resources and man hours they'd need to spend working on it.
Why spend a lot of your own money, man power and resources on something that may never get you back the return you need to justify it all?
That's bad business and as unfortunate as it may be, the game industry is a business.
I'll just say what a few reading are already thinking:
Tripwire already spent pretty much a year on RO2 with patches, bug fixes and performance boosts on all the various PC systems & their specs that were not originally found prior to being released due to the larger variety of hardware configurations present...... I doubt they'll work on a Mac version any time soon as they'll just be right back to square one again with more bug fixes, patches and performance boosts based on all the various Mac hardware setups available.... further spreading their man power and resources than what's currently being done.
(Keep in mind that Macs and PC's handle graphics processing in different ways.... just for starters)
Not only that, but they'll also end up having a slew of Mac users coming into the forums trashing them out for a buggy game that doesn't work on their Macs..... and they're already getting enough sh*t tossed at them from PC users..... I sure as hell wouldn't want to even touch another completely different platform until I fixed the majority of problems existing in the current platform.
So they'd be getting crap from both sides.... Mac users b*tching at them for all the glitches and bugs they have to put up with, PC users b*tching at them for some of the existing problems they're still facing..... and both sets of users b*tching at them for it taking them even longer to fix those issues due to being spread out between the two.
With that kind of environment, I simply wouldn't want to wake up the next day and go to work.... I'd load up my back pack and head out into the forest before I'd end up with a stroke.