Dec 07, 2014  However there's a cost to developing the Mac version and for big publishers there needs to be a big reward to justify that. The number of Macs with specifications high enough to run modern games, especially the largest, big-box AAA games like Call of. Macs make up a small percent of the PC market and an even smaller percent of gaming PC's (Only about 3.5% of Steam users are using OSX) so if that were to increase then so would the number of Mac titles most likely, but just like on consoles, gamers tend to go where the games are.

If you're new to the Macintosh, or even if you've had one for a while, you may be interested in putting the work aside from time to time and playing games on your lovely machine. Macs may not have the same number of games as Windows PCs, but there are still plenty of places to get them if you know where to look. Here are some of my favorites. What are yours?

Steam

Valve's Steam service has been available for the Mac for a while now, and offers a pretty rich combination of indie and commercial titles for the Mac. They have their own Mac OS X section, which makes it very easy for Mac gamers to find what they're looking for.

What's more, Valve puts Mac gamers on a pretty even playing field with their Windows counterparts when it comes to sales and promotions — so you can usually get the same remarkable discounts. This weekend, for example, they're doing a free play weekend for the popular FPS Borderlands 2, with a 50 percent discount available as well.

Mac App Store

I've already said my piece about what I perceive to be the problems with the Mac App Store. But those issues notwithstanding, Apple deserves credit for bringing forth a robust marketplace for Mac app developers. What's more, Mac App Store is baked right in to OS X and uses Apple ID credentials, which means that it instantly has a potential user base of almost half a billion accounts, many more than the total number of Macs in use today.

The Mac App Store features indie and commercial titles alike, and also keeps lists of top paid and top free games, so there's something to appeal to gamers regardless of the budget. You can usually find the latest hot releases for Mac offered here, but sometimes it's a good idea to compare to Steam to see if you're getting the best deal.

MacGameStore

Even before the Mac App Store launched, MacGameStore came on the scene to provide Mac gamers with the latest downloads. In fact, they've been serving up games to Mac customers since 2005.

You can buy games directly from the web site, though there's a handy app that you can use if you prefer. MacGameStore regularly runs specials and deals, and if demos are available you can find links to them there too.

GameAgent.com

GameAgent.com started out as Mac game publisher Aspyr's way of reaching out to its own customers, but since then it's grown into an active Mac gaming service that offers downloads not just of Aspyr games but of other company's products too. They sport deals, favorites and games under $10, to make it easy to find something you might like.

If you set up an account with GameAgent, you can also use their Mac Match service to find out what games are supported on your system, taking the guesswork out of system requirements. You can also create a wish list, get access to special deals and more.

Feral Interactive

Mac game publisher Feral Interactive is a perennial darling of the Mac App Store, but you can usually find their games through other Mac game services too. If you'd prefer to go direct to the source, Feral is happy to take your money — they run their own Mac game download service, which is exclusive to their games.

Feral follows the 'traditional' model of Mac game publishing — they license top rated games from PC and console game publishers, then produce and publish Mac versions. So if you want the new Tomb Raider game, for example, or XCOM: Enemy Within, you know where to look.

GameTree Mac

TransGaming is a company that mostly stays behind the scenes — they're content to convert games to the Mac using their Cider technology (which has its distant origins in the open-source WINE project) and let the publishers themselves to the heavy lifting. But they also operate their own game sales service, called GameTree Mac.

GameTree Mac has the usual Mac-compatible products from other commercial and indie game publishers, but they also sport the titles that TransGaming has worked on, which often can't be found through other services. So there are some exclusives there that might peak your interest.

GOG.com

GOG.com — what was once branded as 'Good Old Games' — specializes in selling 'vintage' computer software. They do have some more recent releases like Torchlight, for example, but much of their specialty has to do with resurrecting games from the DOS and early Windows era, recycled to run on modern hardware.

They're much better about supporting the Mac than they used to be, and you can usually find games for $6 — $10 without too much of a problem. Just be advised that GOG.com games are typically running inside some emulation layer or shell in order to operate and haven't been updated, so you're getting the real look and feel of vintage games, with their unusual control schemes and blocky graphics to boot.

GamersGate

GamersGate is another online service where you can download Mac and PC games alike. The service is clientless, just like most of the other services we've talked about, but one cool thing about GamersGate is that they have 'gamified' the experience of using their service with a rewards system.

The more active you are on their boards — posting reviews, ratings, solving problems for other gamers, and more — the more 'Blue Coins' you'll earn, which will get you discount on future orders. You'll also gain experience points, which will entitle you to special discounts on games.

Straight from the source

More and more Mac game publishers are hopping on board with support for the platform for their own download services. Electronic Arts' Origin, for example, is where you'd go to download SimCity and connect to other players. Want to buy popular Blizzard games like World of Warcraft or Diablo III? Off to Battle.net with you, then.

So look around — Mac games are a lot more available than you might think. And have fun gaming!

Why Are There No Games On Mac Laptop

Do you have other favorite places to buy Mac games? Sound off in the comments.

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Gaming on the Mac is terrible, right? That has been the consensus among gamers for a decade-plus—Ars even declared Mac gaming dead all the way back in 2007. But in reality, the situation has gotten better. And after Apple dedicated an unprecedented amount of attention to Mac gaming at WWDC 2017, things might be looking up for Mac gamers in the coming years.

When Apple announced new Macs and a major update to its Mac graphics API at this year’s developer conference, there was an air of hope amongst Mac gamers and developers. Gaming on a Mac may look more appealing than ever thanks to the introduction and gradual improvement of Apple’s relatively new Metal graphics API and a better-than-ever-before install base. On top of that, discrete Mac graphics processors have just seen some of their biggest boosts in recent years, VR support is on the way, and external GPU enclosures promise previously impossible upgradeability.

So gaming on the Mac is improving, but is it good or still terrible? Are we on track to parity with Windows? Speaking to game developers who specialize in the Mac about the state of Mac gaming in the wake of WWDC, Ars encountered plenty of optimism. Still, there’s plenty to be cautious about.

Decades in a niche

In gamer communities on forums and Reddit, Mac gaming is often the subject of jokes and snarky comments. Again, such snark was not always without justification. There just weren’t many good games on the Mac for years. Nevertheless, a few companies have continuously worked to fill the niche. Two in particular emerged as leaders in the marketplace—Aspyr Media and Feral Interactive.

Aspyr was founded way back in 1996, originally as a retail distributor. The porting aspect of its business came later, with the first game it ported in 1998—Eidos’ Tomb Raider II. Feral got started in 1996, too. And in addition to the Mac, Feral has ported games to Linux and iOS (it plans to expand to Android in the near future).

Why No Games For Mac

“We’ve dealt firsthand with all the big changes to the platform that have taken place over the last two decades,” Edwin Smith, Feral’s head of production, told Ars. He cited changes like the advent of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), the move to a UNIX-based operating system, and the transition from the PowerPC processor architecture to Intel.

PowerPC-based Macs in the '90s and early '00s used a different processing architecture from the Windows PCs for which most games were primarily developed. It didn’t help, either, that Microsoft’s Direct3D (part of the DirectX suite of APIs) became the industry standard graphics API. The cross-platform OpenGL API used in Apple computers struggled to keep up in the meantime. And frankly back at that point in time, Macs weren’t very popular, so the audience was small. It was abundantly clear to gamers that the Mac was not a competitive platform in the PowerPC days.

“In the years leading up to the transition to Intel CPUs in Macs, the porting process entailed converting games to run on PowerPC hardware,” said Smith. “This was difficult because the existing code was written with x86 architecture in mind, and since this didn’t always have a 1:1 relationship with how PowerPC architecture worked, we had some interesting problems to solve.”

Climbing out into the sun

Why Mac Is Best

Players using today’s Mac offerings live within a different landscape. Things became much rosier over the past decade for a number of reasons.

First, there was the switch to Intel. By adopting the same architecture used in most Windows PCs, Apple moved the Mac out of a software engineering wasteland. Second, Mac sales figures grew significantly at the same time. According to data aggregated by Statista, 3.29 million Macs were sold globally in 2004. By 2015, that number had reached more than 20 million.

“Apple today sells in a quarter what they used to sell in a year, so the total market opportunity has grown from what used to be normal,” Elizabeth Howard, vice-president for publishing at Aspyr, told Ars.

The hardware situation looked better, too. Macs enjoyed what Howard called a “halo effect” from the previous generation of consoles. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 remained gaming hardware standards for nearly a decade—longer than many other console generations. That longevity allowed the Mac’s laptop-grade graphics hardware to catch up to this industry standard.

“Most video games are developed with console or PC as the lead platform, and the system requirements are naturally targeted around what those platforms can handle,” she explained. “Since Mac is a downstream port of these versions, and Macs were well-aligned with last-gen console specs, we were able to easily move games from PC and console over to Mac.”

Why Macs Are Bad

Finally, Howard and Smith cited the shift to digital distribution. While this was disruptive and concerning for the industry at first, it turned out to be a major boon for Mac-centric gamers.

Why Are There No Games On Mac Computer

“2011 was the last year Apple carried any physical game boxes in their stores,” Howard said. “There was a time we thought this would mean the demise of Mac gaming.” Within a few years, Apple was no longer shipping computers with physical media drives at all; the platform abandoned them more quickly than the PC market did. But rather than hurt Mac developers, it helped. Digital marketplaces like Steam and the Mac App Store “made it much easier for us to get our games to end users,” said Smith. “And as a result, our customer base has grown.”

Howard also sees the new marketplace as an improvement: “Digital distribution had a huge impact on our business. It’s obviously much easier for people to buy games, we had a big catalog to leverage with this new audience, and it’s much easier on cash flow with no cost of goods. It was a huge shift.”

Why Are There No Games On Mac Computer

And all this has made the Mac a more vibrant gaming platform than ever before. Mac games have a substantially larger addressable market, the economics of scale are more favorable, and for a while, the hardware was in a sweet spot. With plenty of great games available on the Mac, gamer snark has been looking less and less applicable in recent years.