Whisky Van Gogh Go

…We tried to have a conversation with Apple for several years, and they never seemed to… well, we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go “wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming”. And then we’ll say, “OK, here are three things you could do to make that better”, and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there’s never any follow through on any of the things they say they’re going to do. That makes it hard to be excited about doing games for their platforms. — Gabe Newell of Valve software, Sept. 2007

I wonder what happened between then and now.

More importantly, I wonder how the sales and piracy rates will stack up against Windows. A few years ago I read a bit by an indie Mac software developer which posited that writing for the Mac is a great deal because their users are people who are consciously sacrificing convenience and even a little more money for a superior experience. This is a psychology that won’t balk at spending $30 on a decent FTP app over a crappy freeware product, and is less likely to want to waste time pirating and hacking software. And this was written way before the Intel transition — the Mac user base has more than doubled since then.

It won’t be possible for Valve to sell as many copies of their games on Mac as PC (and let’s not even bring up the Xbox 360), but I bet Mac sales add up to a much higher ratio than the Mac : Windows market share.

I tried to think of an existing game on both platforms for comparison, but the only important game on either is World of Warcraft. It has dominated sales for five years. That’s like Avatar being number one in the box office for two decades. Unimaginable. [edit] Which is the obvious rebuttal to this admittedly funny critique of the Mac gaming scene.

Panic or Ambrosia? Wil Shipley? I haven’t got all day to Google it, but Gruber touched on the topic here.