[neckro23]

Gaming on Mac has gotten a lot better, mainly thanks to Steam.

I'm a huge gamer type, but for assorted reasons my "real" gaming PC isn't actually at home so I'm usually "stuck" with my Macbook. SteamPlay has therefore has been a huge boon to me -- I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac. That's a really impressive batting average.

Of course, a bunch of those I can't actually play due to the absolutely terrible Intel HD 3000 GPU in this thing (Witcher 2? Yeah, right!), but most indie games run fine because they're usually 2D or light 3D.

[anoncowherd]

>> I apparently have 272 games on my Steam account, and of those 121 run on Mac.

How many of those 121 are AAA-titles? I'd like to be a Mac gamer too, but it seems to me there are extremely few AAA grade games available for the Mac. What else is there besides Valve, Blizzard, and .. Borderlands 2 & Arkham City?

[stonith]

I dumped my gaming pc for an iMac a couple of months ago as I got sick of rebooting linux > windows and back to get shit done when I wasn't playing games, and figured OSX was a good middle ground.

It really depends what you're interested in as to whether that's possible for you at the moment. The Blizzard titles all run, the Valve titles all run, LoL runs, and as mentioned in this thread a good portion of my steam library is available.

The big missing pieces for many are the Battlefield series and the CoD series, but since I don't play that type of game I'm fine - ymmv

[anoncowherd]

Well, I've been using a Mac exclusively for a few years now. I just think the gaming situation is still really sad, even if things may be gradually improving.

It's difficult to believe that even 25% of those 121 games you mentioned are AAA quality, and that's what I was curious about. What's your estimate? Could you list a few AAA games for the Mac?

[stonith]

I can't speak for nekro23's library, but mine is ~150 games with 50 available for Mac. I don't purchase a lot of AAA games, but I can go through and list the ones that are/aren't on mac that I would say are of significant quality and a clearly not small titles.

On Mac (49):

All the Valve games - CS/TF2/Portal/HL/L4D

- King's Bounty

- Psychonauts

- Civ 4

- Trine 2

- XCOM: Enemy Unknown

- Two Worlds 2

- The Witcher

- Borderlands 2

- Max Payne 3

Plus Starcraft, Diablo 3 and League of Legends not within steam.

Notable absentees on my full Steam list (152):

- Dragon Age

- Skyrim/Fallout: NV

- Far Cry 3

- Crysis

- Dead Island

- Bioshock

- Alpha Protocol

- Assassin's Creed

- Alan Wake

- Empire:Total War

- Mafia 2

- Mass Effect 1/2

- Stalker

- Supreme Commander 2

The general trend is that most new games are being built on frameworks like Unity and UE3 that are cross platform across the consoles, pc and mac. There's outliers like Battlefield where the Frostbite engine isn't going to get dumped anytime soon, but I think the effort required for cross platform release has gone down to the point where large studios releasing across console/pc will likely also release console/pc/mac/linux.

The fact that I can play the new XCOM game on an iPad is pretty cool as well.

I think the presence of both DotA 2 and LoL is absolutely massive, particularly given the player base of the latter. Serious Mac gaming is probably not an option yet for players who like to shop around and play a lot of single player games, but for people who like me who just grab an online strategy game and play the shit out of it, it's actually fine. I suspect the combination of a Mac + [Xbone|PS4] would get very good coverage at the moment as well.

[anoncowherd]

Thanks for the list.

The problem is that outside of Blizz/Valve's stuff, if you browse Steam's list of Mac games, it's like 95%+ small games made by a lone developer, and that is really sad. No disrespect to those developers, but that kind of games just don't interest me.

But you think things are getting better? Do big game studios actually use Unity these days? That would be kind of.. awesome.

[stonith]

95% is probably a bit high, but I empathise that while indie games are heralded as the antidote to the various malaises brought on by the big studios, they aren't everyone's cup of tea.

Unity is perhaps still predominantly the domain of indies, but the Unreal Engine supports Mac, which is honestly the most important one. Perhaps things will regress a bit with the new console releases as graphical fidelity takes the limelight again and Unity is pushed away by big studios, but I think the point stands that many commercial engines are supporting Win/Mac/Lin/XB/PS and thus there's little reason not to release on all platforms.

Big projects take a long time to finish - the changes are pretty clearly happening but it's going to take a few years.

[erifneerg]

I'd like to say that with Mavericks adding OpenGL 4.1, I can play a number of games much better on my Macbook Pro (early 2008).