Mac gaming finally gathers some Steam

DICE is considering releasing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for Mac.

I've written before that the one area of computing that Macs really do lag in, is gaming, in two Mac Planet posts in the last few months. A couple of recent developments have changed the picture somewhat.

The big news was that gaming company Valve committed to offering full support for the Mac for both its in-house games and for its digital game delivery system 'Steam'. This then led other developers to express interest in the Mac as a gaming platform.

Valve announced that several of its popular titles, and both the Steam and Source platforms, will be coming to the Mac in April. Games include Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half Life series.

Even better news for those few purist Mac gamers still left – ie, those who have not yet succumbed to running PC titles on their Macs under Windows or virtualisation – is that the company intends simultaneous platform releases from now on. Portal 2 will probably be the first game released on both Mac and PC together by Valve.

Steam is a digital games delivery service; Source is Valve's game engine. Steam has a new feature called Steam Play, which lets you purchase the game on one platform (PC or Mac) and play on the other free-of-charge.

Since that announcement, other games developers have turned their gazes back to Apple. How much traction may be gained, we'll just have to see. Gas Powered Games' founder Chris Taylor hopes that, as a result of Steam's move to the Mac, his own GPG development studio can release future Mac OS X games. GPG has developed games for Steam, including the recent Supreme Commander 2.

Swedish game maker DICE, best known for the Battlefield series of games, may also be looking at Mac releases. One of the company's lead developers said DICE is "currently investigating the possibility of making [Battlefield: Bad Company 2] available on Mac."

Auckland PC gamer (and Mac user) Chris Barrett told me "Hopefully Steam will make the Mac a credible gaming platform; it's a solid distribution channel. As much of a straw man as it tends to be, I'm sure some potential 'switchers' do genuinely get turned off by the desolate Mac gaming scene. Having access to Steam games purchased on Windows makes the barrier for entry that much lower."

The reason I asked Chris about Steam is that he gave me such an interesting response to my original article about the state of Mac gaming.

I began this post "It's [gaming] the one area where Mac can users can justifiably feel well and truly miffed at being users of a platform with small market share."

The article discussed using virtualisation to play PC games on Macs and also mentioned Crossover Games by Codeweavers.


CrossOver Games lets you run many popular Windows games on an Intel OS X Mac (or Linux PC). The games supported includeWorld of Warcraft (which you can get in a native Mac version anyway, as you can on Call of Duty), but also EVE Online, Guild Wars, Prey and Steam Games including Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike and more.

Crossover costs US$39 though (about NZ$56), although a free trial is available.

Of that, Chris Barrett commented "Crossover is a specialised Wine fork, which is heavily geared towards Source engine games like Half Life 2, Team Fortress etc. As a consequence, it will run many other games with varying degrees of success – there's a compatibility list on the CodeWeavers site.

"I have an ageing machine (a 2007 24-inch iMac with a 256MB Radeon card), but in my experience, Source games are amazing. They run smooth and the graphics look pretty good, with some caveats (more on that later). Dawn of War> (1) was also good, but beyond that I've had mixed success. The general rule of thumb is that games more than three years old often work, but anything more recent would be likely to hang on startup. You can download a free trial if you want to test it yourself on your [better] hardware.

"In CrossOver Games, 3D drawing is performed by converting DirectX calls into OpenGL calls that OS X can deal with natively, and Win32 API calls are converted to something the OS X kernel will handle (probably implemented in the POSIX layer) by Wine. All this converting leads to a performance hit compared to running the apps native in Windows, but when it works, it works quite well. Unfortunately, Apple's display drivers are poorly maintained, and not all DirectX calls translate well into OpenGL.

Apple also ships Snow Leopard with an implementation of an older version of OpenGL (which is expected to get upgraded in the forthcoming 10.6 point update). This all means that games lack a lot of the whizbang in the graphics that you would see if you played them under Windows - advanced shader effects and the like all get nerfed under Wine."

Chris went on to note "Transgaming's Cedega system does basically the same thing as CrossOver, but it is a system developers can use for ports. This is how EA and other developers seem to be handling their ports to OS X (ie, CoD4 et al are not native Mac apps, but are modified somewhat and encapsulated in a sort of translation wrapper).

"You mentioned virtualisation a few times in your article. I use the current release of VMware Fusion, and don't find it to be useful for gaming. Fusion (and I think Parallels as well) uses Wine for 3D translation anyway, so you're better off using CrossOver and saving the system overhead you'd incur from a guest OS. I can't see virtualised gaming working well on Apple's consumer machines."

He concluded "In my experience, Boot Camp is really the only way to go for recent games. So yeah, Mac gaming sucks, which is why I have an N64."

(Boot Camp is an Apple utility installed on all OS X Macs that lets you install a licensed version of Windows, but you need to restart to change systems. When you reboot in Windows, your Mac is, to all intents and purposes, a PC and can run anything a PC can run.}

In other Mac games news, Icarus Studios announced the Mac beta release of Fallen Earth, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. The new Mac beta release requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

Unfortunately, this is a big download and a clunky port I found virtually unplayable on my three-year-old MBP 15. Worse, the play controls seem really old-school PC style to me – hardly the flowing game play of a great Mac (and PC) game like Call of Duty. Don't bother downloading it unless you have a pretty powerful Mac.

Your thoughts and comments on Mac gaming are welcome.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com