Can Apple save PC gaming?

Posted by Kevin in Apple, Articles, Portable | 1 comment

Jul 31, 10

Apple is a company with a fairly strong gaming past. In years bygone, companies like Bungie and iD were all about the Mac platform – showing up to keynote speeches and bombing terribly on stage as the press sat silent, wondering why these coder kids were being allowed to share the same stage space as Herr Jobs.

Today, though, with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad running through the app store, gaming is a multi-billion dollar investment for the Cupertino-based computing giant. They claim more mobile gaming market share then the DS and PSP in terms of both games sold, revenue taken and handsets out there. Let us not forget that using an iPhone on the bus to play a game is a lot less worrying and nerdy then using a PSP or DS. Not only that, the same device allows you to listen to music, browse the web, etc. Something neither Nintendo or Sony can compete with.

You cannot deny the facts & figures behind the app store-powered devices. Apple owns mobile gaming. And more & more developers are flocking to the format to develop interesting games. Even our old friend, the FPS and third person shooters are making an appearance on the machines. And as each generation of device arrives, we see better hardware capable of running more complex games with better graphics.

What about the home, though? About 10-15% of all computers in the world are Macs. An unimpressive figure on the surface of it, but when you peel away the millions of medium-powered Dell computers running XP in offices globally, the home computer is a bit more dominated by Apple then first thought. And this market share isn’t just growing, it’s ballooning at a huge rate. As people buy iPhones and iPads, they’re also buying Macs – which is delivering quarter-on-quarter growth of epic proportions.

The new Macbook and iMac range all feature i5 and i7 processors, with nVidia GT330M graphics chips (soon to migrate to ATi exclusively, too) which means they’re more powerful then most in-home machines and despite costing as much as a home-made gaming PC, run a much more stable operating system and the hardware is always high-end caliber.

Let’s also keep in mind OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) runs complicated back-end architectures such as Grand Central Dispatch, which allows the GPU and CPU to sync up (in a sense) to share resources and more effectively number crunch. This kind of technology and speed (the basic config on most new Macs involves 4GB of memory) is a match made in heaven for gaming.

Match this with Valve releasing Steam for Mac and a continued push from companies like Activision, Blizzard, EA, etc. to push gaming titles to OS X, you get a pretty potent combination for gaming bliss.

So, while PC gaming is dying a death, Steam is growing. Valve also reports about 10% of all sales being on Mac since launching on the platform – and with a meagre selection of games to start off with, that’s a huge number that shows the captive audience Apple computers provide. Digital distribution is key here, and Apple know it with the App Store.

So how can Apple grow the market? Well, they need to work with developers. It’s rumoured Apple worked with Valve, and provided about $1million to help with the platform getting developed and ready for OS X. Apple spend quite a bit of time helping developers with their objective-C work on the iOS mobile platform and the app store. The app store is likely to be replicated in the next iteration of OS X (which is likely to launch next year, or at least get announced), which will help push games direct to your Mac without needing to go buy a disc. Furthermore, the iTunes platform has evolved from merely a music store to an all-round entertainment platform with music, movies, tv shows and books. All it’s missing is games.

So while Microsoft blunders it’s way out of the Vista mess, leaving expensive PC builders with sub-par software to go on top of top notch hardware – Apple have quietly toiled away on systems that, in fact, are probably the saviour of gaming outside of the console market. It could also be suggested that Apple might jump into the console market given how well their foray into gaming has gone thus far, but let’s not jump the gun here! The numbers prove it, Apple could well be the saving grace of PC gaming.