Is the Mac a viable gaming platform?: Last year at the Casual Games Association conference (Casuality 2006), many companies were eager to bring their games to the Mac. The Macintosh casual games world was a wide open space waiting to be filled. One year later, we find that many of these companies have not stepped into the Mac market, and those that did ported perhaps one or two games to the Mac, but did not market them effectively.
We spoke to many companies this week, and found a variety of opinions regarding moving games onto the Mac. Daniel Bernstein of Sandlot Games believes that when porting a game to another platform, only the top five or so best-selling games should be considered because they are the ones that have proven selling power.
Beatrice Spaine from Pogo.com, an online game network of Electronic Arts, stated that Mac casual games space has not yet proven its viability as a strong revenue stream to justify Pogo.com porting their downloaded games to the Mac.
Erik Goosens of RealNetworks said that they had two houses for developing games, and one automatically ported all games to the Mac (their GameHouse division) and that they are slowly moving their other development house into the same mode.
Real-time Chat with Last Day of Work: We chatted with Arthur Humphrey, CEO and lead designer of Last Day of Work, the indie game developer that released Virtual Villagers.
Aspyr will distribute a retail version of Virtual Villagers.
One year ago, Last Day of Work released Virtual Villagers, which rocked the casual gaming world with its ability to recognize real time. Real-time casual games create an illusion of continuity. After the computer has been restarted and the game opened, the game will recognize the passage of time and simulate this passage in the game accordingly. The game so successfully simulated this time movement that fans accused Humphrey of running down their laptop’s battery.
We asked Humphrey about his experience with trying to get Virtual Villagers onto Web portals. Many were concerned because it encouraged players to turn the game off within the first ten minutes - a major rule-breaker for casual games - in order to stimulate players into coming back to see how their sims were doing. Others just wanted another copy of Fish Tycoon, Last Day of Work’s last hit game. However, Virtual Villagers became a major hit despite all of the worries. The game has been so successful that Aspyr Media just announced they will be publishing the Mac version for retail next month, despite the fact that a Mac version is available for download right now
Humphrey also feels it important to bring all his games to the Mac platform as well. Last Day of Work just recently updated their engine to develop Universal binaries of their Mac games, so Intel Mac users can enjoy the same games that PPC users have been playing for years.
Last Day of Work announced Plant Tycoon for the Mac. Originally available on Palm OS and PocketPC, Plant Tycoon simulates the creation of a garden, from the planting of that first seed in a pot to cross-breeding plants to the creation of bizarre cactus plants. We jibbed Humphrey that he had created the perfect game for microtransactions, but Humphrey smiled and said that though this game might be perfect for it, he was a firm believer in the try and buy revenue model.
Next: Gaming in India, and Google's game ads
India: The new gaming frontier: When thinking about the Asian electronic game scene, you probably don’t think about India. And that’s a pity, says Gameshastra VP of Quality Assurance Jason Wong, because India is ready for a change.
Traditionally, says Wong, young people in India concentrate on helping raise families and in becoming educated. Playing games is anathema to the culture. But in the past decade an emerging middle class has created a group of people with disposable income. These people are interested in exploring how to exploit that income, and some are looking at game playing for entertainment.
Because this middle class is in its infancy, says Wong, their disposable income is still small, and so they are only willing to purchase the cheapest computers and MP3 players available. As that income becomes more pronounced, he predicts that more of these young people, mostly in their early to mid-twenties, will want the geek cred of owning foreign-made products, such as iPods and Macs.
Gameshastra, based in India, offers 3D art production among its different game production services.
Wong also says that there are no Apple stores in India, and few stores that carry Apple products. He believes this is a problem from two sides, because there is currently not enough demand for Apple products and because India has fallen through the cracks of Apple’s thinking. This is not a surprise, Wong says, as most everyone has let India fall off of the radar. But he believes that won’t last for much longer.
Already, the Xbox 360 and the PS3 has been released in India. And Wong feels that within the next five years there will be an explosion of demand for more entertainment products.
Gameshastra, the only company providing game services and game development outsourcing services in India, has also seen a substantial increase in the number of talented Indian engineers flocking to their company from all over India, wanting to develop games. Some of them have never even played games, says Wong, and yet they are still very interested in exercising their creative potential. Soon, these talented young Indians may be exploring their creativity with a Mac.
Google does games: Google announced their AdSense for Games program. Google will partner with developers and publishers to provide relevant, in-game advertising that will be viewed while playing games. Google will target Flash-based Web games first, but will later move to Windows, Mac, Linux, and console games as well.
Developers can create white or black-listed advertising and refine to provide targeted advertising. Revenue return will be impression-based, rather than click-based.
We spoke with Google about how they would be targeting their advertising for games, and they stated that they would work personally with developers and publishers to refine their advertising for each site and each game. However, the Google folks seemed to honestly not know how to communicate their intent to the game developers at the event, and many developers left feeling very confused, and even a little irritated.
D. Omaha Sternberg is the producer and host of the iGame Radio podcast.
