Oh Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay!
That's right gentle readers, after a none-too-brief absence - and just
the very occasional threat of vorpal blades from our website
maintainers - it's time again for a new installment of Gavriel States.
I propose to galumph back to columnizing by expanding a bit on the question
asked by this month's Dev Report: What would you do if you could see the future?
TransGaming's August announcement of our new Cider product for bringing PC game
titles to the Mac has, in the space of just two months, elicited more positive
response from the world's big game publishers than we have seen in the previous
six year history of the company. As a result, we are working more closely with
these companies than ever before - and we have been getting more and more access
to unreleased content for detailed portability analyses.
We think that this is fantastic. Game developers and publishers are waking up
to the fact that by the end of 2007 there will likely be more Intel based Macs
in the market than there will be PlayStation 3s. Apple has made the Mac a far
more attractive gaming platform than it has ever been before - and we're not
just talking about the aesthetics here.
For Mac users, this is obviously great news - by next year, Mac users will
start seeing titles released on both PCs and Macs on the same day. This means
that no longer will Mac users have to wait months for a 3rd party port of the
latest hot new title - instead they'll be able to pick the games up in-store and
run it on their platform of choice.
For Linux users, the improvements may be a little less obvious at first, but
they will have as much, or possibly even more impact in the long run. That's
because every single game that will be deployed with Cider is first tested and
analyzed under Linux with Cedega. Thus, each game deployed on the Mac with Cider
will, at the fundamental level of its core executable and data components, also
run under Linux. This doesn't mean that all these games will run unmodified
under Linux, due to additional complexities such as installer support, but it
does mean that Linux gamers will have more gaming opportunities than ever
before.
As a result, I hope that all of you will join me in a hearty chortle of joy
at TransGaming's Cider progress. Just please don't drink too much of it - I
prefer email responses to my columns to be as burble-free as possible.
Take care,
-Gav
Founder & CTO
