作者：Rob Fahey

各开发公司都着迷于iOS设备——但苹果还有另一平台受到众多开发者忽略。

如今的游戏开发主流平台是什么？你可以轻松列举，完全是屈指可数。PlayStation、Xbox、Wii、Windows PC、DS、PSP及后继掌上设备。iOS、Facebook和Android主要针对技术理想主义者。Windows Phone 7主要瞄准乐天派。而Google Plus则主要锁定不明时局者。

我是否有遗漏哪些平台？掌机、手持设备、PC、手机平台及社交网络，完全一一俱全，除非你打算涉猎互动电视平台之类的奇怪领域——这将来也许会变成一个主流平台，但和目前的市场显然没有多大关系。

Mac Gaming(from kotaku.com)

但这一列表显然还遗漏一个重要平台——另一苹果操作系统Mac OS X。除去一部分杰出开发商（例如暴雪），多数PC游戏开发者均忽视了苹果的电脑设备。这完全能够理解。相比其游戏PC同伴，苹果电脑显然略逊一筹，更不要说它们为数不多。设计师采用这一设备，有些音乐家采用这一设备，些许作家是该设备的忠实粉丝，但游戏并非Mac设备的商业吸引力。

他们是手头持有1000英镑消费资金的手提电脑用户，但EA及其众多竞争对手似乎对此视若无睹。

这个观念存在于游戏行业的众多领域。大家都知道，苹果设备如今越来越受欢迎，但当你同开发者谈及此话题时，他们总是忽略这一事实。苹果在PC设备出货量中依然只有约10%的份额。苹果设备颇为昂贵，不受玩家青睐。想玩游戏的Mac用户通常会同时配备Windows操作系统。

所有这些观点都有待商榷。是的，苹果只在美国PC设备中占据约10%的份额，但它是唯一设备出货量急剧增加的PC制造商。事实上，PC市场正在全面收缩，Mac销量的增加是少数亮点之一。

此外，多数苹果设备的销售都是面向消费者——若去除购买1万台PC充当办公设备的公司，苹果的份额是多少？这是重要的数据——被消费者购买的手提电脑都是潜在的游戏设备。而由公司购买，被严格IT部门封锁的PC则不是。不妨走到大学校园，看看学生们都在用什么，你会看到很多人都手持苹果设备——这些族群就是游戏开发者的目标用户。其实，近年来越来越多的苹果商标也开始出现在电子游戏相关的活动或新闻发布会上。

这并不是说OS X的重要性高过Windows平台（游戏邦注：显然完全没有）。但这是个处于发展中、拥有庞大用户规模的平台——这些用户被许多PC开发者忽略。同开发者探讨这一问题很快就会变成系列关于为什么Mac令人讨厌，苹果颇为居心叵测的讨论——无意义的网络论坛话题不应影响到开发者的商业决策。

情况正日渐好转。目前Steam已入驻OS X平台，这是非常重要的一步。脱离盒装推广模式意味着，开发者无需担心所开发的Mac版本没有零售位置——虽然我强烈鼓励开发者同时发行PC和Mac版本（游戏邦注：就像暴雪所采取的策略一样），而不是让用户再次为该平台移植版本付费。但Mac平台也许有望获得独立开发者的鼎力支持，在他们看来，同时在Windows和OS X发行应用完全不费吹灰之力。他们从中获得回馈——OS X版独立游戏的销量远超过苹果10%的市场份额。据 Humble Indie Bundle促销活动收集的数据显示，Mac用户在捆绑内容的平均消费金额是7.53美元，而Windows只有4.78美元（不过虽然这一数据仍落后于Linux用户的12美元）。

瞄准用户实际持有的设备设计游戏，而非你希望他们持有的设备。

这里的问题是，支持Mac依然不是根植于PC游戏开发者脑中的概念。“Mac并不适合游戏”依然是很多开发者持有的看法，即便如今现实情况越发显而易见：许多游戏的目标用户都持有Mac设备。再次建议你多到校园转转，这里我要补充的是，苹果设备用户是手持1000英镑消费资金的用户，而EA及其众多竞争对手却对此视若无睹。就如前面提到的，暴雪积极吸收Mac用户的资金，而且碰巧收益高过其他公司。这并不是因为Mac用户积极填充《魔兽世界》金库，而是因为该公司采取的策略是，针对愿意掏钱的用户制作游戏，而非刻意将用户限制在他们碰巧喜欢的平台或可能突破更高技术障碍的机制。

PC游戏的优点在于，玩家无需持有游戏设备。我最早是PC玩家，因为我有自己的PC——和同时代的父母一样，我反对在家里配备游戏掌机，因此我的桌面就拥有相当不错的游戏设备。很多玩家都是通过这一媒介开始自己的游戏之旅，在出于辅助家庭作业或制作电子表格目的配备的PC设备上玩游戏。很多游戏公司通过鼓励用户将“严肃”PC转变成游戏设备而在初期取得突出成就——在公司的LAN玩《毁灭战士》，在工作笔记本电脑上玩《足球经理》。

认为在全球范围内日益风靡（其受欢迎程度近年来急剧提升）的个人电脑“不是游戏设备”会让你错失发挥PC游戏优势的机会。开发者应瞄准用户当前持有的设备制作游戏，而非自己期望用户配备的设备。摒弃个人偏见，不要再将鲜艳的苹果标识看作是“禁止入内”标记，认为这一设备的用户不是自己的目标群体。这一用户群体规模庞大，获取这些用户的推广网络也非常完善，他们资金雄厚，愿意进行消费。若这不是你的目标用户，那么谁才是呢？（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Other Apple: Why Ignore Mac Gaming?

By Rob Fahey

Everyone’s excited about iOS – but Apple has another platform which many developers seem happy to ignore

What are the main platforms for game development today? You can list them easily enough, counting them off on your fingers. PlayStation, Xbox, Wii. Windows PC. DS, PSP and their handheld successors. iOS. Facebook. Android, for the tech idealists. Windows Phone 7, for the eternal optimists. Google Plus, for the deluded.

What did I miss out from the list? Scan it again and think about what’s missing. Consoles, handhelds, PC, mobile platforms, social networks. That’s the lot, surely, unless you’re going to start delving into oddities like interactive TV platforms – which might be important someday but certainly don’t have much relevance to the market right now.

Yet there is actually a massive platform missing from that line-up – the “other” Apple platform, Mac OS X. With the exception of a handful of stand-out developers, perhaps most notably Blizzard, PC game developers have traditionally ignored Apple’s computers in creating their games. That’s been understandable. Apple computers were traditionally underpowered compared to their gaming PC brethren, not to mention being pretty thin on the ground. Designers used them, some musicians used them, some authors were devoted fans, but games were hardly a commercially appealing consideration on Apple hardware.

It’s a consumer with ￡1000 to spend on a powerful laptop, whose money EA apparently doesn’t want – and nor, it seems, do a fairly solid number of EA’s rivals

That’s still a view that’s broadly – if more quietly – held in a lot of corners of the games business. Everyone knows that Apple hardware is much more popular now, but developers will often go to great lengths to downplay that fact when you talk to them. Apple still only accounts for 10 per cent or so of PC shipments. Apple gear is expensive and doesn’t appeal to gamers. Everyone with a Mac who wants to play games just dual-boots into Windows anyway. And so on, and so forth.

All of these arguments are problematic. Yes, Apple accounts for only around 10 per cent of US PC shipments (it’s harder to get worldwide figures – Apple is very strong in Europe, does okay in Japan and struggles in much of the rest of Asia, but overall numbers are tough to figure out), but it’s one of the only PC manufacturers whose shipment numbers have been growing strongly. In fact, the PC market is contracting overall, with increases in Mac sales being one of the few bright spots in the picture.

Moreover, the vast bulk of Apple’s sales are to consumers – if you were to take out corporations buying 10,000 new PCs for their offices from the picture, what percentage would Apple represent? This is relevant stuff – laptops bought by consumers are potential game devices. PCs bought by a corporation and locked down by a strict IT department are not. Walk onto any university campus and see what students are using, and you see the demographic buying Apple gear – a demographic which aligns closely with exactly the people game developers would like to be selling to. Indeed, it’s rather telling that the glowing Apple logo has been becoming increasingly ubiquitous at videogame-related events or press conferences in recent years.

This isn’t to say that OS X represents a more important platform than Windows – it obviously, demonstrably does not. However, it’s a platform which is growing and which already has a massive audience – an audience which many PC developers are simply ignoring. Raising this question with developers tends to rapidly turn into a series of arguments about why Macs are terrible, why Apple is evil, and so on – nonsense Internet forum stuff which should have no place in business decision making.

Things are improving. Steam is on OS X now, which is a major step (and Apple’s own Mac App Store also offers an excellent route to market on the platform). The move away from boxed distribution means that there’s no longer any danger of building a Mac version that simply won’t find retail shelf space – although I’d strongly encourage developers to ship PC and Mac versions together, as Blizzard does, rather than making users pay again for a platform port. Perhaps most promising, however, is the degree of support the Mac platform receives from indie developers, many of whom simply consider it a no-brainer to release software that works on both Windows and OS X. They’re rewarded for their efforts – sales of OS X versions of indie games tend to significantly outstrip Apple’s 10 per cent market share, and figures compiled by the pay-what-you-like Humble Indie Bundle promotion last year showed that Mac users on average paid $7.53 for the bundle, compared with $4.78 from Windows users (although still well behind Linux users, who paid $12.00, although being fewer in number this meant they still made up roughly the same percentage of payments as the Mac contingent).

Build games for the systems that people actually have, not the systems you’d like them to have

The problem is that supporting the Mac still isn’t a concept which is hardwired into the DNA of PC game developers. “Macs aren’t for games” is a mantra which still bears a great deal of weight, even in the face of the rather obvious reality that plenty of people in the demographic being targeted by games are using Macs. Repeating the suggestion that you walk into a university campus and see what young people are actually using, I add a further consideration – every glowing Apple logo you see is a consumer who can’t play Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s a consumer with ￡1000 to spend on a powerful laptop, whose money EA apparently doesn’t want – and nor, it seems, do a fairly solid number of EA’s rivals. Blizzard, as noted, are happy to take cash from Mac owners, and coincidentally also make a hell of a lot more of it than anyone else seems to manage. That’s not because Mac owners are filling WoW’s coffers (though it helps), it’s because their policy is to make their games available and playable to anyone who wants to give them money, rather than artificially limiting them to platforms they happen to like or systems that can jump an improbably high technical hurdle.

The strength of PC gaming, traditionally, was that you didn’t need to own a game device to do it. I started out as a PC gamer because I owned a PC – like many parents of that era, mine wouldn’t let a games console into the house – and therefore I already had an amazing games machine on my desk. Countless gamers began their journey with this medium by playing games on the PC hardware they already owned for their homework or their spreadsheets. Countless game companies got their early success by encouraging people to subvert their “serious” PCs into gaming machines – corporate LANs running Doom, work laptops playing Football Manager.

Dismissing some of the world’s most popular personal computers – whose popularity has grown in leaps and bounds in recent years – as “not gaming machines” misses the whole advantage of PC gaming, to my mind. Build games for the systems that people actually have, not the systems you’d like them to have. Leave your biases at the door. Stop seeing those glowing Apple logos as a “no entry” sign, the people behind them as outside your audience. There are tens of millions of them, with well-established distribution networks set up to reach them, and they’re proven to have money in their pockets and a willingness to spend. If that’s not an audience worth reaching out to, what is?（Source：gamesindustry）