Why does this warrant a post? I came across another blog that equated the two together, and generally had bad things to say about the Cider scene. The two points I had issue with were:
- Cider porting is a lazy way to support the Mac platform.
- Cider somehow encourages or accelerates piracy.
On the first point, how much time and effort is put into a project is a product of how much money you are likely to generate from it. The Mac gaming market is tiny, beset on all sides by piracy. If my memory serves me (and I have used Apple and Macs since the very beginning), this has always been the case. Cider makes it possible for us to get games on our platform that we would not otherwise get. We also get them faster – for examples see the EA and Ubisoft titles that shipped within months of their PC cousins.
Laziness has nothing to do with it. This approach is calculated as the only cost-effective way to get new games into our hands. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth even if it means I am only getting 50% of the performance from the hardware I have. If it really bothered me I could vote with my wallet and run the Windows version in boot camp (or my Mass Effect partition as I like to call it).
The blogger’s second point is that Cider encourages piracy. That is nonsense. Nothing could make piracy on the Mac more prevalent – our market is saturated with it. What unofficial Cider ports do is sell more PC games by providing community developed Cider or Chromium wrappers. Just buy the game on Steam or Direct2Drive at whatever insane weekend promo price they happen to be running and enjoy. Not one of my Cider games are pirated – but only a few are official (Spore, Prince of Persia).
Cider is simply an emulation layer – the games are not modified in any way.
My hunch is that Trans Gaming are happy the community is showing publishers the ease with which games are ported because it will encourage more concurrent releases on Mac (and more middleware sales to Trans Gaming). If hobbyists can do it, why not put a couple of people on a porting project and make some money? One way or another, a publishers game is coming to Mac – whether they like it or not.
[update]: PC World has a story on this too. It is pretty bad journalism as you could just as easily say, ‘Internet Used to Pirate Games’ or ‘Electricity Used to Pirate Games.’ It takes me about 1-2 hours to port a Windows game that I bought to Mac using Cider. So I don’t know why publishers can’t do the same.
