OT: Mac Gaming Piracy

[dojoboy]

Here is an excerpt from a very good article on a troubling trend. Lets all be good stewards here and promote product loyalty, no matter how frustrated we get at times.

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Inside the business

A misconception exists about how the Mac games industry works. To publish a popular title such as Halo, developer/publishers must customarily pay the owner of the PC version of the product a licensing fee. They must then sustain development costs, packaging and distribution costs – and are often required to pay a certain royalty to the original publisher on sales. In many cases, even a minimum royalty payment is set, and Mac publishers may have to pay the balance due under that agreement if a game fails.

Adams said: "Because the Mac is a small market we are always having to make the case that there will be enough sales to make it worth bringing a game to the Mac. If sales shrink because of piracy, it gets harder to make that case."

MacSoft's Tamte said: "Damage is huge: all publishers make decisions about which games to bring to the Mac based on how well earlier, similar titles sold. Stealing games today robs the platform of tomorrow's titles."

Smith observed: "The Mac game market is a small pond. Each lost sale hurts because we sell only a fraction of the games PC developers do. A hit on the PC side can make you rich; a hit on the Mac will pay the bills and bring some capital to get the next game going. If fewer games do well because of piracy, there may not be a next game."

UK games developer Mark Thomas of porting house Coderus said: "If we don't recover costs, future projects can be at risk – users have less titles, and fewer developers risk introducing Mac games.

"We understand there will be piracy, but such massive levels will affect future titles. We are losing money that we need for future games. Mac gamers aren't getting the full picture here."

Stephen explained: "It may end up that only blockbuster games reach the Mac, because they are the only ones that can make a profit despite piracy. This will reduce the number and the range of titles available."

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complete article

 

[AlanH]

For the last ten years of my working career I was involved, at various levels of management up to P&L responsibility, in a small software development company that made most of its revenue from sales of Macintosh products to the whole range of Mac users from home and small business through education to government and corporate.

I wholeheartedly endorse the remarks in Dojoboy's post. Most interesting Mac software is produced and supported by very small companies - often fewer than a dozen people. Many of them cannot afford to support the Mac market alone and have to supplement their revenues by selling Windows titles as well. When each next product development decision is due, they have to weigh up the relative benefits to their bottom line of spending developer salaries on Mac or Windows product.

Trust me. Every copy sold is celebrated in those companies. Every copy pirated is a lost sale, and hurts like hell, making new Mac software that bit less likely to happen.

You'll understand why I seem unsympathetic to software piracy in any form.

 

[Trabpukcip]

All of these discutions about mac piracy, IMHO, always come to the same conclusions... we need compatibility with PC. The thing is that "MikeRoweSoft" just won't accept doing their jobs correctly and base once and for all windows on unix like it was done for the mac OS. Porting software would become so much easeer... anyway that's my opinion and I'm not someone involved in this industry, so my thoughts don't makes any changes...