Make Mac Games

An interesting list of best sellers for the MacGameStore in their latest news letter:

This Week’s Top Ten Bestsellers

Scrabble
Luxor 2
Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst
Virtual Villagers – The Lost Children
Bejeweled 2
Halo Universal Binary
Pat Sajak’s Trivia Gems
Luxor MahJong
MacGameStore DVD
Age of Empires III

Of the 10 items, only two are “hard core” triple-A games.
The Top 10 Downloads on Apple’s Game Downloads:

Age [...]

GameProducer.net has published the past five years of sales stats for Chronic Logic’s game, Triptch.
It’s interesting to see the “self life” of this Tetris-like game over an extended timeframe.
The total sales numbers are pretty darn good for 3 weeks of development and $200 in art and sound expenses.

I just rediscovered this nice little podcast: Indie Game Developer’s Podcast
The podcast features interviews with independent game developers, including:

Positech Games (Starship Tycoon, Democracy, Kudos)
Squashy Software (Platypus, Cletus Clay)
Amaranth Games (Aveyond, Ahriman’s Prophecy)

MacNN.com reports:
TransGaming today released the “Cider” portability engine for Intel-based Macs, offering game developers and publishers the ability to deploy Windows-based games on new Macs quickly and easily, without the need for traditional arduous porting.
This sounds interesting, but “Cider” uses a Windows compatibility library to allow this to work. I wonder what the performance [...]

via today’s Aspyr Games Newsletter (July 31, 2006):

The Gamerhood(TM), coming soon, will allow Mac users to download casual
games and video games.
Earlier this month we announced the development of a new game application,
The Gamerhood(TM), that will allow a user to purchase and download a game
directly to their Macintosh using a standard Internet connection. A [...]

MacWorld’s Peter Cohen writes about commercial games taking up the shareware distribution model in his The Game Room column:
Shareware isn’t exactly a new idea. But the distribution model for shareware is being adapted by commercial game publishers for a new breed of commercial game that’s starting to impact how Mac games are sold.

Cohen mentions that [...]

Tuncer Dennis (Inside Mac Games, Mac Game Store, Mac Game Files) has a post on his blog about the days when he used to work with the game studio, Bungie.
He includes a nice little video on the days right before the launch of their game Marathon. Though Tuncer is no Spielberg, it’s interesting to [...]

GBGames has some commentary on Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert’s review of the movie, “Silent Hill” and statements that games are not art.
I have not seen nor played “Silent Hill”, but I have seen and played “Doom” and watched “Resident Evil” (which I quite liked).
I find Ebert’s comments quite silly, actually. Games don’t make great [...]

Jeff Vogel, Spiderweb Softare (Avernum, Geneforge), shares more wisdom from his 10+ years of indie game development in View From the Bottom: Part 3. This time he discusses his experience with trying to innovate.

Peter Cohen of MacWorld Magazine writes in his The Game Room column: Support original Mac game developers.
It’s nice to see MacWorld push this point of view. I hope it helps.