The Mac Gaming Market

Thanks to radioact1ve for passing on a link to this article over on Next Generation in the comments section of my recent Fruitful Weekend post:

The Evolution of Mac Gaming
by Christian Svensson

Aspyr director of development, Glenda Adams, sheds light on the challenges and opportunities facing game developers and publishers on the Mac.

The article covers some interesting economics on porting PC games to the MacIntosh gaming market. Glenda Adams throws out some intriguing figures about how many copies they need to sell in order to make a profit and how they select which titles they think will reach these numbers.

Glenda Adams estimates that they will sell only 3 – 5 percent of what a title will sell on the PC side of the world. She goes on to say the following:

“This is one of the reasons Aspyr has focused on the really AAA titles like Sims 2 and Doom 3, since it is difficult to make money on a game that might only sell 5-10K units on the Mac.”

5-10K units? This may be peanuts to Aspyr, but this sounds to me like there is an enormous market opportunity for small game developers and publishers for the Mac. If a game sells for $20 through internet only sales and sells even 5000 units over it’s lifetime, that’s still $100,000. Maybe, I’m missing something… but if targeting games that aren’t in the AAA classification keeps me from directly competing with Aspyr and the like and still leaves room for $100k per title… this sounds okay to me.

How many times have we heard the same complaint, “there aren’t enough games for the Mac”? Well, fellow aspiring Mac game developers… maybe it’s time we stand up to the challenge and more importantly, the opportunity.

[Update: added a link to radioact1ve’s web site]