Macs are not now, never have been, and very likely never will be geared towards video games. They're not a platform anybody but the most money-grubbing companies (Blizzard) even consider development for, and that is not likely to change for at least another decade.

Bethesda didn't put Oblivion and Skyrim on Macs for essentially the same reason they didn't put them on the Wii. It's just not really capable of handling it.

Skyrim must be far more demanding than thought if it won't run on a AMD Radeon HD 6770M and a i7.

And Valve makes games for Mac. I am all for games being made for Macs (because then porting to Linux is fairly trivial)

I have yet to see where calling out a troll is against the rules. Especially, when I have seen it happen at least three times in the past 5 hours by moderators themselves....and like with someone with stinky armpits I am entitled to being able to tell them to go take a bath and stop making our lives miserable. Don't like it? Then show the self discipline in not posting your opinion on the Mac vs. PC war when I asked a question about Bethesda's game development for macs. You are entitled to your opinion...but I'm entitled to my opinion about your opinion. Needless to say I asked from the very beginning not to post about these things on purpose cause I had the feeling this thread would go from about game development for macs to Mac vs. PC...but to no avale these forums (like most forums) are riddled with people that make the experience horrible even when asking legitimate questions.

I'll show some love if you take a little time to answer my question.
:foodndrink:

Go re read the rules

Moderators are allowed to (because they are the 1% )

Right there dude. Let's nip this in the bud now, okay? If me posting my opinion in a thread filled with opinions is making your life miserable, then you need to get over it. If you aren't happy with people comparing Macs to PC's, then don't do it your self in the OP...it's hypocritical and kinda childish (like that thing you used to do at school whilst playing tag...the whole 'no touchbacks' rule? Ridiculous here).

As for the whole trolling thing, by all means disagree with a point that I/anyone else makes...that's your prerogative! But calling anyone who doesn't share your opinion a troll is just downright silly, and has no place here. Let's let no more be said on the matter, so as to avoid the glaring stare of mods/regulars alike

Thanks for answering my question!

As in the question in the OP?

It's nothing anyone else hasn't already said really. Macs have never been seen as a gaming platform...a lot of media students/workers use Macs to run media programs (things like the Adobe suite, among many others). When I was at school (a couple of years ago), we used Macs in the recording studio to record/mix music. It's definitely got a 'Media' reputation. Unfortunately, it is often forgotten about where gaming is concerned.

It's purely speculation, but in Skyrim's case I'd guess that it's something to do with the modding Demographic. The people that do the more serious mods for TES are pretty into their IT. For a lot of people who enjoy/live IT, they build their own rigs...I did the same...and it's just a lot easier to build a Windows PC from scratch. If Bethesda are looking at their sales, and seeing that it's top of the list for games to mod, they're going to focus on getting the game out to those modders who, at least 90% of the time, are on Windows machines (most that have been built themselves).

Okay now I'll buy you a beer :foodndrink:
Your modding point is new :lightbulb:

Thanks :foodndrink:

Like I said, just my opinion, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with that?

I think Skyrim works decently well with wine according to http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=24749.

There are obviously problems as listed on the page, but it's an idea if you really wanna play Skyrim on your Mac. I'm pretty sure wine can be used on an Intel mac anyway although I don't have much experience with them.

Can you right click with macs yet?

<-hasn't used a Mac sense grade school

OS X has always supported multiple mouse buttons. Apple didn't ship their computers with multiple mouse buttons, but it still supported it

(I have no idea if Mac OS 7/8/9 supported multiple mouse buttons, though. If I were to wager, I'd wager it did or that drivers existed if no built-in support existed)

Mac was quite powerful with its stability, comparing to PCs, not to mention great supports from Apple. Perhaps that's also the reason why they are so stable, you don't get to install 200 games from different crappy programmers that mess up your OS registry and memory allocations, crashing things here and there.

I'm a developer freelancer and working at a coffee shop. I see about 8 mac's including mine and people seem mostly busy doing stuff, not "showing off their mac's", like rest of the other 3 people which are not using's MacBook's.

Including Twitter and this thread, i've asked about 3 people on why Mac's are either toys or stupid or "just pretty", none of which gave me an answer. I think some people use the word "design" left and right, not having in mind that "design" is a lot lot more than "looks", it's functionality and user experience. For example, i have yet to see on any other platform a backup system as simple and efficient as Time Machine.

It's not that i get any kind of e-peen by coming on top of discussions on how mac's are or are not great, it's just that i read a lot of untrue statements and i'd jump into the same arguments about Windows or Linux or any other thing.

I guess the main reason i nerd rage about it so much, should mostly be due to also being a long time Linux user, meaning i witnessed FUD for a long time originating mostly from the Microsoft corporate world. In the end Linux established itself as a solid platform and it's now even powering smartphones (Android).

I don't mean to take away from time machine because it's probably one of the best default backup programs out there for any OS, but to call time machine efficient is quite the misnomer as far as I'm concerned. You can only have efficiency in a backup if you can control the deduplication, compression settings, and archive setttings -- not all of which can be done with Time Machine. Apple chose not to include these because of your mentioned "design" of simplicity. There's plenty of simple backups out there, but it's power that sets them apart because power is what guarantees your backups are done in a useful way to you. Still, despite the major shortcommings of Time Machine, as I said it's probably the best default backup program out there and the easiest for an end-user to setup and use (but many beat it in ease of use if it's set up by someone else)


Well the fact is that there are a lot of problem's in Apple's security department in no small part due to their aim at "simplicity and "design" and it's lead to them losing things like Pwn2Own pretty much every year. I could list examples, but don't want to turn this into an OS X bashing thread (if you want them, feel free to PM me). I only bring this up because a lot of things OS X users hold to be true aren't, and many things you may think are false are indeed true.

Note: I'm talking security here, which isn't the same thing as # of viruses.


What does Linux have to do with this? OS X doesn't use Linux...

I think he's just using it as another example of the same thing: MS has certainly spread plenty of FUD about Linux. I do think it's a shame that OS/X's FreeBSD origins aren't more widely publicised, though; might even go in its favour as far as people taking it more seriously.

You can, you just have to go into sytem preferences or something like that and select what you want each button to do.

Yep, it should also be said that OSX (the operative system) usually runs on a strict set of [known] hardware (you know, because of Apple "locking" it to "Apple hardware", which i dislike too) while Windows runs on a much much wider variety of mid/low/high end hardware. This means, and the people on the thread "who built Windows machines" will probably concur, that usually a Windows installations runs a high number of third-party drivers, not all of which top notch and specification conforming i guess, which can lead to a lot of problems.

Also a higher (largest) market share means a higher number of problem reports and a wider vector for malware attacks. This all adds up to a lot of ups and downs and completely different experiences from different people. I hardly had malware/virus issues wen i used it and i've fixed friend's computers that resembled a malware zoo.

That.

It comes down to a question of liberty:

Would you rather have the freedom to starve or only be allowed to eat what someone else gives you?
With a Windows PC, you have the freedom to do whatever you want, including destroying your machine with bad drivers. With a Mac, you have no freedom at all, but in return you have a guarantee that the drivers will always work.

It's not really equatable since most of MS's FUD against Linux isn't about usability but about TCO and patent violations...

I think Apple could do better to make it more publicly known that they are the main group behind CUPS. Either that or a large percentage of the open source OS world users will never print again With FreeBSD it always feel like they just take what they need and leave. Same with their legacy X11 support. The only thing their X11 board member does is maintain an old version of X11 so Apple doesn't have to do any work. CUPS, IMO, is Apple's open source gem.

There is a ton of platform bashing going on in this thread, and this is entirely inappropriate for the forums. If you don't like Macs that's fine, but if you're going to be critical of the platform it needs to be kept civil and constructive - idle attacks are nothing more than flames.

I was hoping to clean up this thread and re-open it but there are far too many posts/quotes to delete. Drakenborn, if you would like to post a fresh thread on this topic send me a PM and we'll arrange it so your opening post is followed by a strict warning from me that platform bashing will not be tolerated.


Calling someone a troll is not allowed on the forums, and this is outlined in the forum rules (funny enough, alongside the bit about platform bashing). If people are causing problems you should report the posts and let us take care of the problems, being goaded is not an excuse to flame in kind.



I suspect moderating these forums would be rather farcical if we couldn't tell people when they're causing problems, and what those problems are. As such moderators are allowed to inform people when they are being trollish.


I can try to answer your question, although I'll note I'm not a Bethesda employee and I can only speculate as a fan. However I suspect they haven't pursued Mac editions of their games because they don't believe the market is large enough to warrant the work required to port the title. Back in the Morrowind days the community often suggested to Mac gamers that they contact one of the companies that specialized in porting software to Macs to let them know the interest in getting Morrowind brought over. For better or worse it seems Boot Camp has done away with such things.

Bethesda was primarily a PC developer for some time. Supporting the XBox was likely fairly easy since it shared much of the same architecture, and it opened up a very large audience. I know one of the Bethesda programmers is a Mac enthusiast and he mentioned once on the forums that he'd pitched a Mac edition of Morrowind but it obviously didn't work out.