There's no doubt the Mac gaming scene has improved drastically over the last decade. In short, indies develop for Mac because you – the Mac gamer – are likely to buy their game if they do. It's possible the Mac's limited selection means there's less competition, which gives small studios lost in the noise of PC gaming a chance to stand out on the Mac. Less than 5% of computers worldwide are built by Apple, but developers often see more than 5% of their sales come from OS X gamers. Smaller studios also seem to benefit more from releasing on OS X than raw usage statistics suggest. Such tools are often built with cross-platform support in mind, which makes distributing a game on both Windows and OS X an easy, viable and more profitable decision for developers. The tools used by small developers contribute to this because unlike big studios, which build their own game engines from the ground up to support cutting-edge features and outrageous graphics, indies rely on packaged toolsets like Unity or Unreal Engine. Indie support for Mac might not make much sense at first, but there are a few good reasons for it. Even a MacBook Air or Mac Mini will play a number of recent games, like Divinity: Original Sin, Civilization V and The Walking Dead, at low to medium detail. Yet the steady forward march of hardware, combined with a lack of interest among developers in building games that target higher specced machines has created a favorable atmosphere for Mac gaming. Whatever limited interest Apple has in gaming has grown in response to the success of mobile games on the iTunes and Mac App Stores. With the exception of the Mac Pro, which is powerful but also very expensive, nothing in the Mac lineup is specifically targeted towards extreme power users and nothing, including the Mac Pro, is built for gamers alone.

There were several good reasons for this, but the switch from PowerPC to Intel a decade ago eliminated one major barrier and, as a result, Mac gaming has slowly improved over the last decade.īut can players finally ditch Windows completely and use a Mac for work and play? Apple's operating system has always received the short end of the stick when it comes to games.

Best games for mac 2014