When the majority of games for computers are made for the PC only, Mac users are grateful for everything that comes their way. The Mac gaming press is voluble and enthusiastic, and thus the news gets out to the gaming community more quickly. This leads to greater sales for the Mac market, sometimes even outnumbering PC sales for the same title. In this way, the relative dearth of games for the Mac seems to make it possible for greater success for a title than for some PC games that have to fight it out with tons of other games for sales.

Another consideration that many developers mention when talking about making games for the Mac is that it's easier than ever to write for the platform, with dev tools like the Xcode suite of apps available. Rob Barris, one of Blizzard's lead software engineers has said "Out of the box and at no extra charge, Mac OS X gives us tools for graphic performance tuning, code cache profiling, memory leak/corruption hunting, file systems and network monitoring, remote debugging and profiling, and crash postmortem collection -- dozens of useful tools to visualize what's really going on inside our games." He also mentions that simultaneous development allows his team to catch more bugs more quickly than single-platform development can. Given the double whammy of easier development and the voraciousness of the Mac gaming community, it hardly seems worthwhile to continue to ignore the Macintosh as a target for sales.

Once again, it must be said that much of the perception of the viability of the Mac as a gaming platform can be laid at the feet of Apple itself. It's incredible that Apple is putting so much effort into pushing the iPhone as a games device, yet has created no similar campaign for its more powerful hardware offerings. When was the last time you saw a commercial touting the iMac as a gaming powerhouse? Perhaps Steve Jobs doesn't realize that there are people out there who will go so far as to buy PCs specifically geared toward playing games. There is no reason why Apple couldn't put together a high-end gaming machine, especially now that the Intel chip is included as part of each computer's base design. With the incredible Chiat-Day advertising firm behind it, Apple could turn easily this whole thing around.

To sum up: being a big fish in a small pond can be quite lucrative for a game developer. It's easy to sell water in a drought. Making games for the Mac can yield surprising benefits, even applicable to PC code for the same title. And Apple, you're missing out on a huge opportunity by ignoring the passionate games audience in favor of pushing the iPhone, which barely ranks as a games device to serious players.

Next week, we'll take a look at the options available to players who want to try PC games on their Macs -- which ones work, which don't, and should one just get a PC instead and be done with it?