INVESTIGATES
Gaming on the Mac
For years, the Mac has been dismissed as a gaming platform. Charlotte Henry looks at why that might be changing
WRITTEN BY CHARLOTTE HENRY >
With the advent of Apple silicon, big gaming developers are now upping their, ahem, game on Mac.
Image credit: CCP Games
People
play
lots
of
games
on
Apple
products,
particularly
their
iPhones,
but
serious
gamers
don’t
use
a
Mac,
right?
While to a great extent that still holds true, and you’re unlikely to see an esports star competing using an Apple device any time soon, the Mac is becoming a more important part of the gaming ecosystem for players who want both high-end and casual offerings.
EVE Online goes native
One good example of this is the decision by CCP Games to make their sci-fi mega-hit EVE Online available natively on Apple computers. This Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMPORG) has been played by some 24 million people since it first launched back in 2003. “Bringing EVE Online to Mac has been a core goal for us at CCP Games,” Bergur Finnbogason, EVE Online’s Creative Director said when he announced the Mac update in October last year.
CCP also provided support for Mac keyboard and mouse shortcuts. Recently, Finnbogason told MacFormat that “we’ve always been part of the Mac discourse when it comes to gaming. And for the longest time we’d even be part of apple.com… It was a great testament of showing how you could push the boundaries, the capabilities of the machine [the Mac]. So, making the decision to go native on Mac, it’s something we take a great pride in. It’s a part of our history, it’s a part of our ethos, to be on Mac.”