Mac.LTL

Cider, while old news, is still the subject of much debate. Cider: good or bad? I will reveal my opinions on the matter here, now. This is Cider: An editorial.

Cider, a product by Transgaming, who also produces Cedega, was announced over a year ago. While seemingly good for the Mac gaming community, including announcements that EA will release some of it’s top tier games to Mac OS X using Cider, with versions of X3, Heroes of Light and Magic, and Myst Online: Uru Live released already using Cider.

In my opinion, I think Cider can be a good addition to the more mainstream way (read: Aspyr, MacSoft, etc) of porting Windows games to Mac OS X, but it can also be a potentially bad addition. While we are receiving some games that were not previously considered for release to the Macintosh platform, is it really worth it? Could this method of simply wrapping the Windows version of the game become perhaps mainstream if the licensing was more inexpensive? I think so, and if it happens, this could possibly see native versions of games, previously ported by Aspyr, MacSoft, and other outlets, just go away. The result-less native games. While it technically is running natively under Mac OS X, it is just a wrapper using technology from WINE, it was not coded for Mac OS X specifically, and with a Cider game, if you open the contents of the .app file, you will find .exe’s from the Windows version.

I do not want to see Aspyr’s, MacSoft’s, and other companies’ actual ports go away, especially to be replaced with, a system, that is in my opinion, a lazy “port”, but then again, this could be the future perhaps of Mac gaming, sad as I am to admit this, and not supporting it could give developers all the more reason to drop the Macintosh platform completely, once again.

Cider, be it the savior for Macintosh gaming, or the downfall of Mac gaming, you form your opinion…

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Games, Developer, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.