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Apple’s failure to grasp any substantial share of the computer games market is down to the company’s culture of senior staff changing roles on a regular basis and its inability to follow through on its promises to publishers and developers.
Speaking with Kikizo, iD Software’s chief executive Todd Hollenshead said that he agreed with Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell that one of the firm’s biggest failings was its ability to keep one person responsible for games and that constant churn might benefit Apple overall but that it was disasterous for Mac as a gaming platform.
"The Apple guys will probably frown to hear me say that [Gabe is absolutely right], but I mean there are facts and there are facts, and the fact is that over the years, Apple has shown an interest in gaming and then not followed through on it," he said. "Certainly, our hope is that they are going to follow through.
"I do think they have made a significant investment," he added, but warned that the games industry isn’t going to jump through hoops like other industries might to be on the Mac platform.
"Jobs had a limited around of time [at his 2007 WWDC keynote] and John Carmack isn’t the kind of guy who’s going to get up on stage just to please Steve Jobs. John has his own ideas and he’s his own guy and even the persona of Steve Jobs isn’t going to work very well – if at all!"
He also warned that Apple has to follow up on the promises it has already made. "Now it was great for Apple to work with us, we were in some dialogue and they asked what we thought of having [our games] on Mac, they sent some engineers down and they made a commitment about drivers and how they were going to support all this stuff in the future.
"I certainly hope they follow through on it, because with the hardware now, you’re not having to deal with all this weird PowerPC architecture; they have Intel chips and all that stuff, and it does make it a whole lot easier for us to work with it."
