Is this so hard?

#1 Not all games made with TGE target the Mac. And not all games in the Games Store are made with a Torque product. Plus, every game that is made with TGE in the store probably has some C++ under the hood that would complicate the portability. CodeOnce is a TorqueScript notion, not a C++ engine coding notion.

#2 ...If it's not made with Torque, then why's it in the game store? I can see how the C++ would complicate things, however.

#3 The requirement is good, fun games, not "you have to use TGE/B/A". Of course, they want good, fun Torque games!

#4 GG wants to be open to all indies. At least that's how I understand things.

Also, not every indie team has Mac and Linux development boxes. Or Mac and Linux savvy developers.

The sad truth is that most of us are windows people, with windows tools and we tend to target the windows crowd, which, fortunately for us, makes up about 95% of the market. (Or so I keep hearing)

#5 Unfortunately, the Mac market is a great niche to target for indies, but as Aaron noted, it requires expertise!

EDIT:
That unfortunately is to work with Aaron's post, not because it's unfortunate!

#6 @David

:)

#7 OSX has accounted for 30% of Minions of Mirth sales...

#8 Since there are fewer games for mac, the mac users out there are undoubtedly more hungry for content...so I imagine it's not a bad investment of time to put out a mac version.

I remember Joe saying that Think Tanks sales were largley to mac users.

#9 Porting a TGB or TGE game to mac isn't very hard... but that's not all it takes for a commercial release.
I have a published TGB game, but its windows only. I don't know enough about OSX to make a time limited demo etc. Shouldn't take too long to figure it out, but I just haven't found the time to do it yet (although I did buy me a mac mini to research this). Remember most of us are indies... with limited resources (time, money,...).

#10 Sure, Windows makes up 95% of the computer market. But since there are so few commercial games for Macs, Mac users tend to buy more Indie games. (I know this by experience.) And yes, most of us have limited resources, I'll fully agreee with that one. But shouldn't Google have almost infinite tutorials on how to convert a Torque Windows Timed demo (for example) to a Mac? Or post a topic here on the forums...

#11 You see figures like 'Windows has 95% of the market' thrown around a lot. While it's true Windows has 90%+ of the entire PC market, it doesn't quite have the same share of the Home PC market. Some info to think about:

Recent estimates I've seen put Macs at about 8%-12% of the PC market (the 3% days are long gone).
Estimates put Linux at about 3-4% of the PC market.
Macs sales (especially laptops) are currently increasing faster than Windows PC sales (since the Intel transition).
Windows is virtually unchallenged in the Office PC market.
The Office PC market makes up approximately 50% of the PC market, leaving the other 50% for Home PCs.
That means the 8-12% of the PC market made up of Macs is actually 16-24% of the Home PC market.
That number meshes with the quantity of Mac software, and the percentage of software sales for the Mac platform.

That means the supposed 5% of your potential audience that you think is made up of Macs is actually closer to 20%.
As mentioned by BlueStar, there are relatively few Mac game titles (because everyone thinks it's only 5% of the market).
Is it worth your development time (if you have the hardware needed, or access to the hardware needed) to increase your market size by 17%-33%?

My suggestion? Next time you get a new PC, get a Mac. Run Windows through Boot Camp (dual booting), and keep a partition with Mac OS X on it to do testing & platform-specfic coding and fixes. That's what I've done. (Of course, I'm still so deep in the planning/design phase of things that my 2GHz MacBook Pro will probably be my low-end target by the time I'm done developing.)

#12 I do my artwork on Winders and my coding on Linux. I'm seriously considering a Mac Mini so i can do OSX builds as well.

#13 I just wish apple would come clean and admit they lost the PC war and they make IBM PC AT clones not Mac's anymore. The commercials where us PC guys are supposed to be stupid geeks just makes me upset because it's a lie. PC's where open, APPLE kept there hardware and there OS closed for the little guys.

Do they have there place and is OSX a solid OS? Yes. Did they win the PC war? Heck no lol... it might have a sticker on it but it's X86 Intel Inside.

#14 You also have to think about this. If you are going to port to any OS, your going to have to field support claims for that OS. Thats no small task to take on.

#15 My own experience with supporting the Mac has been very positive. Yes, it took a few days of pulling and dragging to get my game working at first (largely due to the horrible mess the Mac-specific code was in TGE1.3- it's a hell of a lot better now). But within about a week of buying my first ever Mac, I had Darkwind running on it.

I would say the majority of my active users are using Macs. The point people make about it being an indie-friendly market is true.

Also, the Mac community is great- I was never exposed to it before- but I really think it has a high percentage of creative people in it; most of my casual contributors (offering to work on GUIs, textures etc.) have been Mac people. And my main collaborator is a Mac guy too.. so the partnership would not have happened if I hadn't gone for it.

#16 As long as we're diverging into the "which OS?" discussion:

One of the reasons that PCs (er, Windows boxes) dominate the market is because MS Office is the de facto standard for the office SW bundle. The Corel and Lotus offerings have to offer file compatibility with Word, Excel, etc., in order to maintain their (slim) market shares.

A few years ago, somebody (was it the gang at Garage Games?) turned me on to OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice is a free, open-source, office SW bundle that competes directly with MS Office. In many ways it's superior to MS Office -- in some ways it isn't, but it's catching up. It offers file compatibilty with Word, Excel, etc., but it also has its own file formats. Best of all, it's available for OSX and Linux as well as Windows.

I'd suggest that serious open-source products like OOO have helped OSX and Linux chip away at Windows' market share over the years, and they will continue to do so.