On the eve of AspyrWorld
Tomorrow I'm going to Austin, Texas for a few days to catch up with the folks from Aspyr Media. They're holding AspyrWorld, which they did once before, a few years ago. It's ostensibly a dog-and-pony show they do to show off their past accomplishments and trumpet new announcements and so on.
Things have changed a lot for them since the last time they did this show. They've lost some people, they've gained a lot of new ones, and they've broadened their product line to more than just Mac games: They're doing PC and Game Boy Advance titles now, and they're going to be expanding their horizons again, soon.
I'm really looking forward to seeing those folks and other people who have been invited to this thing, because I consider a lot of them close friends. Austin's a great town to have a good time in, too, but AspyrWorld has a more personal significance too.
It's exciting for me, because in many ways my career has paralleled what's happened at Aspyr. When we started working together, they were just a bootstrap organization operating out of the home office of the company's president, while I was doing Tikkabik as an online gaming resource during free moments in between my duties as an IT guy for a local newspaper chain.
Pretty soon I'd switch to doing online game news full-time and Aspyr would grow in leaps and bounds as well -- moving and picking up a lot of momentum in the process.
Now I've diversified, and while a lot of people still think of me as "the game guy" (mainly because of the Macworld column and my weekly bits on Your Mac Life), I do a lot more than that, and Aspyr's perspective has been similarly extended to markets other than Mac games.
My feelings on this are bittersweet.
I wish the Mac game market had grown like we all hoped it would when we got started doing this job. But it hasn't. Apple's marketshare hasn't grown significantly, and while there's a lot more games available than there ever used to be and a lot more of a clearly defined market, I can't say with any reasonable sense of assurance that the market is actually *better* now than it was nine years ago, when I first started Tikkabik. In many ways, it's diminished.
Part of that is because of a basic evolution in the video game market. Since I first got the Tikkabik domain, computer games have gone from a primary to a secondary market. When I first started this site, most people were still playing 16-bit games: A lot of side-scrollers and 2D fun, but not a lot of depth. PC gamers, meanwhile, were playing detailed flight simulations, in-depth role playing games and strategy titles that just couldn't be duplicated on the console.
While there are still some standout games and genres that come out on the PC first and play best on the PC, game console makers have largely caught up or surpassed PC makers when it comes to making a system that's fun to play a diverse amount of games on. That's shifted the entire momentum of game development from computers to consoles, and it means that the Mac is even more marginalized, because we've always, always been dependent on feeding from the trough of PC games to sate our gaming appetite.
Aspyr figured this out a while ago, and this year we've seen them option PC and Mac licenses for several console titles. Some impatient gamers have criticized Aspyr's choices here, and while I can't say that I was overwhelmed either, I think that those same critics haven't heeded the "it takes money to make money" idea. The smartest, safest way to make more money, of course, is to spend a little to make a little more. Aspyr couldn't very well have been expected to bet the farm on one hot console-to-computer conversion if they can hedge their bets on three or four more modest efforts.
So, I'm hoping that on Wednesday and Thursday, I'll hear about some hot new titles coming down the pike and maybe some info about some new partnerships. I'm also looking forward to spending some time with friends and having some barbeque. I trust I won't be disappointed.