Macintosh games publisher Aspyr Media lays off 50% of staff

John Brownlee ()

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If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media. After all, what choice did you have? Aspyr has long been one of the pillars of the wobbly Mac gaming scene, porting over seventy games to OS X, including The Sims, Call of Duty 4, Civilization 4 and Quake 4. Short of restarting into Boot Camp, Aspyr has been the only way for Apple gamers to actually play most of the AAA game releases on their machines.

Sad news for Mac gamers, then. According to gaming site Big Download, Aspyr Media has laid off over fifty percent of its staff, with only a handful of team members now remaining in the office. The layoffs apparently happened weeks ago, but the news has only just gotten out.

Aspyr Media’s business is more than just Mac porting of course: they also port games from consoles to the PC, and recently ported the original Call of Duty to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Unfortunately, it looks unlikely that their core Mac team members got away unscathed. The Mac gaming scene just got even sparser.

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11 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Gaming, Rumors, Software |

  • MacRat

    “If you like to game on your Mac, you’ve probably played something released by Aspyr Media.”

    Nope. My games are made by Pangea Software.

  • http://silicioacido.blogspot.com Higuetari

    Oh man, I’ve been played COD4 for Mac and it runs so fine, they did a good job with this game. If there is any Mac gamer community, it’s a bad day for them.

  • Paul

    I’m sure that Bootcamp, Parallels and VMware Fusion didn’t help matters. Why wait 2 to 3 years to run a ported PC game on the Mac when I can run them all natively today.

  • OlsonBW

    I bought about 18 games from them over the last 10 years. I don’t do Windows licenses of any kind.

  • segaprophet

    I hope Aspyr can pull through this, I always thought their ports were top notch.

  • chano

    or the Mac team maybe got scathed Mr. Brownlee?
    There is a dictionary app on the Mac. It’s free, gratis and unused in your case it seems.

  • John Brownlee

    Thanks for pointing out the typo, chano! Corrected! Occasionally, it seems, a mistake creeps into the dynamic and live-published realm of blogging!

    Also, thanks for pointing out the dictionary app! I wonder if “smugly self-satisfied jerk” is in there, at least under the Wikipedia heading.

    Love and kisses,

    John

    (who, as you rightly suggest, doesn’t know what ‘un’ means)

  • http://www.myspace.com/arthas2 David Fulero

    Nice one John lol
    Anyway this really does suck, while I have started using boot camp, a big problem for mac users is the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t seem to work with boot camp, at least yet,
    so when new games start to not be compatible with XP, I would have to update my boot camp partition to (shudder) Vista!
    I still don’t understand why there aren’t more games and companies doing games for the mac. Installing one is so much easier than on Windows, drag the app to the app folder. How much easier could it get? Plus the stability of OS X, why isn’t there more industry interest?

  • Alexander

    Hmmm… I think their games aren’t great ports, at least the Sims 2′s performance was just not as good, even when playing at lower graphics levels (because some things like Anti-aliasing weren’t even available).

    By the way, I have no problems at all running Windows 7 (64 bit) on my iMac (the Boot Camp drivers work great), although my Magic Mouse doesn’t do scrolling… (so we go Mighty)

  • http://www.ps2home.co.uk/ Gaming

    yeah, i also bought games from them,And I don’t do Windows licenses of any kind.

  • enb14

    Their ports of the Sims 2 and Neverwinter Nights were just atrocious. Good riddance.