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.