Aspyr to Drop Game Support for Snow Leopard as OS X Mavericks Launch Nears

Mac gaming publisher Aspyr has announced on its blog that as of the launch of OS X Mavericks later this year it will begin phasing out support for running titles on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, which includes future patches for existing games as well as any upcoming titles that the company plans to publish for Macs.

The company has also stated that older titles that receive updates or patches may stop working on systems running Snow Leopard altogether.

This means all future releases of Aspyr games, as well as any patches and updates for existing Aspyr games, will no longer be supported on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard); in some instances, older titles that receive updates or patches may cease to work on OS X 10.6. To continue to play the latest Mac games, we recommend upgrading your computer or operating system to the latest version of OS X.

Aspyr also stated in the post that 8% of its existing audience is on Mac OS X 10.6, down from 16% in January. Recently, the company has published games such as Bioshock Infinite and Borderlands 2 on Apple’s platform. According to a report from yesterday, Apple is targeting a late October launch for OS X Mavericks.

Top Rated Comments

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Asuriyan

83 months ago

Doubtful users who cannot even install Lion would have a good experience on a new game anyway. And I doubt Aspyr wants people playing their games at 8 fps, it's going to lead to bad reviews and dissatisfaction. With new versions of OS X now being priced at around $20, there is little reason for users with newer machines not upgrading. You can argue it's a problem, but people who have very old machines or are too cheap to upgrade to a more modern OS are probably a small percentage of users, and not the kind of users Aspyr is going to want.

While I, as a power user, would personally switch to Mountain Lion in almost every scenario I can envision, your assumptions that Snow Leopard is inherently inferior or faulty - or that every user who remains on Snow Leopard does so because they have no choice - are fallacious.

Snow Leopard is among the most stable and polished operating systems released to date and a user who chooses to remain with proven technology over new versions with dubious benefits could likely make a good case for their reasons for doing so.

Rating: 22 Votes

pgiguere1

83 months ago

Playing older (PowerPC) games and newer ones will now be mutually exclusive. I wish you could still install Rosetta, even if it was optional :(.

Rating: 12 Votes

roadbloc

83 months ago

This shunning of backwards compatibility is one of the many things that makes gaming on Macs and OS X lacklustre compared to Windows PCs.

Rating: 11 Votes

HiRez

83 months ago

Rating: 7 Votes

jav6454

83 months ago

Kind of blows for older Mac users.

Rating: 7 Votes

iSayuSay

83 months ago

Lol and they say Microsoft is suck on legacy software.

Even XP has been being supported for 12 years and run most modern apps just fine

Who has bigger balls now :D

Rating: 6 Votes

Greg.

83 months ago

As a Snow Leopard user, I've held off Lion and Mountain Lion as most of the updates seem to be designed for iOS users. As an Android user, I don't need iCloud, iMessage, notification center, game center etc - and it's disappointing that these are the main features advertised - I use my computer for work, not a Facebook machine. There's no feature I feel like I'm missing at the moment, yet if I upgraded I know I'd miss SL features like expose and Rosetta support. I will say Mavericks does however look to be a step in a right direction, so I may reconsider upgrading.

Rating: 6 Votes

Hastings101

83 months ago

oh well, lately I've given up on gaming in OS X anyway; it's just ridiculously better in Bootcamp. I'll always keep Snow Leopard installed for the PowerPC support though.

Rating: 6 Votes

ValSalva

83 months ago

The yearly release schedule for OS X is such a mess. IMHO 10.7 and 10.8 should just have been different point versions of the same OS to reduce support costs. Now devs are in the Vista-esque situation where more people use 10.6 than 10.7.

With the way Apple has treated Omni Group and paid upgrades one could argue that 10.7 to 10.8 to 10.9 have all been upgrades. By Apple's strict defintion of upgrades Mavericks should be free ;) That would help adoption of 10.9.

Rating: 5 Votes