Rob Fahey for GamesIndustry International:

Yet there is actually a massive platform missing from that line-up – the “other” Apple platform, Mac OS X. With the exception of a handful of stand-out developers, perhaps most notably Blizzard, PC game developers have traditionally ignored Apple’s computers in creating their games.

Most of Fahey’s observations are old hat to Mac veterans who only too well understand the economic, logistical and historic reasons why Mac gaming isn’t a thriving industry. And a lot of this inside baseball is eye-glazingly boring to consumers who are new to the market who haven’t the slightest interest in playing games on their Macs, even though they gleefully drop 99 cents at a time for the latest iOS novelty app.

But Fahey either willfully or ignorantly misses the fact that there is a Mac game market, comprising companies like TransGaming, Feral Interactive, Aspyr and others, who license games from major publishers and produce Macintosh versions of them. You can go poor trying to keep up with their new releases. There are also a ton more casual games on the Mac platform than there used to be.

Apple gave this moribund market new life with the introduction of the Mac App Store, and it’s growing organically and sustainable. As the Mac’s popularity grows, the Mac App Store’s influence – along with other Mac software download services – will continue to positively influence the growth of games on the platform.

I doubt that the Mac will ever achieve equilibrium with other platforms when it comes to gaming. But that hardly seems to matter now. Gaming has evolved, and soon we’ll be seeing even richer, more sophisticated games on the iPad that will rival console games.