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Bonnie’s Bookstore Mac

The Mac version of Bonnie’s Bookstore is out – you can try & buy it on my own site or on the site of my publisher, PopCap.

I’m quite curious to see if it generates much sales. I’ve seen some small game makers report 40-60% of their sales from the Mac market, but that’s often off a very small sales base, and a single mention on apple.com will cause Mac sales to dwarf Windows sales.

While the initial ‘get it up and running’ port to Mac took only a few days (3?), I ended up investing far more time into the Mac version than I’d planned – maybe 15% of so of the overall ‘time budget’ for the game. I’m skeptical that it will generate 15% of the total sales, but we’ll see.

How did a quick port get bogged down, and end up not coming out until 3 months after the Windows version? Long story that I won’t fully detail here, but it was, in part, a result of trying to do a really clean port, that’s very ‘Mac-like’, fulfilling all kinds of tricky requirements, as well as a rather stop ‘n start development and testing process, that was not nearly as efficient as a one shot, “port, test, and publish” approach might have been.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 10:14 am and is filed under Game Biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Bonnie’s Bookstore Mac”

  1. Peter Berger Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 8:00 am

    First up, here’s my mini-review and general pimping of the mac version: http://www.tgr.com/weblog/archives/000601.html

    Second: the link to “your website” actually goes to pocap.

    Third: the “basic web game” version of BB doesn’t seem to work on my mac, either in Safari or Firefox. You might want to have popcap remove that link until it works.

    Good luck, and I’d be interested in hearing more about your opinions about the experience of the mac port from a developer perspective.

  2. Phil Steinmeyer Says:
    April 29th, 2006 at 11:14 pm

    Thanks for the nice mini-review, and for noting that I had the wrong link here – that’s fixed now. I was also linking to the wrong page (fixed now) on PopCap’s site. The correct, Mac-oriented Bonnie’s Bookstore page doesn’t show the ‘Basic Web Version’ link at all. The web version was done in ActiveX, which is a Windows only-tech, so there’s no practical way to do a Mac version of the web playable game. But the web version is basically only a teaser anyways – download the full deluxe version for Mac (or PC), and it’s quite nice.

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