TransGaming deserves a lot of credit. While may not be perfect, the company has sought to resolve one of the single biggest complaints that Mac gamers have had over the years: The long lag time between Mac and PC releases of the same game.

Not all of TransGaming's Mac releases have been same-day, same-date, but the company has proven that it can be done with titles like and , and I think that's great. From my conversations with TransGaming executives over the years, I know that this is vital to the company's overall business strategy. TransGaming understands as well as anyone that a Mac game that lags behind its PC counterpart isn't nearly as appealing to some consumers.

That's a goal to work toward, but today many Mac games--including a fair number that TransGaming has released or been involved in the development of--lag behind their PC counterparts. There are a lot of reasons why this happens: contractual issues, for example, or a lack of flexibility in the workflow from the original game developer that might prevent or inhibit a Mac version from happening at the same time. There might be a lack of interest in the Mac market from the publisher, or it could boil down to a simple numbers game--Mac games sell in much, much smaller quantities than their PC counterparts, even for the most successful Mac games.

There's an inevitable reaction, whenever someone announces a Mac game conversion that will come out months--or in some cases, a year or more--behind its PC counterpart. People come out of the woodwork to smugly announce on Web site forums that been playing the game for weeks, nay, , in Windows on the Boot Camp partition of their Intel-based Mac.

The Boot Camp announcement is often accompanied by some form of indignation at having to pay for the same Mac product than its PC counterpart.