We started Control Command Escape (formerly Mac-Gamer.net) in April of 2012, as we perceived there to be an absence of games websites dedicated to the Mac that featured only the best games from all publishers.
The main objective of Control Command Escape (^⌘⎋) is to champion the Mac as a viable gaming platform, having the freedom of Windows-based games, coupled with the hardware standardisation of consoles. Although Macs have a smaller slice of the PC market than Windows-based PCs, there are a great many people who own Macs and want to use them for gaming.
We encourage developers to bring great games to the Mac, and in we commend developers and publishers that bring their games to the Mac simultaneously (or in some cases, before) with other platforms, whether through Steam, the Mac App Store, or through initiatives such as Kickstarter. Even more, we love games that are designed with the Mac in mind, that include Mac OS-specific features as well as great and original gameplay. We appreciate the great work of companies like Aspyr and Feral Interactive in bringing PC-only games to the Mac, Apple for encouraging developers to release Mac versions of games via the Mac App Store, and Valve and Gog.com for creating an independent platform from which to buy other games.
The flipside of that is that we won’t typically cover games that are shallow, straight-up clones of iOS games that happen to have been ported and made available on the Mac App Store. It doesn’t matter how many accolades Angry Birds is given, until it’s a game worthy of the Mac platform, we won’t ever cover it.
Our reviewers don’t score their reviews, because we feel the reviews are too complex to be boiled down to a number, whether that number is a handful of stars, or a complex consolidation of other long numbers. On the flipside, we appreciate that some of our readers do want to share their opinions, and to allow for that we have the option to post comments under each article, and to score games visibly on our site (these “user scores” are aggregated, but not presented as necessarily meaningful).
Note to advertisers
Before you dash off to check our Alexa.com ranking, please be aware of the following:
- We do not share our analytics data with any third party
- Alexa.com estimates Internet traffic to a site based on users browsing with an installed toolbar. Such toolbars tend to be installed on Windows-based systems, and as our site is primarily focused towards Mac users, we don’t experience a typical proportion of Windows-based surfers (at the time of writing, Windows-based systems account for only 20% of our total traffic)
- We do not make use of aggressive SEO techniques to artificially drive users to our site
- We do not submit so-called “guest posts” on other sites to increase our organic search ranking
- Our userbase at this point in time is fairly consistent and regular, and as such, most of our traffic is direct traffic rather than referrals
- Our users tend to be interested in actually purchasing related items, rather than merely researching pirated materials
- Many of our users visit our site with adblockers installed. We take no steps to discourage this. C’est la vie.