Why no Mac support for Guild Wars 2?

As the title says, I would like some input as to why there won't be a Mac version of GW2.

It's probably not worth it for the 3 people that would buy it.

Apple shipped 2.1 Million Macs in the 3rd quarter of 2007. Their sales have been in the top 5 among all PC makers for the entire year of 2007. Even if I were to be conservative and estimate that only 5% of those people would game, that would be 105,000 potential sales. From a 3 month period. Now extrapolate those numbers out to the proposed release date of GW2, and consider that Mac sales are growing like 25-30% per year.

One reason:
Boot Camp.

There's really no good reason (financially) to support Guild Wars for mac users. They're more likely to spend more than they'll earn.

The new OSX comes with the finish version of bootcamp. Install xp/vista on it and make it duel boot OS/window. Work perfectly fine, I have it and I use it. GW run just like normal and all games I tested on it run just fine as well, so far.

Infact the new bunch of mac run window faster than pc.

I knew Boot Camp would come up. If I were planning to run Windows, I would buy a Windows computer. Dual booting is a crutch used by lazy developers.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
Mac is a pc.
Mac pc doesn't exist anymore.
Mac have only MacOsx
Mac have a EFI bios but this not increase speed performance

well, take it or leave it, I guess. They have no plan for mac os but who know? Apple is taking a bigger share of the market everyday. Dont hold your breath though.

Too bad that no one buys a Mac to play videogames.

Also:

the mac-user demographic is trivial compared to PC-users. its not worth the time or money to put out a mac version. buy a PC like all the normal people in the world or QQ more.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/appl...ndows-in-japan

Isn't Japan like video game Mecca? Nobody buys Vista to play games either.

http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+game+performance

More likely to be a consol version than a mac version that is if a consol can handle the updates "which I doubt"

It seems to me Consols have the biggest games market then PCs then Mac.

I would have bought a mac years ago except the number of mac games I see for sale is tiny compared to the competition.

Read DarkNecrid's post. 5% is too high an estimate for Windows machines, and Windows is where the gaming is. Mac's aren't known for gaming, meaning the percentage will be lower than it is for windows.

So you need to reconsider your estimated number of mac players who will buy guild wars. Then you need to estimate how many of them will use bootcamp and subtract that from the rest because the bootcamp users will buy anyway.
Then you need to subtract the people who will use a windows emulator to run it, because they will also buy either way. Then you need to estimate how much a port will cost, along with the cost of keeping it up to date every time ANET changes something.

The best you can hope for is something like what CCP did with Eve Online where they picked a windows emulator* and decided to officially support it.

*I know that emulator isn't the correct term for the programs involved here, but its close enough for this thread.

Read the entire article please. Specifically the last paragraph.
How many of those Macs are being brought for business use ?

Also I thought that Japan was known for console gaming, not desktop. And for the port to be worth it you need to consider worldwide computer use, not a regional one.

Oh come on, that's just not a brilliant thing to say.

Avid gamers will always buy PCs... The number of games out there for Mac's is negligible at best. Mac's perform highly with graphic, music, and video programmes, far better than PC's, but PC's have games. I hate to say it, but people who buy Mac's know that their game choices will be limited. The number of gamers who buy Mac's is minimal indeed. There may be many mac's sold, but I guarantee most of them won't be used for gaming...

Blizzard thought Mac was worth it over and over again...

People like to say that Macs are meant for design, but that's not such a smart thing to say. Comparable Mac and Win PCs aren't going to handle design programs much differently! The difference is the user experience. Knowing Windows kind of makes you feel like a computer expert. It's not as user friendly as Mac, but many people are familiar with it anyway. Mac is very user friendly in comparison. For me, it's stuff like Exposé and all the system things made easy, such as giving folders (incl. burn folders in Leopard) icons.

Windows PCs sell more. The percentage of Mac sales compared to PCs with Windows installations is less, but if you look at the numbers, and ignore them then you're making a bad choice as a company.

Sure, there's Boot Camp. It works. But if I had a choice to have a Win client of have it directly in Mac, I would prefer Mac. I've used Win for something around 12 years and Mac since April, and I already prefer to be in OS X.

You're not looking at it from a financial perspective. ArenaNet would have to redesign the game from the ground up just for the small, practically negligible, group of Mac gamers interested in playing Guild Wars.

It's just not worth the cost.

Thought I would rebold your statement there. They shipped, not sold, 2.1 million macs. If we would continue to take your numbers, 105,000 potential sales is not enough of a buyer base for the work involved to make the game compatible with macs even if they were guaranteed that all 105,000 would buy the game.

It's also not just the cost of creating the game on two platforms, but also the amount of testing would double. Everything would need to be tested on both Windows and Mac.

There just isn't enough demand for developers to cover the cost it takes to create games on both Windows and Mac

Blizzard also rakes in over a billion USD per month (~1.1 billion) and has over 2,700 employee's.

Let me know when ArenaNet gets close.

EDIT: For the record, ArenaNet has 140 employee's atm

One simple and effective answer to the OP's question: development cost.

No, it's not just a matter of recompiling GW for OSX ...

I was pretty sure it was mostly a matter of reliance on Direct X.

Yeah, I figured it would be a DirectX thing. If they would go with OpenGL, it would be a hundred million times simpler to port. Of course, if the guys over at Blizzard are able to develop an engine that does OpenGL and DirectX, you'd think ArenaNet would be capable. Maybe, maybe not. All I know is, if my next computer is a Mac (99% probability), I won't be buying Guild Wars 2 to run on Windows.

It's not about being capable of it, it's about the cost of it. They're able to offer a no-monthly-fee MMO only because they can control all the costs. Moving from DX to OGL would be the end of Anet, as there wouldn't be enough added revenues from this. Plus, DX, despite being proprietary, is more flexible than OGL for most programmers (but OGL has some nice features).

We already have all the pve kiddies thinking they can get a free wow-clone and act like they need a free re-education and then join the forum whining about "nerfs" to their uber 1337 pve build , we already have the farmers who complain that they get jackshit, even though in GW, you need jackshit, and we already have botters who complain they're being banned. Do we really want Apple users? I mean, if they're not smart enough to not trip over a cable(magsafe), or configure their computer ( overpriced plug&play devices ) , why should we expect that they are smart enough to conquer -gasp- pve NM?

DirectX is an entire API covering graphics, audio, and input. The *only* advantage in using it is fast development time. Compatibility and user experience go out the window. Run a DirectX 9 game on a DirectX 8 graphics card, or at least try to. Doesn't work. That's because Direct3D is hard-wired into the video card. Quake 4 will run on *any* OpenGL capable graphics card, provided it's fast enough and has enough memory. There are, of course, some hardware features that you'd be lacking, such as hardware T&L, programmable shaders, etc, but it would still run. You can even run OpenGL entirely in software emulation, if you're so inclined (and have the patience). The reason developers like DirectX is because it lets them be lazy.

How have you never been banned?

I didn't intend this to turn into a Mac vs PC flame war, and then Yan showed up. Mods, please close this thread.

Actually, everyone here is overestimating the challenges of porting. Back when Macs were on the PowerPC chip, yes, almost everything would have to be redone. That's why most companies didn't bother porting and why some companies could make a living entirely off of porting. With the Intel switch, things have become a different field. While OS X natively uses OpenGL, Boot Camp Windows runs DX games just fine.

There's a company called Cider and a process called Ciderization that can take a completed Windows game and make it capable of being run as a Universal Binary on an Intel Mac. A company called Cyan, famous for the Myst games, used it to make their Myst Online game, Uru (released in 2004 as a Windows-only game, the first and only Cyan product to not support the Mac) an Intel binary. I know, I'm running Uru-for-Mac on my iMac. Before they Ciderized it, I was running it through Boot Camp.

Ciderizing can't be that expensive either. Cyan has less than 30 full-time employees now, down from the Riven-era heydey of more than 50. They're smaller and less financially secure than ArenaNet, and they could do it. I think if ArenaNet wanted to, they could easily Ciderize it and make the game available to Mac players. It's a cheap and not requiring massive amounts of extra work way to get even more users, so as far as I can see, there are no drawbacks to the process.

EDIT: It's not just Uru either, but that's the only one I've played. C&C3: Tiberium Wars, Heroes of Might and Magic V, and X3: Reunion have all successfully been done. GameTap will soon be following, as will many others.

EDIT 2: How it works:

Cider is a sophisticated portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs without any modifications to the original game source code. Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are "wrapped" with the Cider engine and they simply run on the Mac. This means developers have only one code base to maintain while enjoying the flexibility of targeting multiple platforms and, therefore, multiple revenue streams.

That's directly from their site, folks. No more of the recompiling, no more of the months and years of extra development to make it run- very simple and cost-effective and opens it up for more players to buy.

Cider is just a fancy version of WINE. It even comes with the WINE source code. Cedega is the same thing.

Wrong. It's not only "fast" (which is dependent on your level of knowledge of the Windows API anyway) but most importantly (relatively) cheap. There was an article on MSDN developper a while ago (unfortunately, I was unable to find it when I wanted to show it to a friend) where Anet explained how they were able to sustain a no-monthly-fee thanks to the Visual set of tools, which are the most efficient when used in conjunction with Windows API. And DX is exactly that, an API. OGL is more open and standard, but for things like graphics where performance is essential, a more dedicated approach is more successful. (who would want a WoW where you must have a monster computer to have more than 30fps?)

Yes, because there's nothing like "forward-compatibility" in the computing world. It's only "backward-compatibility" that interests people out there.

Wrong again (in most cases). Video cards have tons of CPU artefacts and other tricks to implement DX features the best they can. This is also dependent on the driver doing the best job it can to bridge the gap between the card and the DX software. We are talking here about a "science" (so to say), as modern graphic cards are a maze of things and nothing as simple as what you say. (this is not something you'd find in the Mac world, by the way I love Macs).

I'd say you're the lazy one. And the worst type of lazy: the one that will hide is selfishness behind its intellectual lazyness. In the end you're only interested in people answering here to say "Yeah, Anet should implement GW on Mac", you'll simply discard any answer that is not consistent with this statement.

I don't think that ANet's business model would work with ports to the Mac. Things may change if they get into the console world via the NCSoft/Sony trade deal, as they could earn big money on one side and then devote a bit of it on port for Mac.

You clearly understand nothing about Software Engineering, do you?

I think Cahalith gave what is potentially the best reply to this thread and possibly your "savior" answer. And this is how you reply to him?

Indeed, this thread shoud be closed...

Most mods know I'm joking, and I hope most users know it as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransGaming_Technologies

Cider "...shares much of the same core technology as Cedega but is designed for video game designers and publishers."

IE, Wine. Cedega is a non-free fork of Wine designed with gaming in mind. And no, I'm not a software developer.

Also, I wasn't insulting him for offering an answer. He was the only person in the thread to offer an answer other than "there are only 3 mac gamers" or something along that line.


That's all you needed to say. The whole ad hominem attack was uncalled for, and that's all I have to say to you.

I think you don't realise the technical depth of your question (and you probably don't understand the depth of our answers or yanman.be's sarcasm). Are you playing GW at the moment? If so, is it on a Mac?

This kind of question leads to more crazy one such as: Why is Anet seggregating against mobile phone games users? Why aren't they developping their stuff in Java? Why is it not an open source game so that people can port it themselves?

They have incredibly good programmers, a fantastic artistic team, and a bunch of other great people. But they have to pay these people, and since they are faithfull to their "no monthly fee" philosophy since day one, they have to make choices. Sorry for non-Windows users (in a few years time, when virtualisation technologies will be hardware-optimised and commonplace, these problems will fade away, with business model problems remaining, but we're there yet).

Anyway, I'll leave you to your thread.

I am planning of making an open-source game in java based on GW. Online 1on1 RTS based GW on a chess board, using actual game rules converted to RTS, and you probably will be able to nerf your own skills as you like(provided that your opponent has done the same) because I'll be too lazy to balance it myself .

Gaile Gray said it would probably interfere with the EULA but afaik so does GW:LP and TexMod, besides what's wrong about honing gw's best part --gameplay?

That way Apple users can also <3 GW, but not in 3D

I don't respond well to people calling me stupid. I'm not as stupid as you seem to think. Ignorant of the nuts and bolts, yeah, but that's because I'm not a programmer. I think you established that point.

I never said ANet was a bad company. I agree that their team is good. Theirs is still the only online-exclusive game I'll play, and for good reason. It's an excellent game. That being said, all of the programmers I know say DirectX is ugly, inelegant, and designed for speed code-mashing. Similar to using Frontpage to make a website.

You claim a 99% probability that your next computer being a Mac in spite of the fact that you want to use it to play PC games? What part of this makes sense?

You can throw all the numbers at us you want to about how Apple's market share is growing and absolutely none of it matters because the state of the industry is that game developers develop for PC. Even most of the games that end up on Macs are ports made by third parties, Blizzard being a rare exception. Furthermore it doesn't matter if there's 10,000 Mac users out there, or 500,000,000 if no appreciable number of them are gamers interested in ArenaNet's product.

combatchuck, you're buying a rolls-royce but you complain that the FAA didn't give you an aerospace license? Right.

I re-read all my posts, just to be on the safe side, and nowhere did I use this word or any word close to it. Could you please point me to the exact sentence where I said something akin to "stupid"?

Indeed.

Do the programmers you know programme video game? I hate FrontPage, but I know why it's so popular, but I won't delve into the explanations as this is not the point of this thread (though I hope it'll point to the problem of your lack of perspective ... which does not mean that you're stupid, just in case you misunderstand me again...)

yanman.be: If you need help, I could try to rewrite GW in COBOL...

If Mac sales are going up,- it's only because you can install Windows on the new ones!
I have a PC privately, but work all day on a G5 Mac (right now as a matter of fact). I would never ever buy a Mac for my personal use,- they are too expensive and until now (with Windows capabilities) to limited in regards to programs, games, etc.
I have no idea what Apple did to get so loyal fans! Ever since they first leased out the developer rights (long time ago, bought them back later), their platform haven't been remarkedly better or more stabil than Windows - I have crashed more in the last 7 years on my work Mac than on my personal PC.