COMMUNITY

5 June 2009: I have complied a list of users that have posted in this thread who I believe make a good argument for the Mac Client. Find them HERE or just go to page 12.
5 June 2009: I have made the official mac client supporter signature. You can find it two posts below.
5 June 2009: I have made another supporter signature. You can find it two post below..
6 June 2009: Added the "Noteworthy Contributions" section, located at the bottom of this post.
8 June 2009: Another supporter signature added. See the "Official Supporter Signatures" two posts down.
9 June 2009: More info added to "Noteworthy Contributions."
9 June 2009: Link to a mac petition has been added just about "Noteworthy Contributions". Mac client supporters be sure to vote in the poll and sign the petition. All it requires is name and email. No registration necessary.
12 June 2009: With the peculiar disappearance of my "Official Supporter Signatures" two posts below. I have edited and made a new "Official Supporter Signatures" now four posts below.
22 June 2009: Added a quote from a windows user expressing his doubt that the census (this thread's poll) would reach 400, can be found at the top of this post.
06 July 2009: Obtained 400 votes, 46 days after thread creation.
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I credit the idea of starting this thread to Desy from the Animosity Guild. URLs below will show you where I got particular pieces of my information from.

First things first, I realized posting another amateurish thread whining about mac users not getting noticed wouldn't do me any good.

"In todays business world, money means everything."

It goes without saying that if there was a high demand and good profitability for a mac client, then there would be one made. So, I'm calling upon the mac gaming world to this thread so that you can see just how many people are ripe for this game to be opened to mac doors.

Some important numbers to notice:

According to betanews.com
Mac sold (Including CPUs and Laptops):

1.57 million units sold in the 4th Quarter of 2006.

2.2 million units sold in the 4th Quarter of 2007.

The most recent:

2.6 million units sold in the 4th Quarter of 2008.

Okay, lets expound upon this.

Even if we slash that number in half due to people not interested in gaming and round down the 1.6 to say, 1 million mac users. Then slice that number in half due to misc. reasons why people can or can not game to 500,000 mac users. That's still 500k users open to the idea of SWTOR subscription.

I expect the monthly payment to be around $15, but for arguments sake lets just say SWTOR becomes generous and knock it down to $10 (hint hint :-D ). A simple calculation is then done to find out how much you could make a month.

That's $5,000,000 million dollars a month. A month, not a year and not a quarter, but every single month.


Okay, now on to the projected growth of the Mac world. With the prompt release of Leopard OS Mac has upped the standard significantly, and potential customers have taken notice.

w3schools.com has reported their OS statistics over the course of 5 years.

Macs went from
2003 - March 1.8%
2004 - November 2.7%
2005 - November 3.3%
2006 - November 3.6%
2007 - November 3.9%
2008 - November 5.3%
2009 - April 6.1%

There has been a annual average increase of 3.81% since the year 2003.

To quote a Cnet article, "...[C]ompared with last year, Mac OS usage is increasing faster than Windows usage."


It is important to note that the popular MMO World of Warcraft, with more than 8 million subscribed users, making an annual revenue of $250 million, and being the leading MMO at the present has a full backing of the Mac world. We helped get them that far, and we can help you get farther.


WHY MAC USERS ARE RIPE FOR A NEW MMO...!

Despite WoW being an ever-present behemoth, Mac gamers are ripe for a new MMO. Why? Because it's been there for a long time and people want options. Why would SWTOR appeal to Mac gamers? Because it has a foundation (KOTOR I & II) that were grand slam hits with an awesome story line and a good sense of direction. Look at all of the MMOs out and planning to come out:

Stargate Worlds
Global Agenda
Earthrise
Lord of the Rings Online
Warhammer Online

I have checked, these have no confirmed Mac clients. We have nothing to put our money into.


SWTOR, please consider this quid pro quo and the amount of revenue you can make off the mac community. Do not make the mistake of underestimating the mac gamer. WoW hasn't, and they are a giant because of it.

An interesting fact to keep in mind, and a rule of thumb that has been inherently grown into Mac gamers because of the rarity that developers think of Mac:

"Don't ignore us, and we will not ignore you.

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lcmmania has created a petition for supporters to sign, the link is
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/macrepublic

All that is required is your name (can be forum name) and email. No registration required. Just hit and go.

__________________________________________________ _____________________________________________


5 June 2009, mpen sent an email to both BioWare and Electronic Arts calling attention to this thread and our cause.

6 June 2009, mpen posted on 5 different message boards to get our cause known, as well as registering for a 6th to support one that I had I previously posted.

7 June 2009, mpen emailed David Whatley, President of Simultronics (the umbrella corporation of HeroEngine) and received the following response.

8 June 2009, mpen and Dharma has sent a letter to Bioware regarding our cause.
9 June 2009, mpen has written a letter to Steve Jobs, current CEO of Apple asking for information and aid.

That's of course assuming the mac people who'll play the game aren't already running boot camp with a dual boot for Windows and will play through that making developing a mac client a waste of money .......

I have to agree with you on that point.

Bootcamp is indeed every bit the same as running it natively on a PC. You're running the full PC software stack and drivers in a 100% native PC environment. VMWare Fusion is not native, of course.

You're true that VMWare deals poorly with 3D games because it's a virtualized environment running in the Mac OS, but you can run VMWare Fusion and Bootcamp off the same parition. I do this on all 3 of my Intel Macs.

I can appreciate the desire for a Mac port of this game and would like it as well, but it's not helpful to your argument to gloss over these points in anything less than a factual way.

Official Supporter Signatures

Find the signature that you like best and it's corresponding #. Then simply quote me, copy & paste the text in between the CODE tags.

#1
#2
#3
#4

perhaps a real poll with more than two identical options would have been wise.

That is true , however the amount of macs out in the wild is dwarfed by pcs.

So it looks like they are selling less than 3 m macs a quarter ? Pcs sell many times that.

Okay 500k users is nothing. Thats also not even 500k users that will be playing but 500k that might be playing .

Well it be nice but sadly most of that $10 a month will be going towards bandwidth costs , new content costs , employees , advertising and expansion development.


Windows has had to content with an onslaught of negative press some warrented but mostly un warrented on vista. MS is set to launch windows 7 which so far is getting alot of postive press during its beta tests
__Except no one knows how many of those are mac users and billzard doesn't want to say.
Sorta tells you something huh ? The development of a mac client will yield little gains for a large out flow of cash


[/quote]


The mac user base is very small , the machines are primarly used for work and even if we came up for a ratio of gamers to pcs and used it on macs you'd see how far off it is.

Lets also not forget that bioware is liscensing an engine they can't juts go and make a mac verison.

Companies such as Blizzard and Maxis have had native Mac programming teams since the beginning, which is why we Mac gamers get big games such as WoW, StarCraft, and the various Sims games. AFAIK, BioWare doesn't have a Mac programming team, so development of a Mac client would require either:

A) a significant investment in hiring talent to port the game to Mac OS (or license it to a company like MacSoft or Aspyr) which would likely result in a long delay releasing the Mac version, thereby killing sales due to gamers who either lose interest or just buy the Windows version. Or,

B) wrap the game with Cider, which seems to be all the rage currently, and hopefully put enough effort into it so that Mac gamers don't get shafted with the bugs and significantly reduced performance that many Cider ports have.

As a Mac user and a gamer, I would prefer a native Mac client, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Based purely on Apple's ~10% market share (not even accounting for the probability that gaming makes up <5% of that), I would assume that WoW subscribers are >90% Windows users, which breaks down to less than one million of WoW's staggering eleven million subscribers. If SWTOR can get a healthy subscriber base of 2.5 million, that's about 250,000 Mac subscribers. If they can make money from that, great.

I would accept a Cider port if it was in the same package as the Windows version, but I'm not going to buy the game twice.

You must partition your Mac drive first, format the new partition as NTFS and install Windows into that. Then once you've got that going, reboot back into the Mac and tell VMWare Fusion to use the Bootcamp partition for its virtual drive.

What you can't do is create a generic virtual machine/disk image in VMWare first and then somehow hope to transfer that data to a Bootcamp partition you create later, which is what it sounds like you were trying to do.

Very nice post Icemansab. It seems you have done a great deal of research and put a whole lot of thought into it. I am right there with you but these other people are making some very valid points. I didn't even think about the licensing issues that may arise if they tried to port over to Mac. That alone could to be to much hassle to be worth the gain.

I wasn't going to waste my time by responding to this, but you're smart aleck tone has perturbed me. Half of your responses have little to do with the point of my first post and letting them go unanswered would dumb down my intent.

However, most of this is a no brainer.


Two poll options is the minimum you can have. What I'm not going to do is for option one put: "Oh I'm a mac gamer and I like the idea of.. blah blah", and then option two: "Hey I'm a windows/mac gamer who doesn't want a mac client." The point of my post is to GET a mac client, not show the developers who is for it and who is against it. Go post a rant somewhere if thats what you want.

The 1st no brainer. Everybody knows this. However, it would make sense to make a client for the growing second runner up OS, even if it is a dwarfed minority.

The 2nd no brainer. There is no relevant point to your argument, stop trying to negate me by replying with moronic items.

The 3rd no brainer. 0 users would be nothing, 500 thousand users at $10 a month is $5 million dollars. If you read what I was saying, the key words in that section was "users open to the idea of." So yeah I know and pointed out it was hypothetical and could go down or up, thank you for reiterating.

Finally, finally, finally! A response that sounded like you put a tiny bit of thought into. ALL the money accumulated from windows and mac would go to bandwidth, content costs, payroll, advertising and expansions. The only portion of money that would go exclusively to the mac client would be expansion development, some payroll, and advertising.

I have to say this is the second most intelligent part of your post, something that I would consider sound argument. Too bad they are so spread out, but I'm okay with playing leap frog. The only part I would point out is that vista is filled with random bugs and incompatibility issues with older software because of it's "high tech" nature. For example, two of my laptops I had to return because they would not start within a month of receiving them. My boot sequence was corrupted. Before you try to explain to me why that occurred, I can assure you it wasn't because of a virus. So mostly unwarranted? That's debatable, however at the moment I would lean more towards warranted.

The 4th no brainer. I had previously searched for the OS statistics on Blizzards website, found none, so I omitted any specifics. Note when I said "we helped get them that far," I even colored it red.

Ignoring the smart aleck tone, lets examine your first sentence. Take World of Warcraft, I would compare this giant behemoth of a MMO to any another as I would Windows and Mac. This MMO is #1, it dwarfs all others, and it has a developed mac client which gets patched updates. I wonder, and this is implied speculation, if they are profiting from the Mac world. You can try to pull the "oh but they are so large it doesn't matter card," but that is blown to bits when you look at EVE Online. Being the 2nd or 3rd (not sure which) runner up in size of MMOs (a subscription base of around 300,000 compared to WoW's 8 million), it too has a fully functional mac client.

Now on to your second sentence. This claim is based off what, your obvious expertise? Keep in mind, they are already putting a lot of money into this game with little return, the point of them doing this is that they (and their sponsors) expect an even greater return in the long run. They are thinking very long term. Fundamentally, that's how businesses (like your local food store) work.

Your 5th no brainer and thankfully, your last. Again, although it is common knowledge you even pointed it out a couple other times in your post. WE KNOW mac is smaller. I believe it would be hard to tell exactly how mac computers are used, and I doubt even further you know the answer. I would like to know where you got that information/belief from. Good Lord, I wouldn't need to get a ratio of pc gamers to mac because it's not relevant to my post! I don't care what the ratio is, because my post is about MACS, not MICROSOFT!

I'll give it to you, that's the number one intelligent thing you've said so far. However since the guy below you expanded upon that issue and doesn't sound like you, I'll talk more with him.

Thank you for your contribution, have a nice day.