EverQuest Mac fans fight for survival; SOE responds

@Miffy


The few people that play it only do so because SOE cannot update it and they want to play as close to classic as possible lol. So SOE might not be proud of it or be able to support it but that is what these people want, otherwise they'd just get the windows version.

I would edit it but you cannot :\

@JohnD212 Gaming is unimportant in the relative scheme of selecting a computer. Keep that in mind.

@Lethality

Surely that depends on why you are buying the computer?

@JohnD212
*Blizzard waves at you seductively from the corner*

Apple fanboi-ism and kneeJerk Apple bashing aside, it comes down to a simple business decision for the game company: if they make the additional marginal effort to develop a code base that can be ported, they'll get a healthy number of very loyal players. The savvy companies know this.

What puzzles me is why more companies don't just hire the CrossOver games folks to make an official port; they do solid work from the outside looking in, and they would be able to do a tighter job with "official" support. If it cost $ 1 million to get CrossOver to do a good port of your $50 game, you have to sell 20,000 to break even. That works out to selling 400 copies per US state, and if your game is *any* good, you'll clear that easily.

*boggle*

@(Unverified) So the largest sub game is able to support a marginal Mac population? Surely that will translate into enough Mac players to justify the extra expense for smaller MMOs (ie every one not named WoW).
It also doesn't that Blizzard has always has Mac versions which seem like it is as much of a sales strategy as it is a PR strategy or maybe a personal preference that the Blizz higher ups have.

@Lethality That would be news to Alienware.

@(Unverified)

"What puzzles me is why more companies don't just hire the CrossOver games folks to make an official port;"

I think it boils down to money. SOE said they had one guy who knew the old code on staff. While they could hire an outside firm, think of all the patching and bugs, that would, IMO, require one to hire and rehire the firm. It'd be cheaper just to have a small group in-house to do that (and other game-related things) than to keep hiring an outside firm.

Many MMOs are actually on pretty tight budgets, even fairly large ones (but probably not Blizzard). Some of these MMOs seem to"share the wealth" with "All-in-one-game/station passes" so that requires more scrutiny.

@Furdinand
"So the largest sub game is able to support a marginal Mac population? Surely that will translate into enough Mac players to justify the extra expense for smaller MMOs (ie every one not named WoW)."

Results from a 2009 WowInsider poll asking "what platform do you play WoW on?" (23,236 respondents)
Windows - 69.6%
Mac - 28.2%
Linux - 2.1%

28% isn't "marginal". Would a game with 1 million subscribers like another 280,000, all paying a one-time game cost and a monthly fee? Most MBAs would say "yes", provided that the additional upfront development costs could be covered. I understand why single-player games might not be able to recoup the costs, but MMOs are different; there's a persistent revenue stream coming in. Even if you can't break-even on the upfront costs, the monthly revenue from Mac players will eventually cover your costs and turn into a profit center. Unless the costs of developing for the Mac is *so* high that you can't ever break even, but I've never heard/read that from a game developer.

The numbers make a case for supporting the Mac. I believe the reluctance that we see from Bioware, etc., is the result of anti-Mac bias within the game industry and *not* a solid analysis of the numbers. They're thinking in terms of single-player games, not ongoing revenue streams.

"It also doesn't that Blizzard has always has Mac versions which seem like it is as much of a sales strategy as it is a PR strategy or maybe a personal preference that the Blizz higher ups have."

I like to believe that part of Blizzard's success is *because* they've supported the Mac all these years. It means more upfront sales at launch (which makes a bigger splash in the press), and you gain a very vocal minority talking about your game. Word-of-mouth is still huge.

Pulling this back around, though, I understand SoE's decision: their EQ-Mac server is costing them money that they're not going to recoup in an F2P environment.

@claytondora

As for as I'm aware (don't have a Mac personally), it's actually not difficult to run both OS' on your system so you can play PC games whenever you want.

Also, reading the thread on the forums (and reading the first comment here) it looks like a good number of the people playing the Mac version could easily switch to the PC version if they wanted to, but they choose to play the Mac version specifically because it's so close to the original EQ.

@donweel The problem is that Sony isn't interested in players that "would like" to play the Mac version, they are interested in the players that "did" play the Mac version, which apparently wasn't many.

@Maseno

Agreed. SOE may have the most notorious mistakes under their belts, but at least they have the class to admit it.

@Maseno

Too bad they don't really seem to learn from their mistakes very often.

They're great at admitting they fucked up (either because their PR people suck or because they actually care about some level of honest), but not great at taking the lessons they learned and putting them to use for future titles.

@Maseno

If Smedbuck's mouth is moving he is lying or covering his ass. The only thing he regrets is not screwing customers out of more money sooner.

He only admits things when paying customers find out and demand a response.

@winterborn

Lol I actually like a large majority of SOE games. I guess people are still butt hurt about SWG:NGE and a few other mishaps.