Mac client?

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Mac gamers are generally more strategy/sim focused. Like Civilization or sim city.
Might not be worth it to invest in porting a game of this expense to run natively as only a fraction use Macs for MMOs. But I see no logical reason for players to be against it.

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Quake, Bioshock Infinite, World of Warcraft TESO, CS:GO, Garrys Mod, Assassins Creed, Portal, TF2, Left for dead 1+2 and many more. Might want to have a word with you about that.

At those saying Mac Clients would do anything BAD for PC players. It sure nice to be a wanna be troll eh?
At those typical mac haters, shoo shoo, no place for you in 2014.

Bump. Let's get some visibility.

Mac runs off a custom Linux kernel that is closed off (you have to buy the dev kits from Apple and buy the yearly dev support). You also have to port the code over from Windows to Mac (no easy task by any means) on top of "low" interest Mac users have for using their machines for gaming.

From a business standpoint, the man hours it would take, supporting the code structure of another OS (we already have Windows, PS3, and the PS4), Adding driver support, getting approval from Apple, and writing ports for ALL their patches wouldn't make sense. It just costs too much money.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a native Mac client for XIV, but the reality is, it just costs too much money to make it feasible.

There are alternatives however:

Bootcamp - Dual boot into Windows (this only works due to Mac chipsets being Intel. For the time being. There is talk they are reverting back to their custom Ax processors)

Wineskin Wrappers - http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=28853 (pain in the ass to configure but works)

Already Configured Wrapper - http://lodestoneradio.com/home/article/1716556/m/7398449 (it takes a small donation, but it works pretty well. I use it at times when I'm on my 2010 MacBook Pro. This, to me, is the best option available right now)

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Originally Posted by Marishi-Ten

Mac runs off a custom Linux kernel that is closed off (you have to buy the dev kits from Apple and buy the yearly dev support). You also have to port the code over from Windows to Mac (no easy task by any means) on top of "low" interest Mac users have for using their machines for gaming.

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Mach kernel actually.

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Originally Posted by Marishi-Ten

Analysis

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Very good description on some of the challenges of porting it over to Mac. I'm hoping that they understand that there IS value to having that support, and that the market is one worth investing in. At least that's the approach many other big titles have taken, which is why they have overcame these challenges. You could be right that the company simply doesn't have the resources to expand support for mac users, nor see the business benefits of it, which would be too bad.

I am curious to research the percentage of mac users for some of those games (WoW, Borderlands 2, BioShock...). At least then I'd have a more realistic idea of how big the market is.

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Originally Posted by Marishi-Ten

Mac runs off a custom Linux kernel that is closed off

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It's based off FreeBSD not Linux :) (for the record PS3 and PS4 OS are also based off FreeBSD)

Realistically its down to how well they've realized their graphical engine abstraction, which considering the game runs on multiple OS has been done to some extent. I'd wager porting to OpenGL should be doable for them. Valve has proven lately that gaming on OpenGL on Unix systems can be more optimized than their DX/Windows counterparts.

just a quick point about bootcamp: windows runs HOT on macs. If you don't have a great cooling system, be very careful with how you game on bootcamped macs, particularly the laptops. I burnt through 2 logic boards bootcamping SWTOR and FFXIV 1.0.

In JP gaming site interview, YoshiP talks about how he wants to get XIV on the mac. But it's just what he wants and it's still not a confirmed project for them yet, it'll be cool to see it done though :)

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Originally Posted by Kimikryo

Quake, Bioshock Infinite, World of Warcraft TESO, CS:GO, Garrys Mod, Assassins Creed, Portal, TF2, Left for dead 1+2 and many more. Might want to have a word with you about that.

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Yeah I know. Believe me, I know.
But those don't sell nearly as well as the PC versions, and that's not just because there's more PC users. Strat and sim are the meat and potatoes of Mac development. Everything else is gravy.
I am for it, but I can see why they might avoid going through the effort. Especially sense the company has no Mac history and probably wouldn't be willing to have a 3rd party like Aspyr or Feral. At least not this soon.

From a technical standpoint this would require the client to be recoded into the Coca API along with transposing the entire client from DirectX > OpenGL.
It's quite a large task to do something like this, certainly not something you'd get done over a month or two, this would have to be worth the investment in time to produce.

I don't see them doing it unless there's a particularly large demand, however, as with anything if there's a large enough demand they'll consider it.

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Originally Posted by Bossycow

Very good description on some of the challenges of porting it over to Mac. I'm hoping that they understand that there IS value to having that support, and that the market is one worth investing in. At least that's the approach many other big titles have taken, which is why they have overcame these challenges. You could be right that the company simply doesn't have the resources to expand support for mac users, nor see the business benefits of it, which would be too bad.

I am curious to research the percentage of mac users for some of those games (WoW, Borderlands 2, BioShock...). At least then I'd have a more realistic idea of how big the market is.

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http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

3.47% of the Steam Userbase uses OSX, however this isn't completely accurate as it doesn't account the number of people running wine for OSX, so the number would be every so slightly higher than this.
Ontop of the fact that not everyone does the hardware survey.

But it's good as a rough guide.