Why are there both PC and Mac licenses?

[VisperCon]

This is technically incorrect though. CrossOver, just like Wine in general, will get detected as the mac platform by default. Linux users get around this by installing Wine-Staging (or a custom build with Lutris) that sets HideWineExports to true in the registry, and that tricks FFXIV into thinking it's running on Windows. CrossOver does not include support for that in their binaries. And hacks to force it in would probably be frowned upon by SE, so I'm not going to elaborate on how that can be done. Just that it can.

So you can't just download CrossOver and use the PC license. You'll be required to use the Mac license there.

This is also not accurate. The wrapper ABSOLUTELY needs to be tested. Wine is not perfect, and naturally, neither is CrossOver. They're still converted Windows-only syscalls over to other platforms and Wine often has bugs and regressions where something they had working in an old version breaks on newer versions.

The reason CrossOver gets better performance than the official macOS wrapper is because it's packaged up with newer versions of Wine and CrossOver's modded DXVK. It also lets you enable esync. If you went and installed CrossOver 18 or 19 and compared it to the official Mac client, it'd probably be pretty similar. CrossOver 21 (current) has a lot of improvements. And it's based around Wine 6 as well.

You don't need to change the registry, all that you to do is download the client through crossOver, make a new Windows 10 x64 bottle, install DIRECTV X, DXVK, and then install the FF14 setup files inside of this bottle. No hacking needed at all.

Your second point kind of goes to my point.

Yes if it's a commercial release they need to ensure it works but the investment is minimal at this point. The phrase "not even test" wasn't fair but to make it a big undertaking is far from the truth. crossOver 21 hasn't been tested or even implemented by SE but shows significant gains in performance. And again, no testing done was done by SE in the process. Patches have been released and XIVLauncher has been updated to already support Endwalker on release all without testing from SE.

I am fine having some charge to support the Mac version but in no world is full retail pricing justified; especially if one already has the PC version.