FFXIV for macOS?

[Kiasta]

I just have a serious complaint about this. Why do I have to pay for the game again when I've already paid for it and pay a monthly subscription just to play this on my MacBook? I've never encountered a game where they charge separately for Windows and Mac. This is completely ridiculous. As a paying customer I am actually very disappointed in your service right now. There is absolutely no way I would ever consider paying full price for your game twice.

[NephthysVasudan]

If you think this is unique to FFXIV...your rather ignorant of the market.

Only a few tittles don't require you to buy an extra license per platform.

Not that I'm saying this is a good thing mind you...but your acting like this is a new thing....hate to break it to you...its been a "thing" for far longer than you realize.

PlayStation owners can't play this game without buying a license for the game even if they own a PC version.

Its especially prevalent between console games and computer platform.

Mac is just yet an another platform.

[reiichi]

Because like a PS4, macOS is considered a separate platform. (Even PS3 was, although those got free upgrades to PS4 when PS3 service was shut down). Platforms and subscription service are two separate things.

You buy the game (and latest expansion) once on each platform you play on. Then your service is the recurring fees. Some distributors give cross-platform access, but not all.

Better yet though, don't get the macOS copy of FFXIV. Quite frankly, it's garbage and even after they took it off the store and then added it back after "fixes" it's still garbage. You'll get the best results using BootCamp, and can just use the Windows version then. Otherwise, if you aren't afraid of developer tools and potentially having to use the Terminal, look into CrossOver or the project it's based on, Wine. (They do compile for OSX/macOS and the "Mac Port" is based on an archaic branch of wine that added DRM and not the good features.) You can then just play the Windows version in Wine, but you won't receive any official support for it should something go wrong or work unexpectedly.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I don't think the MacBook is even officially supported, only iMacs.

Most MacBooks don't have dedicated GPUs, and the ones that do get rather hot while playing, which is why they aren't supported I believe.

[Felis]

And you get another 30 days free everytime you register a new platform

[Sigma-Astra]

Well, you have to take into consideration that the way Macs are built, in terms of their OS, for games is incredibly limited. So, it's a bit silly to think that just because something works on the Windows OS, it should work on the Mac OS flawlessly in the same manner. That's not the case. The Windows OS system was designed with a lot more leeway regarding people using their PC's for work and high end tier entertainment value at the same time while Macs have been and were always made strictly for work and low end tier entertainment value. That's not to mention that a Windows OS system costs less than a Mac OS system.

When a PC gamer wanted to play computer games, they didn't go out searching for an Apple, they went for the Windows OS system because a lot of companies would have rather developed their games to play on something largely used by the majority and coding their games to run and work on Mac's, in most cases, was more time consuming with less of a chance of breaking even on sales.

It takes more time to develop games for Macs, not that those games simply don't exist, but because of Apple it just takes additional time that a lot of game companies simply don't want to put in. In regards towards the software, the two OS systems are radically coded differently in terms of their installers for files and just in general. You're not going to find an .EXE file on a Mac, ever. Those files do not exist and will not work period.

I own both a PC and a Mac just in case you were wondering how I know these things. I mostly use my Mac for design work because they were designed to run Adobe programs much more flawlessly than how they were coded to run on the Windows OS.

[reiichi]

Well, you have to take into consideration that the way Macs are built, in terms of their OS, for games is incredibly limited. So, it's a bit silly to think that just because something works on the Windows OS, it should work on the Mac OS flawlessly in the same manner. That's not the case. The Windows OS system was designed with a lot more leeway regarding people using their PC's for work and high end tier entertainment value at the same time while Macs have been and were always made strictly for work and low end tier entertainment value. That's not to mention that a Windows OS system costs less than a Mac OS system.

When a PC gamer wanted to play computer games, they didn't go out searching for an Apple, they went for the Windows OS system because a lot of companies would have rather developed their games to play on something largely used by the majority and coding their games to run and work on Mac's, in most cases, was more time consuming with less of a chance of breaking even on sales.

It takes more time to develop games for Macs, not that those games simply don't exist, but because of Apple it just takes additional time that a lot of game companies simply don't want to put in. In regards towards the software, the two OS systems are radically coded differently in terms of their installers for files and just in general. You're not going to find an .EXE file on a Mac, ever. Those files do not exist and will not work period.

I own both a PC and a Mac just in case you were wondering how I know these things. I mostly use my Mac for design work because they were designed to run Adobe programs much more flawlessly than how they were coded to run on the Windows OS.

Since about 2006, Macs have been built with Intel CPUs are hardware-wise, are basically just PCs in custom cases. Macs also support a number of common graphics libraries among their own proprietary ones, but Microsoft DirectX support is not one of them. It's not the hardware. A user using Bootcamp would have no issue installing FFXIV. They'd have the exact same experience as a regular PC with similar hardware. (As in, a dedicated GPU would do much better with the game and the ones with Intel graphics would be a pretty lackluster experience.)

FFXIV for Windows relies on DirectX. That's where the holdup is. The "port" for macOS is also literally the Windows version. It even has exe files. With crossover or wine, users can even double click them to run, depending on file handlers.

I'd argue it doesn't take any more time to develop for iOS/macOS than it does for another platform, but the common tools and libraries that a company like Square-Enix is using weren't built to make use of OpenGL (cross-platform Linux/macOS/Windows) or Metal (more akin to Vulkan APIs and Apple-only).

[Sigma-Astra]

Well, I'd argue that if you need a third party software to run the .EXE files for XIV on a Mac correctly, then that still doesn't necessarily mean that the Mac OS system was built first and foremost to run them in the first place.

Unless you're paying $5,000 for an iMac Pro, you're not getting a good graphics card otherwise. Even my own Macbook Pro has two graphics cards built into it, costs me $2,000 from the Apple store, refurbished even, and I wouldn't trust XIV on this thing. You could easily spend that $5,000 on a custom Windows PC and get more bang for your buck, hell, less than that even.

[reiichi]

Well, I'd argue that if you need a third party software to run the .EXE files for XIV on a Mac correctly, then that still doesn't necessarily mean that the Mac OS system was built first and foremost to run them in the first place.

Unless you're paying $5,000 for an iMac Pro, you're not getting a good graphics card otherwise. Even my own Macbook Pro has two graphics cards built into it, costs me $2,000 from the Apple store, refurbished even, and I wouldn't trust XIV on this thing. You could easily spend that $5,000 on a custom Windows PC and get more bang for your buck, hell, less than that even.

Surely. It's not cost-effective to buy a mac for playing windows games. I suppose someone could eventually buy an eGPU for gaming, but macOS support there is still a bit lacking (10.14 seems to be improving that though) and getting an eGPU connected to a Mac to work with Bootcamp is not a walk in the park. Users will still have a much better experience using Bootcamp than Crossover/Wine or the bundled Transgaming fork of Wine which is what the Mac "port" uses.

But it's not quite correct to say macOS doesn't support games. Or that Apple's branded hardware doesn't support games. It just doesn't support -this- game because it doesn't support DirectX. If SE had coded FFXIV using OpenGL as their base, making platform-specific adjustments would have been a much easier task. Instead, Winei s used to convert all the Windows-specific API calls and there's a performance hit.

[Sigma-Astra]

Surely. It's not cost-effective to buy a mac for playing windows games. I suppose someone could eventually buy an eGPU for gaming, but macOS support there is still a bit lacking (10.14 seems to be improving that though) and getting an eGPU connected to a Mac to work with Bootcamp is not a walk in the park. Users will still have a much better experience using Bootcamp than Crossover/Wine or the bundled Transgaming fork of Wine which is what the Mac "port" uses.

But it's not quite correct to say macOS doesn't support games. Or that Apple's branded hardware doesn't support games. It just doesn't support -this- game because it doesn't support DirectX. If SE had coded FFXIV using OpenGL as their base, making platform-specific adjustments would have been a much easier task. Instead, Winei s used to convert all the Windows-specific API calls and there's a performance hit.

Well, I never said that the Mac OS can't run games completely or that it doesn't support them entirely from my first post at all. I said

The Windows OS system was designed with a lot more leeway regarding people using their PC's for work and high end tier entertainment value at the same time while Macs have been and were always made strictly for work and low end tier entertainment value.

Even more so nowadays because most Macs are built with the entire system into the monitor itself, which kind of puts a damper on changing your visual or audio cards in ways that you can do with a custom PC.

When a PC gamer wanted to play computer games, they didn't go out searching for an Apple, they went for the Windows OS system because a lot of companies would have rather developed their games to play on something largely used by the majority and coding their games to run and work on Mac's, in most cases, was more time consuming with less of a chance of breaking even on sales.

It takes more time to develop games for Macs, not that those games simply don't exist, but because of Apple it just takes additional time that a lot of game companies simply don't want to put in.

Not once, in any of this, did I say that they don't support games at all, merely that it's not cost effective and it's possibly time consuming for some companies to port their games over to the Mac OS system when the majority of the people who play computer games do so on a Windows OS in this generation of gaming. Considering that not very many people have or can afford Macs, it's decent to say that games have usually been developed with the Windows OS in mind first and the Mac OS as an afterthought later and there's always been this kind of discrepancy since the early 90's. Some games are designed purely for Windows, others for Mac. If you need third party software on either a Mac or Windows OS to run games not native towards the OS in the first place, that doesn't really mean that the OS was designed to run it still was what I was getting at because all Windows OS games run with an .EXE file which isn't quite native to a Mac and was physically impossible until other people developed the tools necessary to do it or the company in question actually made a viable version for it first.

Simcity 2000 was developed for the Mac OS first in 1993 and was later ported to the Windows OS in 1995, a decent and well loved game by all mostly. It's possible for Macs to run games, it always was a possibility, but it's entirely dependent on whether the company wants to code the game to actually work on a Mac OS system in the first place without the aid of other tools.

Again, a software problem more than anything which is what I was going at.