Why are there both PC and Mac licenses?

[VisperCon]

I love XIV but as someone who will sometimes take their MBPro with them instead of their PC, having to buy the game twice seems quite ridiculous once you know how the game is ran in MacOS.

XIV is not a Mac game, nor is it even optimized to play on Mac. Essentially XIV is using Wine to have the game run on your computer. There isn't much involved in the process for this as it can be done without the need of buying a Mac version. Download crossOver and install XIV using the PC version with a PC license.

Not only that, if one goes the crossOver route players will see significant performance gains with M1 users noting almost an increase of double FPS. This has only been increased with the release of crossOver 21 that has better support for M1 Macs.

Outside of "just cuz" what is the rationale for charging separately for Mac and PC? I can understand the Steam/SE versions for PC a bit more due to billing and distribution methods but I cannot for the life of me understand the PC/Mac difference.

They are essentially one and the same with the Mac version also being gimped due to being launched in a Wine like environment that isn't optimized. I could fully understand charging separately if SE optimized for M1 Macs as a native application or optimized at all; but sadly, they aren't and this seems more like a money grab than anything.