Why are there both PC and Mac licenses?

[reiichi]

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.

I fully agree here. While I can understand why they have to have Windows and Steam count as separate (and incompatible) platforms, macOS shouldn't be counted as a separate platform. Ideally, they'd get rid of all the platform lockouts, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

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.

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.

Not to get too argumentative but that's the thing, the wrapper doesn't need its own testing. The wrapper is just Wine and unless Apple fundamentally changes the way its OS works then Wine is Wine. This doesn't even get into the part that the game runs better using crossOver with a PC license than with the Mac "version."

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.