I love observational misinformation.
Those statistics are for all computers, everywhere. That includes every fortune 500 company who has Linux servers and tens of thousands of cheap desktop terminals running some flavor of Windows.
the home market, Apple has almost 17% of the market. iDevices luring people to the Mac camp has been a serious boost.
in the laptop market, they have almost 30% of the market.
Even if 10% of people with Macs could run SWTOR (which is a little low - it ran totally fine on an older iMac i have in the house, with a fairly minimal GPU), that'd still be 5 or 6 million Mac users as potential clients. If even 5% of those people played SWTOR on their macs, you're still looking at 200,000+ players. At 15 bucks a month, that's still a pretty substantial pile of money.
Yes, it will end up being a small fraction of their player base, but no EA shareholder is going to be upset that they are spending the time to add another few million to the pile every month.
The main issue, and the reason we wont see an OSX client, is because the version of the HERO engine they used for SWTOR wasn't cross-platform, and it has now been so heavily modified there's simply no way to drop in support for the newest HERO engine version (which IS cross platform) without an almost total re-write.
What is potentially likely is that during a major expansion pack, they will overhaul the client and drop in support for the new HERO engine - much like Blizzard did when they made the client 64 bit native - essentially a complete rewrite, or when they dropped in the new OpenGL engine - but it isnt something that will happen outside of major expac time, if ever.
Yeah, i support an OSX client, so i dont have to boot back and forth. It's kinda annoying. But ill still be playing.
I love observational misinformation. Those statistics are for all computers, everywhere. That includes every fortune 500 company who has Linux servers and tens of thousands of cheap desktop terminals running some flavor of Windows. the home market, Apple has almost 17% of the market. iDevices luring people to the Mac camp has been a serious boost. in the laptop market, they have almost 30% of the market. Even if 10% of people with Macs could run SWTOR (which is a little low - it ran totally fine on an older iMac i have in the house, with a fairly minimal GPU), that'd still be 5 or 6 million Mac users as potential clients. If even 5% of those people played SWTOR on their macs, you're still looking at 200,000+ players. At 15 bucks a month, that's still a pretty substantial pile of money. Yes, it will end up being a small fraction of their player base, but no EA shareholder is going to be upset that they are spending the time to add another few million to the pile every month. The main issue, and the reason we wont see an OSX client, is because the version of the HERO engine they used for SWTOR wasn't cross-platform, and it has now been so heavily modified there's simply no way to drop in support for the newest HERO engine version (which IS cross platform) without an almost total re-write. What is potentially likely is that during a major expansion pack, they will overhaul the client and drop in support for the new HERO engine - much like Blizzard did when they made the client 64 bit native - essentially a complete rewrite, or when they dropped in the new OpenGL engine - but it isnt something that will happen outside of major expac time, if ever. Yeah, i support an OSX client, so i dont have to boot back and forth. It's kinda annoying. But ill still be playing.