A few weeks ago, Executive Producer Keith Kanneg published his Q3 Producer Letter. It's the kind of thing I would've looked forward to in the past, but more recently these have mostly been summaries of what happened in the last quarter instead of a preview of what's coming up in the next one, so not that exciting to someone like me who's mostly looking for announcements about the future.
Except for one piece of genuine news that was somewhat hidden away towards the end: that SWTOR is going to get a native Mac launcher soon. (They've since hosted a closed technical test with volunteers.) To which my reaction was... huh.
The last time I used a Mac must've been in my high school's computer lab when I was around fifteen, and I don't really tend to hear much about them either. My only "exposure" to them is due to our graphic designers at work using them. And while I see comments from people asking for SWTOR to come to consoles on social media every now and then, I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen anyone bring up a Mac client.
Of course, I then saw Intisar doing the virtual equivalent of somersaults on Discord, as he's a Mac user (which I didn't know) and was over the moon about this bit of news. So someone's happy!
I was curious to find out what Apple's market share is nowadays, but Google is full of contradictory information on that subject. This Wikipedia page has it at around 10%, but several sites claim it to be higher. Then again, general usage may be different from gaming market share anyway. The Steam hardware survey for example shows less than two percent of users on some version of MacOS.
So I can't say that this seems like a huge untapped market to me... especially since it's my understanding that SWTOR was already playable on Macs, though it required a non-trivial degree of faffing around with partitions or emulators. Then again, I can't claim that making the game easier to access for Mac users is a bad thing, and it may not be too bad in terms of effort vs. reward as they're not developing a whole native client, just a launcher (which is then supposed to automatically adjust the right knobs to make the game playable on Mac as far as I understand the process).
It's basically a slightly weird bit of news as a PC user, because while it sounds like a good thing theoretically, it's not something for which we are able to see any real impact on our end. I really just wanted to give a shout-out to this piece of news because it does feel significant in the sense that this isn't the kind of thing we often see a developer do for an MMO that's been out for close to thirteen years, and it does once again show the SWTOR team's commitment to maintaining and expanding the game for years to come.
One of the things that is helping is Apple is adding some porting tools for the latest MacOS: MacOS Sonoma porting.
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting! Further tilts the scales in the devs' favour in terms of potential effort vs. reward then.
DeleteSince they aren't making a native client, I think this is just going to be some kind of emulation. I think the way players do it now is with open source software that emulates Direct X, so the launcher will probably just install and configure all that software automatically.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine performance being that great. It's going to require more powerful hardware than a PC to get same framerates.
This seems like someone's pet project, given how little return on investment they are likely to get. Of course, if the tools for creating ports have suddenly gotten a lot better, it does put the whole thing in a better light. Even a very small number of new players would be enough to justify the work if it only took someone a week or two.
ReplyDeleteOne possibility that occurs to me is that maybe content creators disproportionately used Macs. That might make it a better ROI than it looks like on paper, since advertising is expensive.