One of the items mentioned in the keynote was EA's decision to simultaneously release games on the same day for the Mac as the PC. Due to the brief mention, details were not available at the time, but now that the announcement has been made, a press release has been made available (PDF) further documenting EA's plans.
Firstly, EA is simply committing to sim-shipping -- releasing the game on the same day on the Mac as on the PC. Many companies already do this for a variety of reasons, including piracy and the gray market (export/import copies). One of the companies that took the lead in sim-shipping is one of their major competitors on the Mac, Blizzard Entertainment.
Blizzard has been sim-shipping since Warcraft III, though they've had Mac versions of all their computer games from the beginning (Starting with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and all the way up through World of Warcraft).
Secondly, EA's game releases are not going to be Universal Applications. Despite the ease of which an executable can be compiled to run on either PowerPC or the Intel-based architecture, EA has decided to make these games Intel-only, because instead of a real programming effort, these games are more like emulations usingTransgaming's Cider. Cider loads the program into the OS memory, and then uses an Win32 API which translates all the Windows based library calls into Intel-Mac equivalents. Think of it as a sort of Rosetta for Windows.
Blizzard's games, on the other hand, are really "Made for Mac" Applications -- they'll run on PowerPC as well as Intel architecture, and it really is the way it should be done.
I also question the motives behind EA's sudden shift to a newfound love for the Macintosh platfom -- for years they've licensed their games out to be published by Aspyr for the Mac platform. To port a game over through Cider only takes a few days (I would assume a real port done by Aspyr would take considerably longer), so there's definitely a benefit to doing it this way, though it would exclude the large number of Macs built before 2006.
Personally, I think EA's expectations for gamers on the Mac are too high -- Mac users are not typically known for being hardcore gamers.
Leave a comment