Apple is certainly very good at marketing some of its products, but that does not necessary mean they are 'better' or that other products are 'cheap', indeed, the reverse may be true.
At an email to Mac users might have been a nice additional communication, but not required of them at all.
This would have required that they be able to identify their Mac users, which was evidently beyond their capabilities, given the reimbursement debacle.
At an email to Mac users might have been a nice additional communication, but not required of them at all.
This would have required that they be able to identify their Mac users, which was evidently beyond their capabilities, given the reimbursement debacle.
Reimbursement ? lol. I guess PWE/Cryptic were going by 24th Century economics on that one (No money)
How can you say cryptic is not making money? I am/was a mac user, but now I can no longer play! And I bought a LIFETIME subscription on my mac client, along with several new ships, packs and such.I have spent well over a grand. I have not even gotta a refund!
One last attempt:
Cryptic was not making ENOUGH money on MAC PLAYERS AS A GROUP to justify the cost of the MAC CLIENT.
If they would need to spend (say) $200,000 a year on salaries and benefits for maintenance but MAC PLAYERS are only spending $150,000 per year then they LOSE $50,000 EVERY YEAR that they keep offering the MAC CLIENT.
It doesn't matter how much you as a single Mac player spent. It's how much all Mac players together spent, compared to the cost of offering the client.
Based on market share, there are 15 times as many PC players. So that's 15 times as much money. They could spend 5 times as much on the Windows client and make a nice profit.
Ok, you have gone there. So let's go further.
Cryptic just needs to hire 1 unix guy who knows Opengl and say SDL (for input, sound and music). Yes it takes some knowledge and skill to transcript a Direcx shader into an Opengl shader (not too much tho). And yes the guy needs to be not afraid of command line and GCC (and LLVM for Macs). They can get such a guy for 50k-80k a year and they would cover linuxes, BSDs and OSX.
And if their engine would run on Opengl and SDL (or Openal) they can port their games to Playstation and mobile phones and tablets with ease. Sky is the limit.
I don't want to think the unix community could not crank out this 1 guy salary (plus PWE's overhead).
Just as an aside, Apple is, I believe, the only company seeing an increasing share of the PC market (from 5.7% in 2013 to 7.9% this past quarter). In most quarters over the past several years, they've had increasing sales while the overall PC market has been shrinking. A lot of people who buy iPhones eventually buy a Mac as well, because the ecosystem is so well-integrated.
That said, these Macs aren't being bought to play games on. Bear in mind that every single Mac sold today, except for the very pricey and not recently updated Mac Pro, is using laptop hardware to facilitate small form factors and low power consumption. They are excellent machines — I vastly prefer my five year old Mac Mini to my brand new HP Envy — but games are built for the latest graphics hardware, and mobile hardware lags well behind in capability.
So I don't really blame Cryptic for dropping support. I don't think they have any in-house Mac expertise, and their partner in assembling the Mac client is probably gone, and Apple's hardware direction just doesn't bode well for the future of Mac games.
But they should have handled it better, and accurately identified Mac users to receive the promised Zen reimbursements. They disqualified an awful lot of people based on the fact that we experimented with home rolled wineskin wrappers back in November when the Mac client was nonfunctional for weeks. (Note that for many of us, Wineskin didn't offer a playable experience, but simply logging in once with a wineskin client — necessary to find out if it worked — was enough to disqualify us.)
So I don't really blame Cryptic for dropping support. I don't think they have any in-house Mac expertise, and their partner in assembling the Mac client is probably gone, and Apple's hardware direction just doesn't bode well for the future of Mac games.
It bodes very well. Macs are pretty strong machines but yeah they are not cheap.
TBH I would do this myself and apply to Cryptic if I were in the USA. (TBH at one time I applied to Blizzard but no avail. It seems in the USA no company wants unix devs. But whatava plenty of opportunities here in Europe. I can find a job in 5 mins on whatever unix flavor I like to use.)
Anyway, it's a shame they finally killed OSX support. They should have opened to other unixes instead.
Talk about how Mac is a dead platform or stuff like this is pretty much TRIBBLE. It will probably chug along nicely for a long time (no less than Linux or Windows).
Though it does seem as if Mac is not really much worried about supporting gaming on the Mac much. They favor lean and efficient machines which requires sacrifices in the graphics card area, for example. That is not a very big issue so far, I think, since STO is old enough that it can work with weaker and old graphic cards, but it might be a concern for any game developer developing a new (hardware intensive) game.
Anyway, the reason that Cryptic choose to no longer support it is most likely the amount of effort it took to support it versus the benefits. And not to forget - the efforts they did make were pretty sad, going by the problems Mac posters reported on the forums - not being able to play a "supported" game for weeks is not an example of good support. And it does reflect badly on Cryptic and PWE if they keep the game in such a state for that long (and repeatedly.) If they cannot improve their level of support, the only reasonable alternative is ending it.
In the rumour level (at least I never bothered to susbstantiate is) there was some talk about the people that do this kind of ports and support them were going out fo business or at least were no longer working with PWE/Cryptic. That could also cause issues, since they would need to find someone else doing it for them (at a price point and level of quality they would be satisfied with) - this could have been an issue, too.
EDIT: And I can totally understand Mac players frustrated with the end of the Mac Client. I already dread the day when Cryptic announces that Star Trek Online will be discontinued all together. (Not that I expect it to happen any time soon.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
So I don't really blame Cryptic for dropping support. I don't think they have any in-house Mac expertise, and their partner in assembling the Mac client is probably gone, and Apple's hardware direction just doesn't bode well for the future of Mac games.
It bodes very well. Macs are pretty strong machines but yeah they are not cheap.
They're very strong machines. But they're (almost) all using integrated graphics now.
It seems in the USA no company wants unix devs. But whatava plenty of opportunities here in Europe. I can find a job in 5 mins on whatever unix flavor I like to use.)
Probably because Linux is a more widely accepted OS in the EU compared to the US. That is likely due to local governments in Europe (and other parts of the world) to cut costs. However, Linux's stability and the openness of it's source code have also been cited as one of the reason for the switch away from Microsoft. In the US, the Dept of Defense uses the Red Hat distro and it is the single largest institution in the US that relies on Linux rather than Windows.
Last time I've read anything about Linux (probably 2 or 3 years ago), it still had less than 1% of the global OS install base.
So I don't really blame Cryptic for dropping support. I don't think they have any in-house Mac expertise, and their partner in assembling the Mac client is probably gone, and Apple's hardware direction just doesn't bode well for the future of Mac games.
It bodes very well. Macs are pretty strong machines but yeah they are not cheap.
TBH I would do this myself and apply to Cryptic if I were in the USA. (TBH at one time I applied to Blizzard but no avail. It seems in the USA no company wants unix devs. But whatava plenty of opportunities here in Europe. I can find a job in 5 mins on whatever unix flavor I like to use.)
Anyway, it's a shame they finally killed OSX support. They should have opened to other unixes instead.
Unix? Unix is the polar opposite of Mac. Unix is an OS for people who want to define what their computer does. Mac is an OS for people who just want a complicated toy. Windows is the middle ground. Honestly though, most people who actually use a Unix/Linux derivative will just use an emulator and don't NEED native support.
OS X is UNIX. That's a big part of why I use it: I can do development work in an exceptionally good front end UI, while the code runs in an environment very similar to where it's going to end up.
Actually no, Betamax came in 1977 and went in 2002 (yes the Betamax machines were still being made for use in Japan until then). This was a 25 year run.
The Mac first appeared in 1984, and it is still in production to this day, which FYI is a 32 year go at it.
So the Mac platform has outlived the Betamax by a bit. I remember using early versions of illustrator on them when I was getting my degree. Haven't touched a Mac since.
Actually no, Betamax came in 1977 and went in 2002 (yes the Betamax machines were still being made for use in Japan until then). This was a 25 year run.
The Mac first appeared in 1984, and it is still in production to this day, which FYI is a 32 year go at it.
So the Mac platform has outlived the Betamax by a bit. I remember using early versions of illustrator on them when I was getting my degree. Haven't touched a Mac since.
Saying a 1984 Mac is the same as a modern one is kinda like saying a CD is the same as a Blu-ray disk... sure they're both optical data storage, but they're not the same thing.
Saying a 1984 Mac is the same as a modern one is kinda like saying a CD is the same as a Blu-ray disk... sure they're both optical data storage, but they're not the same thing.
While the Betamax castettes were important to their function, they are NOT the Betamax units so that part is irrelevant. And I agree the early Macs are not like the current ones, but by that same logic we should rename every line of car every year, because a Camaro now is really not like a Camaro then. Sorry but a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. Doesn't matter how alike (or different) each model is they are all Macs and the run is 32 years so far.
The Betamax 'was better' argument is pretty much an urban myth.
Firstly, Betamax tapes had a shorter recording time than VHS tapes: Betamax 1 hour: VHS 2 hours.
Given that the 'whole point' of video recorders was to engender the ability to record t.v (such as movies) and that (most) movies are over 1 hour, this demonstrates that the Betamax format was significantly inferior to VHS. From Wikipedia:
Sony's decision in 1975 to limit Betamax's maximum recording time to one hour (for NTSC systems) handicapped its chances of winning this marketing war. VHS's recording time at first release (1976) was two hours—meaning that most feature films could be recorded without a tape change. It was not until the early 1980s that Betamax offered recording times comparable to VHS. In UK, the L-750 Betamax tape lasted 3 hours and 15 mins, while VHS was limited to a 3 hour maximum (The E-180), though later on an E-240 tape lasting four hours became available, though picture quality wasn't as good.
Although it was initially true that Betamax tapes had higher recording quality, this difference in quality vs VHS tapes was deemed as negligible given the VHS higher recording ability. Later technological developments by VHS (such as long play recording/playback ability and improved levels of detail) further eroded these differences.
All in all, I think it can safely be said the Betamax was never an overall superior product, rather it was a niche product (much like Macs) that failed to grab a large market share.
Because whether or not if you like Apple, Apple's tech support for developers is an absolute Joke. Bootcamp works well enough. Now before this turns into a windows vs apple war, EVERY COMPUTER is susceptal to virus'. That being said, it's better to go the Bootcamp route with Apple. SIncei f something goes wrong with teh widnwos client, they can fix it and apple users aren't left out.
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
I work for Apple, nowhere important. So save the "When is the new iPhone come out responses". Apple has free workshops in stores for customers to learn how to get the most of the Mac or iOS device. Does Apple have to do that, No. But we do anyway. We spend thousands of dollars in benefits and salary in the retail stores to make sure we have the staff to put on these free workshops and events for customers. Apple runs coding camps for kids in the summer. Why?, not because it brings us huge truck loads of cash. No, because we want to make sure customers have all of the resources to get the most out of their purchase. Apple does not only offer support or workshops to the customers who buy the newest phone. Apple offers it too all customers and in a lot of cases people come to the workshops to learn before they buy. iPhone 6s did about the same as the iPhone 6. Does that mean we should not make "iPhone 7" (or whatever its going to be called). Apple makes WAY more money on iTunes and iOS. Does that mean Apple should kill the Mac? Lets face it the user base as a whole was generating enough to keep both clients up but they choose one over the other.
What the real answer is is 2 fold.
1. They probably lost their OS X code guys, went to get rich making some app.
2. They were not able to replace them at the same rate as the the army of windows dev slobs that they have. Lets be real there is a lot of money in iOS and OS X development right now.
Cryptic missed the boat in my opinion They could have charged a premium for mac client use. LTS could have had an extra 100 bucks on the tag I know I would have paid. For the players who don't want to cough up the extra Benjamin the instead of free to play it could have has a $3.99 charge per month for the OS X client. there are games on the App Store that are "free" that people pay way way more than that per month and get Waaaay less content.
So Cryptic there is your answer to your OS X problem. Your Welcom.....
Cryptic missed the boat in my opinion They could have charged a premium for mac client use. LTS could have had an extra 100 bucks on the tag I know I would have paid. For the players who don't want to cough up the extra Benjamin the instead of free to play it could have has a $3.99 charge per month for the OS X client. there are games on the App Store that are "free" that people pay way way more than that per month and get Waaaay less content.
You've decided that there are enough Mac players to pay for that, year in and year out.
Cryptic has a much better idea than you or I do of how many Mac players there are, and how much they are spending now. They like money. They decided they would lose money not make money. They are more likely to be right about that than you are.
First of all, I'm behind because I've been busy with college classes for the past several weeks, so I just now found out about this. But I am really pissed!
Why is the Mac client going away? There was no problem with it. This doesn't make sense at all. They introduced the Mac client to expand service. Now they're pulling the rug out from under us. This is BS!
When the game first came out I tried using a Wine wrapper, but the gameplay was really choppy. Emulators aren't a solution at all. And I hate having to restart my computer just to use Bootcamp.
At least I'm setup for contingencies, but what about other Mac users? A lot of others will have to shell out extra money now to put Windows on their Macs or buy a secondary PC.
Ever since the Apple version was introduced, I really enjoyed the simplicity of just starting the Mac client from my Mac. Now they just arbitrarily cut it off for no good reason. WTF?
Not enough Mac players and not enough revenue from them. Sorry but you want to play either get a win10 platform (plenty of cheap ones that will run the game after all the game isn't that demanding of hardware) or get an emulator. Problem solved. Hell just go to Amazon and order a laptop there are hundreds that will run sto and are under 300 bucks.
Like I said before, you guys are all cynics. If the game started as a Mac version, and then introduced a PC client that was cut off in a couple of years, how would you feel?
I'd buy a cheap TRIBBLE used Mac in that case and never use it for anything else. So really no big deal.
Okay, I'm done defending myself against a bunch of cynics. No amount of facts will convince you to show at some consideration. Instead, all I get are insults and putdowns. The fact is that Mac users were invited into the game in 2014 and now we have been unceremoniously cut off. If it was going to lose Cryptic money, then they shouldn't have introduced the Mac client in the first place. But since they made the client anyway, they had no business cutting us off.
Guy Cryptic listened to Mac users and spent gobs of money making STO cross platform. What did Mac users do? They didn't support the game like they said they would with subscriptions and buying in game items. Sorry if the fact that Cryptic is a for profit company offends you but thats life. Companies support those who spend money on things not those that promise they will and fail to do so. I can only guess you think you are entitled becasue you have a Mac. That sad tired song "I have Mac it's better because (insert bogus reason here) then a PC. " all while ignoring that the parts all come from tha same bin as a PC. Enjoy your Mac but keep the whining to yourself about being spanked by PC's or having support pulled. PC user spend money on the game and well just the volume of PC users purchases in a month makes anything you Mac users spent in a year a drop in a very very large ocean.
I haven't posted in quite some time, but I feel this thread is worthy of comment.
I want to thank Perfect World for discontinuing the Mac client and cancelling my subscription simultaneously. I kept forgetting to go ftp, and now I don't have to wade through the Arc client to do so.
There are much better games available on multiple platforms, and I'm spending my money on what I like.
Cryptic missed the boat in my opinion They could have charged a premium for mac client use. LTS could have had an extra 100 bucks on the tag I know I would have paid. For the players who don't want to cough up the extra Benjamin the instead of free to play it could have has a $3.99 charge per month for the OS X client. there are games on the App Store that are "free" that people pay way way more than that per month and get Waaaay less content.
You've decided that there are enough Mac players to pay for that, year in and year out.
Cryptic has a much better idea than you or I do of how many Mac players there are, and how much they are spending now. They like money. They decided they would lose money not make money. They are more likely to be right about that than you are.
Do you play on Mac? Do you work for Cryptic? Why do you care if I am right or not? my opinion or speculation does not affect you! Do you have the idea in your head that anyone on this thread is advocating canceling the windows client in favor of the mac? We all know how much Apple stuff costs. I know its not the likely solution for everyone. Its better than PC but not always ideal. My solution offers a way for the Mac users to pay their own way. So if they like money so much what sense does it make to cut of part of your revenue base. This is a result of the Free to Play model. Revenues are based on in game purchase and LTS. What do you wana bet that monthly subs are down. Has nothing to do with how much Mac users play or spend. Well guess what now all of those monthly subs are going to go back to WOW.
How can you say cryptic is not making money? I am/was a mac user, but now I can no longer play! And I bought a LIFETIME subscription on my mac client, along with several new ships, packs and such.I have spent well over a grand. I have not even gotta a refund!
One last attempt:
Cryptic was not making ENOUGH money on MAC PLAYERS AS A GROUP to justify the cost of the MAC CLIENT.
If they would need to spend (say) $200,000 a year on salaries and benefits for maintenance but MAC PLAYERS are only spending $150,000 per year then they LOSE $50,000 EVERY YEAR that they keep offering the MAC CLIENT.
It doesn't matter how much you as a single Mac player spent. It's how much all Mac players together spent, compared to the cost of offering the client.
Based on market share, there are 15 times as many PC players. So that's 15 times as much money. They could spend 5 times as much on the Windows client and make a nice profit.
Ok, you have gone there. So let's go further.
Cryptic just needs to hire 1 unix guy who knows Opengl and say SDL (for input, sound and music). Yes it takes some knowledge and skill to transcript a Direcx shader into an Opengl shader (not too much tho). And yes the guy needs to be not afraid of command line and GCC (and LLVM for Macs). They can get such a guy for 50k-80k a year and they would cover linuxes, BSDs and OSX.
And if their engine would run on Opengl and SDL (or Openal) they can port their games to Playstation and mobile phones and tablets with ease. Sky is the limit.
I don't want to think the unix community could not crank out this 1 guy salary (plus PWE's overhead).
50 grand a year? For a company based in Siberia, maybe. Here in the Bay Area, though, $50k/year is what you pay an intern in the technical publications department (writing manuals) who lives with their parents and doesn't need to worry about paying rent. Someone with the skills you describe would laugh at any offer of less than $100k/year, thank you politely but then not call you back for less than $150k/year, and possibly consider your offer at $200k/year. And that's assuming a single person can handle the entire Mac client, which is highly doubtful.
Comments
As far as I know, modern Apple Macs use the exact same components as standard PC's.
As for other Apple products there is evidence to suggest they use cheaper components than other manufacturers:
http://time.com/3426087/apple-iphone-6-cost/
Apple is certainly very good at marketing some of its products, but that does not necessary mean they are 'better' or that other products are 'cheap', indeed, the reverse may be true.
This would have required that they be able to identify their Mac users, which was evidently beyond their capabilities, given the reimbursement debacle.
Reimbursement ? lol. I guess PWE/Cryptic were going by 24th Century economics on that one (No money)
Ok, you have gone there. So let's go further.
Cryptic just needs to hire 1 unix guy who knows Opengl and say SDL (for input, sound and music). Yes it takes some knowledge and skill to transcript a Direcx shader into an Opengl shader (not too much tho). And yes the guy needs to be not afraid of command line and GCC (and LLVM for Macs). They can get such a guy for 50k-80k a year and they would cover linuxes, BSDs and OSX.
And if their engine would run on Opengl and SDL (or Openal) they can port their games to Playstation and mobile phones and tablets with ease. Sky is the limit.
I don't want to think the unix community could not crank out this 1 guy salary (plus PWE's overhead).
That said, these Macs aren't being bought to play games on. Bear in mind that every single Mac sold today, except for the very pricey and not recently updated Mac Pro, is using laptop hardware to facilitate small form factors and low power consumption. They are excellent machines — I vastly prefer my five year old Mac Mini to my brand new HP Envy — but games are built for the latest graphics hardware, and mobile hardware lags well behind in capability.
So I don't really blame Cryptic for dropping support. I don't think they have any in-house Mac expertise, and their partner in assembling the Mac client is probably gone, and Apple's hardware direction just doesn't bode well for the future of Mac games.
But they should have handled it better, and accurately identified Mac users to receive the promised Zen reimbursements. They disqualified an awful lot of people based on the fact that we experimented with home rolled wineskin wrappers back in November when the Mac client was nonfunctional for weeks. (Note that for many of us, Wineskin didn't offer a playable experience, but simply logging in once with a wineskin client — necessary to find out if it worked — was enough to disqualify us.)
It bodes very well. Macs are pretty strong machines but yeah they are not cheap.
TBH I would do this myself and apply to Cryptic if I were in the USA. (TBH at one time I applied to Blizzard but no avail. It seems in the USA no company wants unix devs. But whatava plenty of opportunities here in Europe. I can find a job in 5 mins on whatever unix flavor I like to use.)
Anyway, it's a shame they finally killed OSX support. They should have opened to other unixes instead.
Though it does seem as if Mac is not really much worried about supporting gaming on the Mac much. They favor lean and efficient machines which requires sacrifices in the graphics card area, for example. That is not a very big issue so far, I think, since STO is old enough that it can work with weaker and old graphic cards, but it might be a concern for any game developer developing a new (hardware intensive) game.
Anyway, the reason that Cryptic choose to no longer support it is most likely the amount of effort it took to support it versus the benefits. And not to forget - the efforts they did make were pretty sad, going by the problems Mac posters reported on the forums - not being able to play a "supported" game for weeks is not an example of good support. And it does reflect badly on Cryptic and PWE if they keep the game in such a state for that long (and repeatedly.) If they cannot improve their level of support, the only reasonable alternative is ending it.
In the rumour level (at least I never bothered to susbstantiate is) there was some talk about the people that do this kind of ports and support them were going out fo business or at least were no longer working with PWE/Cryptic. That could also cause issues, since they would need to find someone else doing it for them (at a price point and level of quality they would be satisfied with) - this could have been an issue, too.
EDIT: And I can totally understand Mac players frustrated with the end of the Mac Client. I already dread the day when Cryptic announces that Star Trek Online will be discontinued all together. (Not that I expect it to happen any time soon.)
They're very strong machines. But they're (almost) all using integrated graphics now.
See this post for some interesting discussion and explanation of the general problem:
http://patrickbeja.com/2015/11/the-sad-state-of-mac-gaming-and-why-its-getting-worse/
Probably because Linux is a more widely accepted OS in the EU compared to the US. That is likely due to local governments in Europe (and other parts of the world) to cut costs. However, Linux's stability and the openness of it's source code have also been cited as one of the reason for the switch away from Microsoft. In the US, the Dept of Defense uses the Red Hat distro and it is the single largest institution in the US that relies on Linux rather than Windows.
Last time I've read anything about Linux (probably 2 or 3 years ago), it still had less than 1% of the global OS install base.
My character Tsin'xing
OS X is UNIX. That's a big part of why I use it: I can do development work in an exceptionally good front end UI, while the code runs in an environment very similar to where it's going to end up.
Not liking something doesn't make it not the most likely scenario based on the observable universe.
Occam's razor this for me:
A ) Cryptic and Arc hate money, so they're throwing away a profitable segment of the customer base.
B ) Mac users are so few in number its better to write them off than to keep TRIBBLE with a client just for them.
The price of being different is you're not necessarily an attractive market segment.
Actually no, Betamax came in 1977 and went in 2002 (yes the Betamax machines were still being made for use in Japan until then). This was a 25 year run.
The Mac first appeared in 1984, and it is still in production to this day, which FYI is a 32 year go at it.
So the Mac platform has outlived the Betamax by a bit. I remember using early versions of illustrator on them when I was getting my degree. Haven't touched a Mac since.
We come in peace, SHOOT TO KILL!
Also Sony didn't stop manufacture of Betamax tapes until 2015: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34776424
My character Tsin'xing
While the Betamax castettes were important to their function, they are NOT the Betamax units so that part is irrelevant. And I agree the early Macs are not like the current ones, but by that same logic we should rename every line of car every year, because a Camaro now is really not like a Camaro then. Sorry but a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. Doesn't matter how alike (or different) each model is they are all Macs and the run is 32 years so far.
We come in peace, SHOOT TO KILL!
Firstly, Betamax tapes had a shorter recording time than VHS tapes: Betamax 1 hour: VHS 2 hours.
Given that the 'whole point' of video recorders was to engender the ability to record t.v (such as movies) and that (most) movies are over 1 hour, this demonstrates that the Betamax format was significantly inferior to VHS. From Wikipedia:
Although it was initially true that Betamax tapes had higher recording quality, this difference in quality vs VHS tapes was deemed as negligible given the VHS higher recording ability. Later technological developments by VHS (such as long play recording/playback ability and improved levels of detail) further eroded these differences.
All in all, I think it can safely be said the Betamax was never an overall superior product, rather it was a niche product (much like Macs) that failed to grab a large market share.
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
And you need an emulator to play STO on it too.
What the real answer is is 2 fold.
1. They probably lost their OS X code guys, went to get rich making some app.
2. They were not able to replace them at the same rate as the the army of windows dev slobs that they have. Lets be real there is a lot of money in iOS and OS X development right now.
Cryptic missed the boat in my opinion They could have charged a premium for mac client use. LTS could have had an extra 100 bucks on the tag I know I would have paid. For the players who don't want to cough up the extra Benjamin the instead of free to play it could have has a $3.99 charge per month for the OS X client. there are games on the App Store that are "free" that people pay way way more than that per month and get Waaaay less content.
So Cryptic there is your answer to your OS X problem. Your Welcom.....
You've decided that there are enough Mac players to pay for that, year in and year out.
Cryptic has a much better idea than you or I do of how many Mac players there are, and how much they are spending now. They like money. They decided they would lose money not make money. They are more likely to be right about that than you are.
Not enough Mac players and not enough revenue from them. Sorry but you want to play either get a win10 platform (plenty of cheap ones that will run the game after all the game isn't that demanding of hardware) or get an emulator. Problem solved. Hell just go to Amazon and order a laptop there are hundreds that will run sto and are under 300 bucks.
I'd buy a cheap TRIBBLE used Mac in that case and never use it for anything else. So really no big deal.
Guy Cryptic listened to Mac users and spent gobs of money making STO cross platform. What did Mac users do? They didn't support the game like they said they would with subscriptions and buying in game items. Sorry if the fact that Cryptic is a for profit company offends you but thats life. Companies support those who spend money on things not those that promise they will and fail to do so. I can only guess you think you are entitled becasue you have a Mac. That sad tired song "I have Mac it's better because (insert bogus reason here) then a PC. " all while ignoring that the parts all come from tha same bin as a PC. Enjoy your Mac but keep the whining to yourself about being spanked by PC's or having support pulled. PC user spend money on the game and well just the volume of PC users purchases in a month makes anything you Mac users spent in a year a drop in a very very large ocean.
I want to thank Perfect World for discontinuing the Mac client and cancelling my subscription simultaneously. I kept forgetting to go ftp, and now I don't have to wade through the Arc client to do so.
There are much better games available on multiple platforms, and I'm spending my money on what I like.
Do you play on Mac? Do you work for Cryptic? Why do you care if I am right or not? my opinion or speculation does not affect you! Do you have the idea in your head that anyone on this thread is advocating canceling the windows client in favor of the mac? We all know how much Apple stuff costs. I know its not the likely solution for everyone. Its better than PC but not always ideal. My solution offers a way for the Mac users to pay their own way. So if they like money so much what sense does it make to cut of part of your revenue base. This is a result of the Free to Play model. Revenues are based on in game purchase and LTS. What do you wana bet that monthly subs are down. Has nothing to do with how much Mac users play or spend. Well guess what now all of those monthly subs are going to go back to WOW.
50 grand a year? For a company based in Siberia, maybe. Here in the Bay Area, though, $50k/year is what you pay an intern in the technical publications department (writing manuals) who lives with their parents and doesn't need to worry about paying rent. Someone with the skills you describe would laugh at any offer of less than $100k/year, thank you politely but then not call you back for less than $150k/year, and possibly consider your offer at $200k/year. And that's assuming a single person can handle the entire Mac client, which is highly doubtful.
Oh, well I'm sure you'll be perfectly reasonab--
/sigh