No Macs? Holy crap did WotC do the math wrong!

[JVisgaitis]

A very good point by Charles. Look, no one is saying the Mac market isn't small, but the way that Charles spins the numbers like this makes it VERY valid. Of the 10 people that I game with on a semi regular basis for the past 5 years, 5 of them (myself included) are Mac users.

People who I used to game with that I can't now because of distance that I would like to play with using the DI? Of the 8 I can think of 3 of them use Mac. Plus, majority of the game publishers use Macs. While 3% is a valid number for the current Mac market, I would think that number is a lot higher with people that play D&D.

The poll that was linked above has the numbers of PC vs. Mac very close. Does Morrus or someone here have numbers on the visitors to EN World and what OS they are using?

 

[SteveC]

I own two Macs and a PC.

My issue is that designing for one platform is a sign of bad design.

My preference is for good design.

Cheers, -- N

I knew that if I were on the boards long enough, I would eventually disagree with you on something, and here it is. I guess I've used some cross-platform tools (or, more accurately, was made to use them) in college, and it's the main reason why I ended up as an English major rather than an English plus Comp Sci major.

All I can say in this to be serious is that if you're right, the vast majority of the computing industry uses bad design...which may exactly be what you intended to say in the first place. In that case, I agree with you!

--Steve

 

[Gentlegamer]

My understanding is that Macs now use Intel processors and can run Windows . . .

 

[reanjr]

According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Business section earlier this week, Mac sales last quarter made up about 2.8% of the U.S. market.

At that point, it simply is not economically feasible to cater to them.

That's a misleading statistic. The lifetime of a Mac is more than double that of a Windows PC. Additionally, a much greater percentage of the Windows PC market is for servers. Add to the fact that nearly all Linux, BSD, etc. users purchase a Windows PC only to delete Windows.

Mac's share is near 10% from best estimates I've heard.

And it does NOT take more than 10% extra work to make something cross-platform. It's relatively trivial if you decide to make the effort.

 

[green slime]

Agreeing with what? That you prefer good software over bad? Well I prefer good food to bad. What does that have to do with anything?

The issue is designing for PC and not Mac.

I call it targeted design. Why spend resources (time, money, testing, etc) when the return on that resource investment is small? Ideally, every project (software or otherwise) would have all the bells and whistles you can imagine. But in the world I live in (and industry I work in), that's unrealistic. Sometimes you have to make hard designs on features. The thing is, the PC/Mac design usually isn't one of those tough decisions.

Is it actually possible to make software, which can run on any platform? Yes it is. At the very basic end, we have available to us today Java, and modern web browsers.

Would the customers be terribly disappointed if we reduced some functionality, but instead could include all users that have an appropriate JVM and a modern web browser, given that they have next to nothing available today? I'd hazard a guess and say No. None of what I have seen in the presentation videos from Gencon suggest a dire "need for DirectX or die trying" attitude, that couldn't be overcome.

It doesn't need more resources, if you do it right from the beginning.

 

[Zurai]

Of the five PCs I used this year, one was mine, free to install software on as I please. The rest were owned by work.

Of the two Macs I used this year, two were mine.

I honestly think you'll find the proportion of PCs "locked down" and used only for business is much larger than the proportion of Macs.

Cheers, -- N

Even if 90% of Windows machines were work-only vs 50% of Macs (which I do NOT believe is the case, statistically irrelevant anecdotes aside), personal Windows machines would still be a vastly larger market.

 

[Zurai]

Is it actually possible to make software, which can run on any platform? Yes it is. At the very basic end, we have available to us today Java, and modern web browsers.

Java is a LOUSY solution. It has horrible memory management tools, it's slow as molasses in January, and it has problems with certain browsers.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I don't think Charles - or anyone else - has missed out on that. Meeting regularly or not, if 10% of the population uses Macs, and WotC assumes group of 5-6, then the Math is simple: around half of the groups (new or not) will likely have at least one non-Windows user.

I can just imagine the email, "Hey guys, WotC has a new release, and even though we live on opposite sides of the world now, we can get the old group back together again! Well, except Joe, because he uses Mac. But screw him, we didn't like him anyways."

I expect it'll look more like:

Gamers Seeking Gamers
Looking for players for a 4th edition game on D&DI game table. Email Bob at bob@bob.com.

Mac users won't email Bob. Windows users will. Therefore 100% of Bob's players will be Windows users.

It's only an issue if you have a pre-existing group that is now geographically isolated from one another, and has at least one member who can not or will not locate a Windows box to use for gaming. Is it really that hard to locate a Windows machine somewhere for a few hours each week? If it's such a problem, go find one of those places in which people play Counter-Strike for two bucks an hour, and rent a computer that runs DirectX.

Hell, I can probably dig up three older Windows boxes in the next 24 hours that would meet the system specs, and the owners would give them to me for free, just to get them out of their basements. Having the vast majority of the market share means that there are a ton of people who upgraded and still have their old systems kicking around. I bet that, for under $50, every single mac user who wants to use the game table could find an old Windows machine for just that purpose. If they're so desperate to use it, it's probably worth the money.

 

[Nifft]

All I can say in this to be serious is that if you're right, the vast majority of the computing industry uses bad design...which may exactly be what you intended to say in the first place. In that case, I agree with you!

That was not my main point, but IMHO it is accurate. There's a lot of bad software out there. Some of it by design (Microsoft in particular), but the vast majority of it is unintentional.

Software projects are plagued by disproportionate expenses and failures. I'm not saying it's easy to do good software -- it's not. It takes experience and hard work, good planning and agility when things don't go as planned. My point is that compared to writing good software, writing good cross-platform software isn't much harder.

Cheers, -- N

 

[reanjr]

I knew that if I were on the boards long enough, I would eventually disagree with you on something, and here it is. I guess I've used some cross-platform tools (or, more accurately, was made to use them) in college, and it's the main reason why I ended up as an English major rather than an English plus Comp Sci major.

I highly doubt what you were doing in school equates with the real world. Academic computer science is far removed from real world software engineering. Assuming the application is written in C or C++ (very likely), two decisions would have made their lives easier and would result in a cross platform product.

Use an intermediary GUI toolkit (wxWindows, GTK, etc.) which runs on top of the underlying platform toolkit (GDI, Cocoa, X). These toolkits tend to be higher level and easier to use than the native toolkit, saving development time.

Choose OpenGL rather than DirectX. OpenGL has wider support than DirectX both platform and hardware (more video cards support OpenGL). OpenGL is a very mature framework (MS used to push it before DirectX) that is well documented and easy to use. Whether one or the other is easier is probably up for debate, but there are far more tools available for OpenGL than there are for DirectX.

These two decisions would have been the right decisions, but the hegemony is so pervasive that people don't even think about it.