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

[WizarDru]

A market of millions is still a market of millions.

At last estimate, there were roughly some 3 million active players of D&D in the world, give or take (as opposed to World of Warcraft's active 9 million accounts). Even if we assume that every one of those active players wants DDI and that 10% of them are Mac users (two fairly big assumptions), we are nowhere near a market of millions.

The fact of the matter is that while the mac market isn't non-existent or insignificant, WotC clearly feels the rate of return is not worth the effort, at least for now.

D&D players: niche
D&D players who want DDI: sub-niche
D&D players who want DDI and have a mac: sub-sub-niche

 

[Crazy Jerome]

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.

Heh. And I say that makes is all academic. If this stuff is a killer app at version 1.0, it will be the first VT software that is. And that's assuming that it is, if not good software, at least solid, decent software. (For example, the few bugs get fixed in updates, quickly, and none of them are the kind that let you know that there is no way full testing was done.)

The notes about using agile software development gives me greater hope for this project. But I still expect it to meet my standards around version 2.*, and not before.

 

[green slime]

At last estimate, there were roughly some 3 million active players of D&D in the world, give or take (as opposed to World of Warcraft's active 9 million accounts). Even if we assume that every one of those active players wants DDI and that 10% of them are Mac users (two fairly big assumptions), we are nowhere near a market of millions.

The fact of the matter is that while the mac market isn't non-existent or insignificant, WotC clearly feels the rate of return is not worth the effort, at least for now.

D&D players: niche
D&D players who want DDI: sub-niche
D&D players who want DDI and have a mac: sub-sub-niche

Except in the year 2007 it needn't be an "either/or" situation, unless you specifically set yourself up for that.

Somehow, somewhere, for whatever godforsaken reason, someone made the decision that it is better to limit the software to a subset.

Because they're not just excluding Macs, but Linux users as well. (Yeah, yeah, I can dual boot or emulate. I'd rather just stay away from Bill and his greedy fingers)

 

[Mercule]

The geographically distributed group still has the fun time of excluding one or more of its possible members.

The OP is right. Because DDI must be used in groups, a significant number of groups will always be looking for alternatives to DDI - one that doesn't make them exclude some of their friends. I really think it's a bad business decision.

You make it sound like they have to kick him out of an existing group. Not so much, since the group couldn't exist w/o the VTT (okay, they could do PBEM or something, but we're assuming a group that hasn't found a solution, yet).

A better analogy (and one within my RL experience) would be someone who has kids. They may find themselves without the time to game. Their group isn't kicking them out, their own choices are excluding them. In my case, I still game because the kids can play in the other room, but I miss out on a lot of movies, concerts, etc. that my non-parent friends go to. They aren't excluding me. They're taking advantage of an opportunity that isn't available to me.

You could also take the example of the guy with a nice-paying job, but long hours. No time for gaming, but he has some other perks (I'm assuming Macs come with perks other than missing out on software). He could find a different job (i.e. change to PC), but that's a choice he has to weigh. If he doesn't make the move, his friends aren't excluding him, he's made a priority call.

The VTT isn't the only way to game. It isn't even the only way to game online. It isn't even the only way to have a virtual table-top online, IIRC. It's just the offerring from WotC in that field. No one is going to come to your house and beat you or hit your IP with as DoS if you use one of the other options or decline to use any option at all.

It's a tool. Something over and above anything ever offered by WotC before. It's existence denies you nothing. It does, however, offer another option to the majority of people. Get over it.

They could have used Java, thus ensuring that it ran poorly on all platforms.

 

[Zurai]

Yes, once a blue moon, you may on occassion run into memory management problems. I can't say it doesn't happen. But neither can I say that it happens more often than errors I see when other programming languages are used. I can't say I've seen any major problems with the browsers I use.

But nothing, nothing can exceed the frustration of the Windows OK button "An Error has Occured: OK"

WTF?!? How informative is that?

I'm not talking about the user end. Neither windows nor java apps should ever have memory management problems on the user end.

In java, the programmer literally has no control over when or how memory is cleaned up. None whatsoever. With windows (or mac, for that matter), you have much more control; full control for windows, I'm not sure the extent of it for mac. That's what I was referring to.

Java is a lousy solution.

 

[jaerdaph]

But one would still have to buy the "guest operating system," yes? The same would be true for Boot Camp, I believe.

$80 + $240 for Windows... Just so a Mac user can get in on the "digital initiative"?

Yes, but I need to have access to both operating systems for the work I do. And there's a lot of people out there in the same boat I am, so they run both on their machines anyway. So saying that WotC's decision shuts out all 20 million Mac users is ridiculous. Ideally, they would have made their tools available to everyone on every platform, but reality was against them. For example, there is a shortage of Java programmers out there - Java programmers made big bucks this year because of it. If WotC had picked Java, they might not be able to afford to keep a programmer on staff, if they could find one at all. Big business is snatching up the Java programmers now for big bucks, and I'm not sure an RPG company could compete, even WotC. Their parent company Hasbro would never allow that for a division that size.

 

[Imp]

They could have either made it web-based, and made us Mac, Linux, etc. users happy, or had somebody real put it together, and made me sad. (DDI, brought to you by Bioware! PC only! : cries : ) As is it's probably totally missable. Eh.

 

[JVisgaitis]

Even if we assume that every one of those active players wants DDI and that 10% of them are Mac users (two fairly big assumptions), we are nowhere near a market of millions.

That's the problem right there. The percentage of Mac users that play D&D is a lot higher then Mac's current market share.

Just looked at our site statistics and while we get nowhere near the traffic that EN World or WotC would get (we average about 5,000 visits a month), we break down like this:

Windows 70.74%
Mac 26.04%
Linux 2.73%
Undetermined .49%

1 out of every 4 people is a far cry from the percentages a lot of people are claiming and based on these numbers, Charles argument certainly has a lot of resonance.

 

[jaerdaph]

That's the problem right there. The percentage of Mac users that play D&D is a lot higher then Mac's current market share.

That doesn't really surprise me. Mac users tend to be a very creative group of people, and as such it isn't surprising that they would be attracted to RPGs. Not to say that Windows users aren't attracted to the game for the same reason though. But in the end, it's all about market share, be it 90% vs. 10% or 75% vs. 25%, and if the cost of development is worth it or not.

 

[Oldtimer]

Are you sure? DirectX 10 is the latest and it only works on Windows Vista. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere that DDI would be Vista-only.

It's written to DirectX9. Paralells only do DX8 at this time. I suppose the poster didn't know about DX10.