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

[JDJblatherings]

heck out of 55 respondents to "which OS do you use" here on enworld 23 use MAC OS X That's what...41%?

 

[Barastrondo]

Yeah, if I were buying a mac, I don't think I'd be saying to myself, "oh boy! I can do a lot of gaming with this thing!" I also wouldn't be getting upset when it turned out I couldn't.[/i]

That's where I am. I have a Mac. I use my computer for both work and leisure. I do have games for it, mostly Blizzard and Popcap, and that's enough. Didn't expect any more than that.

I'm not upset by the fact that there's no Mac support. It just answered the "Would running D&D games online for friends be something I'd be interested in trying?" question for me, nothing more.

 

[Glyfair]

That's what...41%?

That would be nothing close to scientific. The poll has so many variables in it that it can't be taken as anything but "for entertainment purposes."

Who is the target of the poll? EnWorld users, who browse the computer forum, who vote on polls, who are drawn to polls about their choice of operating systems.

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.

Interesting. I saw reports that said the opposite (at least as far as the system they use for gaming preparation). I wish I could remember where I saw that.

 

[hexgrid]

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.

Really, I think it's more about what platforms the developers/project leaders are familiar with than it is about market share. If WoTC was crammed full of Mac users, I'd bet we'd be getting a cross platform version pretty quickly, market share be damned.

 

[WizarDru]

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.

I'm not seeing where you're getting this data from...are you extrapolating from your website and applying it to the entirety of the D&D market? Considering we don't even have hard numbers on how many active D&D players are in the market right now, I don't know that I'm willing to believe that we can determine something like that they have a higher population of Mac users than the general public.

Enworld is one of the most succesful websites dedicated to D&D, with more than 35,000 unique visitors per day, and I'm not sure that I'd trust their numbers, either. Because if there are 3 million active players, then a LOT of them aren't visiting ENworld. WotC hasn't released their web visitor and browser type stats...but it's possible they're looking at the same statistics and drawing their own conclusions, and with their sample size, I think they'd have a relatively more accurate picture if they're using that metric and not external research (which I suspect is at least a component).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Nifft is correct. Writing good multi-platform code is easy, well, not more than 5% harder than writing for a single OS. You just have to design it that way from the beginning. If you isolate things that need to be platform-specific via an abstraction layer, then you have a tiny percent of code that needs to be actually ported. But there are too many badly trained code-slinging monkeys around these days who don't have a clue how to write good code.

(Why not just do it in web-hosted Java? Heck, it’s not like the graphics they have shown us have been anything close to impressive. It doesn’t need to be videogame quality, 60 fps 1200x1000 widescreen. How hard is it to display a 3-d field with some static entities on it? Beyond trivial.)

So, you want a business case for writing platform-neutral code? Sure, here you go, micro-economics 101: for everyone except the OS vendors, the operating system is a complement. As the price of a complement goes down, demand for your product goes up. If Windows were 100% free-as-in-beer, anyone could pick it up and install it solely for the purpose of accessing the DI. Demand for the DI would increase.

Since Microsoft will never reduce the cost of Windows, that means the only way for Wizards to reduce the cost of their complement is to expand the options for that complement: making Mac, Linux or Java versions would reduce the cost of the complement to those target consumers using those OS's. Since the price of software development is a fixed cost, the cost of porting to these platforms is negligible compared to the gains, amortized over a sufficient period. As the user-base grows, the network externalities grow at a geometric rate, which is just more good news for business.

Arguments to the effect of “you knew you were going to be marginalized when you chose a non-monopoly OS” are entirely fallacious and without merit. I made my OS choice (Linux) with the full knowledge that my ability to enjoy one of my favorite hobbies would be entirely unaffected by that decision. Now, since D&D is moving to an online, Windows-only model, Wizards has deliberately and maliciously marginalizing my ability to consume their product.

So far, everything I hear about 4th edition makes to salivate in anticipation. Except the DI. The DI is just Wizards little way of letting me know that I’ve gone from valued consumer to marginalized non-entity in their brave new world. Nice.

Maliciously?

Spoiler

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! I hate this kind of message board discussion tactic. Grrr. Must.Calm.Down.

 

[WizarDru]

heck out of 55 respondents to "which OS do you use" here on enworld 23 use MAC OS X That's what...41%?

Glyfair already pointed out how self-selecting the poll itself is...and if you look, there are currently 61 respondents but 89 answers. Which is fine, but that only shows that of the people who decided to answer the poll, some of them use multiple OSes at home. It doesn't even indicate that they use it for browsing ENworld. I have a test Linux box at home, for example, but it doesn't get used from browsing the web.

 

[Nifft]

Maliciously?

Spoiler

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! I hate this kind of message board discussion tactic. Grrr. Must.Calm.Down.

Looked like humor to me.

And I'm not just saying that because Tanuki

Spoiler

agrees with me and thus

is dead sexy.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Kunimatyu]

I"m another one of those Mac laptop users(and the DM for my group), so that's soured me a lot on the DI. I don't really care about playing most PC games, but losing access to D&D functionality is an annoyance.

My biggest concern, though, is that WotC is actually developing for DX10, which would require Vista. Emulating XP I could probably handle, but Vista's specs are so nasty I'm not sure what the point would be.

 

[Glyfair]

My biggest concern, though, is that WotC is actually developing for DX10, which would require Vista.

As quoted on the D&D Insider info thread, they are developing for DirectX 9.

Edit: Or maybe I missed quoting that tidbit on the thread.

Oh well. Yes, Didier stated DirectX 9.