Unfortunately, Bootcamp is a very successful way of getting PC games on a Mac. Granted, you have to invest in a flavor of Windows OS, but I have been running WoW through Bootcamp and it absolutely performs better PC side than Mac side on my Mac Pro. :(

Most game developers will just tell Mac users to get Bootcamp and Win7.

I don't see this changing until Apple actually pays attention to Open GL, which they won't because Steve Jobs hates gaming (he's come right out and said it - Steam had to rub Apple's nose in Open GL's lackluster performance before the company even considered updating the code, and even then it was a p!$$-poor attempt at best).

Alex I'm not yelling at you but for someone who claims to be an analyst that is pretty much the definition of a straw man argument. The straight truth is in the grand scheme very few people have mac desktops/laptops. Somewhere between 6-10% depending on where you get your information. Assuming that the same percentage of pc users play MMOs as Mac users you would only be growing your player base by 6-10% by adding MAC compatibility. Would the extra cost be made up in MAC subscribers? Possibly, however, if you use the same amount of money in game improvements and marketing you would probably have a much higher ROI.

"I'm going to get yelled at and called an idiot for this statement Im pretty sure"

What is it with the persecution complex so many apple users display?

@zweitblom The persecution complex comes from web forums. Mac gamers are constantly berated and told to get a windows box, or to partition their harddrive. It's pretty funny though considering all the money Steam/Valve has invested in mac gaming. They would not have done what they did if they thought mac gaming had no future.

Also, @quickshiv, the numbers you quote are largely irrelevant. THe dedication from the mac community in WoW and EVE are like none other. In almost every forum ever, you have someone posting things like "I just got a mac, are there any cool games?" And the first post is usually "Try WoW!" or "EvE has sweet graphics! Give it a go!" Those games are very important to mac gaming and both have a significant portion of mac gamers, all of whom contribute heavily to the subscription base. Like I said, My argument is atypical enough that windows fanboys will tear it apart and use out of context numbers, but that won't change the truth behind it. Mac users should be heavily considered when coming up with a new MMO and trying to get it to "stick". There aren't that many good, AAA mac games out there, and the few one's that do exist are highly prized. Blizzard knows this., and its why they'll always have the fiscal upperhand compared to its windows only competitors.

The problem with Rift isn't that it's a "clone". Cloning things like key-bindings is likely a good thing. The problem with Rift is that I'm not seeing a really compelling innovation that makes me want to play. I tried Warhammer for the RvR and how it was integrated with leveling. That's what got me to buy it. The PvE failed so I came back, but you get the point. Rift has a neat classing system and I like their implementation of public quests as taken from Warhammer, but there's really not much else.

@Alexran

Macs are a very small percentage of the hardware base. However, they are owned primarily by the wealthy given their cost. This is a group that tends to have money to burn on things like games. This means that, once Apple started putting in discrete graphics cards in 2008, Valve thought it was a good proposition to work on updating OpenGL (and work on convincing Apple to push the updates) in order to position itself as the primary AAA game provider for Mac owners.

That said, OpenGL is still about two full generations behind DX11. Further, the Mac user base is still a relatively small percentage of the players of any given game. This means that new studios, like Trion, that can't afford to create clients for both would be fairly foolish to create an OSX client instead of a Windows client.

Porting a game is a big investment. You need to rewrite huge portions of the graphics engine, and a fair chunk of the game engine itself. Doing it well is not simple or easy, and can't be done in spare time over a few months. Only the true giants like Blizzard have the money to do it. The more realistic option is to do what CCP did with EVE...create an OSX client after a few years if you have the revenue to do it (EVE launched in May 2003 and the first official OSX client was released in November 2007).