Avoidance of the Mac vs. PC debate aside, I will expand on your point and agree that one of WoW's biggest strengths is that it's accessible by many different types and ages of computers. I used to play on a computer from 2004, now I play on a computer from 2006. Sure, my graphics and framerate are crap, but at least I can play the game.

Yea, those extra 12 subscribers really pushed WoW over the edge.

Most other MMOs have numbers in the 500k or less. So unless 11.5 million of WoW's 12 million players are Mac users, I'll say that being on Mac is NOT why WoW is so huge, not by a long shot.

Not a shot against Macs, more an endorsement of all of WoW's dozens of great things that anyone can enjoy(most of which are mentioned earlier in these comments). A terrible game won't succeed even if it's on both PC and Mac. For a truly great game, being on Mac is only a tiny side-bonus.

"So unless 11.5 million of WoW's 12 million players are Mac users, I'll say that being on Mac is NOT why WoW is so huge, not by a long shot."

You're missing something with that, though. MMOs make it or don't on people continuing to play. And what, more than anything else, gets people to continue playing? The relationships they have online.

If you can't migrate over to shiny new game X without leaving behind friends who can't afford to (or simply won't) buy a new machine just to play it... well, you're less likely to get as deeply involved in the new game. And besides, you miss your buddy with the mac... so you go back to WoW.

I'm older than most of you and have been using a Mac since the early 90s. I obviously didn't choose the Mac for gaming reasons, but as it's my platform of choice I'm a Mac gamer by default. What some of you don't realize is that Mac gamers are *very* loyal to developers who bother to give us a port. When Bungie was independent, I was loving me some Marathon and Myth and even though they now treat me like a second class citizen, I still play Halo. Same thing with Bliz; I'm a loyal customer.

The sad thing for me is that I really enjoyed KOTOR on my Mac.

All this causes me to question whether BioWare really has learned from WoW re: quality and wide accessibility. You can say that this is just sour grapes (and perhaps it is) but it could also be an indication that they are not spending the development dollars to do this game right.

I guess we'll see. There is so much pent up demand for SW MMO content, this thing is basically a sure thing ... oh wait.

You know this isn't far off base. I and my wife both play WoW on Macs. But the real interesting thing to me is that I think people vastly underestimate the number of players on Macs.

We've been playing since beta, and in -every- group where OS platform has been mentioned there's been at least one other player on a Mac. In all our guilds I'd say probably %30 of the people have been Mac users. This was surprisingly true of the largest guild we were ever in (> 200 people, well over 500 characters) and the smallest ones we've been in. (The largest guild we were in also had multiple people switch to MacBook Pro's while we were in it as their main machines).

Now I'm sure on a worldwide basis the number of Mac players isn't as high, but the sheer number of other Mac users we've run in to in the game makes me think that the platform is bringing in a lot more money than Blizzard would admit to. And none of the Mac players have a MMO to switch to. The other modern MMO's that are out on the Mac are all running under Cider afaik, and honestly that means they're not nearly as playable on my older Mac as WoW is.