Comment OSes and Porting (Score 1) 216
A little more accurate picture of what has happened to the four versions of NWN (To fill holes):
Windows - Late, but available
Linux - Later, but getting available
MacOS - Handed to MacSoft to finish, even Later.
BeOS - Not gonna happen.
What I find the most funny part of all this is that by handing the Mac version to MacSoft, Bioware essentially just handed over tens of millions of dollars of profit over to them as well (Since MacSoft won't port if they can't make money off of it).
I see complaining about this type of practice: leaving ports to other companies that release it later. To be honest, this is how the Mac gaming market has become over the past 5 years as formerly Mac-centric game makers have gotten eaten up by PC-centric companies like the Maxis -> EA sellout (and EA used to have a good Mac dept too) and the Bungie -> MS sellout. Loki wasn't the greatest, BUT a business model around porting games to other OSes can be very profitable. MacSoft, Aspyr, Westlake, OmniGroup and others have made a decent living from doing this, as well as doing some decent-quality ports. (OmniGroup ported Oni to OS X, in Obj-C, releasing the update for free online simply because the Carbon version was buggy under OS X... that takes some guts)
Outsourcing ports like this isn't a bad thing (although it prevents the one-box idea), since I would more rather see more porting to Linux/Mac happening. If the company that makes the game says no internally, they might be willing to say yes to another company. If that company starts saying yes to other companies, then more games will reach your hands if you prefer to use Linux/MacOS
Windows - Late, but available
Linux - Later, but getting available
MacOS - Handed to MacSoft to finish, even Later.
BeOS - Not gonna happen.
What I find the most funny part of all this is that by handing the Mac version to MacSoft, Bioware essentially just handed over tens of millions of dollars of profit over to them as well (Since MacSoft won't port if they can't make money off of it).
I see complaining about this type of practice: leaving ports to other companies that release it later. To be honest, this is how the Mac gaming market has become over the past 5 years as formerly Mac-centric game makers have gotten eaten up by PC-centric companies like the Maxis -> EA sellout (and EA used to have a good Mac dept too) and the Bungie -> MS sellout. Loki wasn't the greatest, BUT a business model around porting games to other OSes can be very profitable. MacSoft, Aspyr, Westlake, OmniGroup and others have made a decent living from doing this, as well as doing some decent-quality ports. (OmniGroup ported Oni to OS X, in Obj-C, releasing the update for free online simply because the Carbon version was buggy under OS X... that takes some guts)
Outsourcing ports like this isn't a bad thing (although it prevents the one-box idea), since I would more rather see more porting to Linux/Mac happening. If the company that makes the game says no internally, they might be willing to say yes to another company. If that company starts saying yes to other companies, then more games will reach your hands if you prefer to use Linux/MacOS
