EA Promises but Fails to Deliver

The Mac platform is not well known for its wide selection of gaming titles, quite the contrary, but this summer saw quite a number of announcements from developers' promising games. One of the biggest was made by Electronic Arts, during the World Wide Developers Conference, but since then, there has not been any news and the promised timeline has come and gone with nothing being released.

Back in June, Electronic Arts co-founder and chief creative officer Bing Gordon announced that the company was going to move some of its staff members over to the Mac platform in order to release games for OS X. The promise was that quite a number of games would be shipped in July. The list included Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. With more than a week of August gone, Electronic Art has not released anything yet and there is no word on the status of these games. Should people keep waiting, are they just around the corner, has the effort been scrapped?

Whatever the case may be, Electronic Arts is about to learn a valuable lesson about Mac users… They don’t forget and they expect companies to stick to their announcements. Already the Mac related press is asking where the goods are and users that had been waiting for the games are saying that they are disappointed. The delay looks even worse since as far as anybody knows, these games were not even going to be proper, native games, instead being ports that utilize Cider from TransGaming. Such games usually don’t run at native speeds and they are sometimes plagued by other issues, last but not least, they will only run on Intel Macs. Considering that Cider is a portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs "without any modifications to the original game source code," why is there such a delay?

EA really dropped the ball here, since by the time these games do eventually ship, they will be even more outdated. With Boot Camp and the other virtualization options available today, gamers are much more likely to simply run the games in Windows, not wait around until companies get their act together.
This was the perfect opportunity to break into the Mac platform and make a good first impression, but it is long gone now.

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