Square Enix first made waves earlier this year when they announced that Final Fantasy XIV would come to the Mac. That alone was remarkable because the Mac is not a platform Square Enix has demonstrated an interest in. Then the company made waves of an entirely different kind in late June by releasing it only to have Mac users screaming at them about performance and stability problems. The problem, ultimately, is that people who are buying Macs are, by and large, not gamers. The company responded over the weekend by temporarily. The game's producer and direct, Naoki Yoshida, accepted responsibility for the problem in a lengthy explanation posted to the Final Fantasy XIV forums.

Yoshida lays the problem at the feet of changing system requirements late in development. He said that he plans to keep the Mac version from being sold until the company can better articulate Macs system requirements. They're offering refunds to those Mac users who don't want to wait. There's a lot more to this than just a case of mistaken system requirements, though.

Yoshida went pretty far down the rabbit hole to explain. Among the problems Yoshida cited is Final Fantasy XIV's reliance on Cider. It's a translation technology developed by a Canadian outfit called TransGaming, which recently sold Cider to Nvidia. Cider has been used for years to make Mac game ports. Square Enix knew from the start that not a lot of Mac users were going to play Final Fantasy XIV compared to their Windows counterparts, so they wanted to do the Mac version's development on the cheap. That's why they did a Cider port, according to Yoshida. They made it someone else's problem in the process.

Mac gamers often look down their nose at Cider-based games. They have the reputation for not running as fast as a game that's been programmed with native support for OS X's graphics drivers. Yoshida confirmed this but went further, throwing under the bus OpenGL, the graphics technology employed by OS X. Thirty percent is a big nut, and it's a pretty good indication of just how bad things are on the Mac today when it comes to performance parity with Windows games. And mind you, Yoshida's talking about if FF XIV was remade as an OS X native game. Best computer monitors for mac 2015.

FFXIV for Mac I'm using Bootcamp with my Retina MBP at the moment (runs great with standard settings) and know there are other ways to run it such as with Wine or Parallels but would much rather prefer something supported.

The actual performance delta between Mac and Windows currently is much bigger, and that's why Square Enix pulled the game for sale right now. Yoshida also noted that Mac graphics performance varies widely depending on the model, and low-end Macs wouldn't be able to run the game nearly as well as low-end PCs would. That's another nagging problem: Apple specs its machines for what it wants them to do, not for gamers or performance enthusiasts. You really can't argue with Apple's success over the years at building great hardware that consumers will buy in droves.

Game companies like Aspyr and Feral have managed to eke out a niche for themselves by making Mac games. Blizzard supports Mac gaming with its efforts like the recently released. But Mac game development isn't growing proportionally to Apple's increased market share. The problem, ultimately, is that people who are buying Macs are, by and large, not gamers.

And never will be gamers. Mac users who are gamers are left with a couple of choices: Buy a Windows PC or console to play games on, or install Windows in Boot Camp and run games there. Either way, running games in OS X is only a solution for a small percentage of players.

There is hope: Apple is making big changes in OS X with the upcoming release of, OS X 10.11. 'Metal' in 10.11 is a fundamental change to make graphics draw much faster than they do now. I'd rather see Square Enix not waste Mac users' time bringing a half-assed product to the platform.