mac support

[cevapesalukom]

incredibly dissatisfied with there being no mac support was very excited to play eu5 but now im second guessing even thinking about buying another paradox game if this is how things will be

[Toblm]

Figure out a way that PDX can make a profit on Mac support and I'm sure they would add it.

Past evidence proves Mac support for PDX games are simply a money and time sink.

[Ronald McDonald Trumpet]

mac n cheese

[大日本帝国]

The reason why they haven't released it on Mac or Linux is because the game is in pathetic pre-alpha state and the devs are even not able to let the game run on one system properly.

The excuse made by paradox shills and suckers that Mac isn't profitable is a blunt lie, because even indie games like Sons of Styx are available and every single Total War game. Moreover, Sega has employed the company Feral games to make even the very old games apple silicon compatible. It's a matter of fact the genre of GSG and obscure hardcore indie games has a lot of mac players.

[Toblm]

Originally posted by 大日本帝国:

The excuse made by paradox shills and suckers that Mac isn't profitable is a blunt lie, because even indie games like Sons of Styx are available and every single Total War game. Moreover, Sega has employed the company Feral games to make even the very old games apple silicon compatible. It's a matter of fact the genre of GSG and obscure hardcore indie games has a lot of mac players.

Make the math work than.

EUIV, which had Mac support and whose Mac sales would have directly informed EUV, sold some 3.5-7 million total copies over a decade.

Steam has some 185 million users. Some 2% of them use Mac OS. so 3-4 million users.

If every EUIV copy was sold on Steam, some 3% of Steam users own EUIV. If a proportional number were Mac users.. 2% of 3% of Steam users. We are talking about maybe 100,000 Mac OS sales, in an abysmally optimistic case.

That same 2% Steam Mac users compared against EUIV's published sales numbers suggest that Mac sales might account for, again abysmally optimistic estimate, a million dollars in revenue over a decade, about 1% of EUIV's sales.

Porting and maintaining a game for Mac OS for a decade is going to cost more than that. Simple as. If PDX could make the math work, they'd chase the sales, but they can't because it simply doesn't make financial sense.

A more realistic solution would be using Mac OS software to just run Windows games. Of which there are some half a dozen modern options.

[大日本帝国]

Originally posted by Toblm:

Originally posted by 大日本帝国:

The excuse made by paradox shills and suckers that Mac isn't profitable is a blunt lie, because even indie games like Sons of Styx are available and every single Total War game. Moreover, Sega has employed the company Feral games to make even the very old games apple silicon compatible. It's a matter of fact the genre of GSG and obscure hardcore indie games has a lot of mac players.

Make the math work than.

EUIV, which had Mac support and whose Mac sales would have directly informed EUV, sold some 3.5-7 million total copies over a decade.

Steam has some 185 million users. Some 2% of them use Mac OS. so 3-4 million users.

If every EUIV copy was sold on Steam, some 3% of Steam users own EUIV. If a proportional number were Mac users.. 2% of 3% of Steam users. We are talking about maybe 100,000 Mac OS sales, in an abysmally optimistic case.

That same 2% Steam Mac users compared against EUIV's published sales numbers suggest that Mac sales might account for, again abysmally optimistic estimate, a million dollars in revenue over a decade, about 1% of EUIV's sales.

Porting and maintaining a game for Mac OS for a decade is going to cost more than that. Simple as. If PDX could make the math work, they'd chase the sales, but they can't because it simply doesn't make financial sense.

A more realistic solution would be using Mac OS software to just run Windows games. Of which there are some half a dozen modern options.

The "math" here is so horrifically flawed in several ways.

First, it mixes lifetime sales over a decade with today’s Steam user base. Steam did not have anywhere near 185 million users for most of EUIV’s lifetime, so using that number as the denominator skews the results from the start.

Secondly, it assumes that Mac users buy games in direct proportion to their share of Steam users. That assumption isn’t justified in anyway. Strategy games like EUIV historically have a higher Mac user share than Steam’s overall average, so a straight 2% extrapolation is not reliable and just wrong.

Third, the revenue estimate is unrealistically low. EUIV is a DLC-heavy, long-tail title, meaning average revenue per user is far higher than the implied ~$10 per copy over ten years. I mean milking for DLCs is basically Paradox entire business model.

Finally, the claim that Mac porting and maintenance would “obviously” cost more than the revenue is asserted without evidence. Because, For a game already using a shared engine and having long-standing Mac support, this is not a given.

In short, your argument looks mathematical, but it relies on incorrect baselines, unsupported proportional assumptions, and pessimistic revenue estimates, so if you want do the math than do it correctly, lol

[Toblm]

Originally posted by 大日本帝国:

Originally posted by Toblm:

Make the math work than.

EUIV, which had Mac support and whose Mac sales would have directly informed EUV, sold some 3.5-7 million total copies over a decade.

Steam has some 185 million users. Some 2% of them use Mac OS. so 3-4 million users.

If every EUIV copy was sold on Steam, some 3% of Steam users own EUIV. If a proportional number were Mac users.. 2% of 3% of Steam users. We are talking about maybe 100,000 Mac OS sales, in an abysmally optimistic case.

That same 2% Steam Mac users compared against EUIV's published sales numbers suggest that Mac sales might account for, again abysmally optimistic estimate, a million dollars in revenue over a decade, about 1% of EUIV's sales.

Porting and maintaining a game for Mac OS for a decade is going to cost more than that. Simple as. If PDX could make the math work, they'd chase the sales, but they can't because it simply doesn't make financial sense.

A more realistic solution would be using Mac OS software to just run Windows games. Of which there are some half a dozen modern options.

The "math" here is so horrifically flawed in several ways.

No ♥♥♥♥. Which is why its a horribly optimistic number.

DLC revenue is not published but would be expected to be proportional, and therefore still marginal.

You've no evidence that Mac users by PDX games at any higher rate than anyone else.

That million dollars in revenue that I figured works out to 100$ an hour 40 hrs a week, 12 months a year, for 10 years. One might be able to pay a two devs to make and maintain that port for 100$ an hour. But there would be no profit. That of course ignores management overhead and various other business costs. And of course is a raw average over the lifespan, while there would be a greater cost up front. But a successful port, particularly one that is under constant development like an EU title, would require constant engaged support, which takes bodies, which cost money.

Find better numbers if you want to challenge my assumptions. Of course the idea you can find numbers that justify Mac OS support when PDX cannot find the numbers to support Mac OS support is rather laughable. Good luck.

[tonypa]

Everyone knows MacOS is going to be merged into iOS very soon so there is not much point developing for it.

Plus, the amount of Mac owners is way too low to justify the costs.

[hannibal_pjv]

They have said many times that making Mac or Linux versions is economically bad choise. So no wonder why they don`t do it!

[大日本帝国]

Originally posted by Toblm:

Originally posted by 大日本帝国:

The "math" here is so horrifically flawed in several ways.

No ♥♥♥♥. Which is why its a horribly optimistic number.

DLC revenue is not published but would be expected to be proportional, and therefore still marginal.

You've no evidence that Mac users by PDX games at any higher rate than anyone else.

That million dollars in revenue that I figured works out to 100$ an hour 40 hrs a week, 12 months a year, for 10 years. One might be able to pay a two devs to make and maintain that port for 100$ an hour. But there would be no profit. That of course ignores management overhead and various other business costs. And of course is a raw average over the lifespan, while there would be a greater cost up front. But a successful port, particularly one that is under constant development like an EU title, would require constant engaged support, which takes bodies, which cost money.

Find better numbers if you want to challenge my assumptions. Of course the idea you can find numbers that justify Mac OS support when PDX cannot find the numbers to support Mac OS support is rather laughable. Good luck.

This is not hard headed realism, it is badly constructed reasoning wrapped in an air of smug certainty.

Leaning on “no published numbers” is not an argument, it is a rhetorical escape hatch. Nobody outside the companies has exact figures, yet other publishers have consistently reached very different conclusions than Paradox. The obvious counterexample is Total War. Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive have been bringing virtually every Total War title to macOS for well over a decade, including massive DLC heavy games like the Warhammer series. Even after Apple has dropped the 32 bit support, every Total war game even the ancient ones like Empire Total war has been updated in order to run on the newest macOs.

If macOS support were the obvious financial dead end you claim it is, that business model would have collapsed long ago. It did not. It exists precisely because it pays for itself.

The back of the envelope calculation about one million dollars over ten years at one hundred dollars an hour is meant to sound grounded, but it ignores how ports are actually made. Studios do not keep two full time developers babysitting a port for a decade. That is exactly why specialized porting houses, shared tooling, engine abstraction layers, and scalable workflows exist. Total War demonstrates that this can be done even for large, constantly updated strategy games.

Most importantly, Paradox’s decision is not some immutable economic law. It is a management choice. Other studios working with similarly complex, long lived, heavily patched titles have looked at the same market and come to different conclusions. Pointing to Paradox and saying “they must have done the math better than everyone else” is not analysis, it is deference to authority.

In short, this is not a case of uncomfortable financial truth. It is a post hoc rationalization dressed up with selective arithmetic and an overconfident tone meant to substitute for actual data. If mac support were truly as laughable and unjustifiable as you suggest, Total War would never have supported it for years on end. The fact that it does makes this argument not insightful, but simply wrong.

[hannibal_pjv]

That depends on total sales… if total war sell enough Mac versions… good for them. If Paradox does not sell enough Mac versions bad to them and Mac users!
Aka game has to cover the production cost and give profit. So Total War series either sell better or is made cheaper.
I expect the previous one.