Those of you who followed the WWDC07 keynote address on Monday will have caught the news that Electronic Arts was coming back to the Mac platform. That was certainly great news for the Mac faithful given how many games the company produces (we won’t go into whether they’re all good games or what not.. but suffice it to say that they make a lot of games). Anyhow, the announcement on Monday had EA coming out with the following games for the Mac platform:

  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
  • Need for Speed Carbon
  • Battlefield 2142
  • Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  • Madden NFL 08
  • Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

Sounds great right? The Mac faithful were finally getting real games for their platform. Well.. not so fast folks. According to this report over at ExtremeTech, EA will be using a program called Cider (created by TransGaming) to help get its current Windows based games to work on the Mac platform. Basically Cider is a porting engine that provides a Win32 API layer. Programs written for the Windows platform use the Cider engine as a wrapper – helping them get to different platforms without the necessity of rewriting their code. So what does this mean for gamers on the Mac platform? These EA games are not using native Mac API calls – but rather using the same source as their Windows counterparts. You basically have another layer of API libraries to deal with here – one that intercepts Win32 API calls and handles them under the OS X platform. There’s less porting headaches for EA to worry about but there could be performance penalties as a result.

Now I can understand why EA would consider doing this. Why develop source code for two platforms when you can write one and get it working for multiple OS’s. On the other hand, you create a game that is ultimately not quite as optimized as it could be. Plus, it’s clear that EA is hedging their bets here for the OS X platform. Sure they’re back - but is there a big enough market for EA to make money off of? This seems to me a logical business step for EA which might not work out quite as well for the consumers. I guess we’ll just have to see.

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