EA fails to ship Mac games

In June, Electronic Arts co-founder and chief creative officer Bing Gordon took the stage with Apple CEO Steve Jobs during the Worldwide Developers conference (WWDC), announcing that the game maker was moving staff members over to the Mac platform to once again release gaming titles for Mac OS X. Gordon promised that the first titles to ship for Macs would include Command & Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and that those titles would ship in July. It's now more than a week into August, and none of the promised titles have arrived, nor has Electronic Arts made any announcements on the subject. Several calls and emails to EA's press department by MacNN staff have gone unanswered.

Making the delay somewhat surprising is the fact that these games will not be native Mac OS X ports. Instead, they will (as far as we know) be made to run under Mac OS X with the aid of Cider from TransGaming (like X3: Reunion, Myst Online and other titles). This means they may not run at full native speed, and may exhibit other issues; they also will only run on Intel-based Macs -- leaving many long-time Mac users out in the cold. Cider is a portability engine that allows Windows games to be run on Intel Macs "without any modifications to the original game source code." The tool loads Windows programs into memory on Intel-based Macs using an optimized version of the Win32 APIs.

Even more disconcerting than the lack of shipment or any word from Electronic Arts on the Mac titles is the fact that Mac OS X does not even appear as a platform in the "Find a game" section on EA's home page.

by MacNN Staff