Sees Mac as 'an important and large' audience

Gaming site Massively recently interviewed two of the lead developers for Bioware's latest release, the MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic, with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk acknowledging that a Mac port was "definitely one of the things we're looking at next." While Mac owners can already play the Windows version of the game using a Boot Camp partition, the pair acknowledged that a native Mac version would be better.

While not committing to a specific timetable, Muzyka told reporter Ben Gilbert that Bioware has "done a lot of Mac ports before for our games. We haven't announced any details yet for The Old Republic, but we know that's an important and large audience ... and we want to serve that audience."

The game, which launched on December 20th, is said to have set new records in MMO game sales. The adventures are set thousands of years before the events shown in the various Star Wars movies, but allow players to become Jedi Knights or Sith Lords and feature other familiar races. Currently, the game has some 350,000 players online simultaneously during peak periods, and players have engaged in some 44 million player-vs-player battles over the course of 60 million game-hours.

"We want to get [the current launch] under our belt and everything stabilized and happy," said Zeschuk, "then we'll look at other platforms, and [the Mac] is obviously one of the first ones." [via Joystiq]

by MacNN Staff