i find it hilarious people think this doesnt happen in windows.
this very same thing happened between windows 7 and windows 10. more and more games are being developed specifically for windows 10.
this is not something that is just happening new to mac. mac has been losing support with various games for a long time. so devs now have to account for peoples lack of common sense?
it isnt an early access thing.
To point yeah, Main difference here is that both windows 7 and 10 are using the same architecture. The main reason for the lack of windows 7 support going forward is quite simply Microsoft doesn’t support windows 7 anymore ( kinda like what Apple is doing with ARM only moreso). WIndows 7 is a dead OS, regardless if it “Works fine” etc. too many things just wont work on win7 anymore due to lack of drivers and so on regardless of how well its coded; this is also assuming your 64bit win7 too, on 32bit win7 most new HW simply won’t work anymore. Could it? Sure, if people wrote drivers for it but why would they?
Anyways this is a longwinded way of saying if MS still supported win7 still devs would develop for it but you are not going to waste time an treasure developing something on a platform you may not be able to fix. Also developing anything on win7 would be light years easier in this case than for ARM it would be 2 completely separate branches. I would not want to do it if I were in their shoes either.
All this said though I get why people would want refunds if they are on a mac. They are not going to get what was sold to them. Sucks all the way around.
im in agreement. i saw the writing on the wall once microsoft literally gave windows 10 for free at the start.
people have to ask themselves this very simple question:
Which OS are devs likely to drop support for? Windows, Mac OS, Linux?
if people can easily answer this then they know exactly how to move forward. i dont blame the devs for dropping mac support as it was not the main platform the game was developed for in the first place.
I think people ignore that more goes into a game than just the engine choice. While there are significant differences between Windows and Linux, the simple fact is that there ARE cross-platform technologies that a developer can use to build their game on all PC platforms with relative ease. Apple, however, has been increasingly moving away from using standardized tooling and moving to its own tooling. Simply put, just because Unity supports Apple Silicon, doesn’t mean that all the other 3rd-party tools used to build the game do, or will.
I work in the tech industry (at a web host) and I can tell you that we have our own concerns with Apple Silicon, not the least of which is that we build programs for servers and cloud infrastructures that run on the x86 architecture and building those on an ARM-based platform means we won’t be able to easily debug our business critical applications once we end up having to switch to the new macbooks in 2 years .
I recently had to get my Linux-based laptop fixed and decided to install Steam on my Macbook Pro while I waited… I quickly found out that, due to Apple using Metal instead of Vulkan, dropping 32-bit library support, and other changes to Mac OS. A vast majority of my games are no longer available to play on MacOS, even the Mac ports of games.
This is not the case on my System76 Oryx Pro running Pop!_OS 20.10. Thanks to SteamPlay and Lutris, I can install and play most of my Windows games directly through Steam or Lutris with a click of a couple buttons:
And this is all despite the fact that MacOS has a larger market share than Linux. If Apple doesn’t want to alienate their users from the rest of the PC market, they need to stop trying to be the IBM of this time.
I don’t think there’s much to argue about not supporting the NEW Mac architecture; that’s clearly out of scope of the original promises and intent. But dumping support for the existing 100+ million user base is a little harder to swallow. Note that most Mac users I know use their Macs much longer than the typical PC gamer does. I’d say the average is more than 5 years, and I know people who have used theirs for 10+ years. My guess is this game would have had a nice long life on Mac given the chance but I suspect the numbers just weren’t there… then again that could also be because MP is not active, which is a whole other topic.
Again, I feel like the ARM thing is being used more as an excuse to drop something they couldn’t or didn’t want to keep up with, maybe no longer seemed financially beneficial. Personally I would have had much more respect if they simply came out and said that. There are people who clearly supported LE at Kickstarter solely because they thought they were supporting a new Mac game development, and they are pretty much being slapped in the face. A refund for those users and an apology would be much more satisfying; just my two cents.
while the cynic in me would think this as well, in this case EHG has had a long proven track record of being transparent about mistakes and gaffes as well as being open in their communications so I’m taking their statement at face value and they still get my full respect.
Not to belabor this but the problem is that even at face value it is hard to swallow. Basically they are discontinuing support for a thriving, existing platform (that they promised to from day one) - with the excuse being that they can’t support some future version of it that isn’t available yet? No one knows what the future will bring for this ARM platform and hardware, and I don’t think anyone is demanding that it be supported in the near term.
Anyway, I think anyone who bought into this for Mac use explicitly deserves a better response.
Thats true and its not EHG’s that’s the cause … that’s what Apple is doing. Apple is dropping support for x86 based Hardware so it means that everyone who currently owns an Apple product that’s not running on ARM’s days are numbered.
Hard to call the Apple x86 ecosystem “thriving” now when Apple has flat out moved to kill it with fire. Granted sure that final death is years out but it would be a dwindling market from the moment Apple announced it’s intent.
We’ll see how this plays out for them this time as last time the 68000 PowerPC HW did not do so well even though it was decent HW on paper. It may go better for them now that there are alternatives to MS productivity suites but I wouldnt like to put too much money on it.
Personally I don’t think ARM is going to hold a candle to the newer AMD chipsets but hey I don’t buy apple anyways =D. Hopefully they give me reason too …
huh kinda went off topic there meh…
You are completely free to feel and think how you choose.
I love these exaggerations Apple users give on how many people they think actually own and use the devices. Using phrases like “Almost everybody…” just makes me giggle. Apple switching to ARM this early is just 
As a developer myself I utterly despise Apples tactics, they pull shit like this all the time. Basically every time our users install a Mac OSX update all kinds of bugs appear out of nowhere, after some investigation we realize that Apple simply changed how their own code works, seemingly completely out of the blue, they don’t care, in the end the blame stick falls on us since it’s our product that stopped working.
We develop products for music studios/producers (which is a very Mac OSX-biased market btw) and basically everyone doing the same has the same experience as us, basically there are loads of blogs etc telling users to hold of on Mac updates since the new shiny version of Mac OSX will break everyone’s projects.
We haven’t even touched upon the amount of extra work that is put into a product from a developer stand point just to make shit work properly again after Apple decides to just randomly change how stuff works.
As a counterpoint, I could easily just build our products for Windows XP today with no problems (released back in 2001), If I would try building our stuff for whatever OS Apple had in 2001 I would probably need to hire a dedicated team to sort that shit out, who pays for all the extra workload Apple enforces us? That’s right, the developer, (in this case EHG) and obviously being a smaller indie team this will lead to decisions like the OP because they simply cannot afford doing all these changes.
I’m surprised dedicated Apple users aren’t aware of these issues and still demand developers to just “make it work” on “their” platform of choice.
I could go on and rant about Apple for eons but I will just leave this here as a last note:
I fully support and understand the decision to drop Mac OSX support for now and focus on actually making the game instead of trying to solve problems related to platform specific quirks Apple feels entitled to throw at us and go bankrupt in the process.
I’m sure later down the road a Mac OSX client could be done once the game has been released and the $$$ starts pouring in so I wouldn’t take these news too hard if I were a Mac user, you probably just have to wait longer for the game to land on your platform.
/ End of rant
Waiting does suck though, especially if you’ve been able to really enjoy LE. So Mac users have my sympathy.
Sure, I agree, but if the only option is that the game wont ever be released due to bankruptcy then waiting doesn’t seem so bad.
I just feel like the anger in here should be pointed at Apple rather than EHG.
I dont understand the technical issues around Mac vs PC. But I generally agree. Though personally, I agree with @StarryWisdom that EHG should probably have not promised Mac compatibility to begin with. Like him, I dont think EHG has malicious intents, but that means we must accept that they might have been too idealistic and optimistic as a startup in promising broad support for a variety of platforms. I’m sure they will learn from this and calibrate the scope for other features too as they develop LE.
To be fair, back when they promised a MAC version there were no real problems in doing so but Apple changed everything with the ARM announcement.
I basically see it this way:
You are looking to buy a house and the salesman promises that there is a lake with fresh water nearby. After you bought the house some dickhead replaces the water in the lake with gasoline. You no longer have access to water, but it’s not the person who sold the house’s fault and his statement was true when he made it.
Oh really? And what happened to Windows phone, the Zune, Windows 8, Vista, Xbox One, and all of the other massive Microsoft failures? What happened to Windows 9? So I guess they just skip over numbers now, how lame…
Intel has literally been making the same garbage processors for at least the past 20 years. Intel is really still making the Celeron processor and the same i5, i7, i9 garbage for years. Even crappy AMD has now surpassed them in the rate of performance and innovation. Can you really blame Apple for switching?
i dont know if you are joking or if you are serious. MS phone and Zune have no relevance in this conversation. neither intel and AMD being better than one or the other.
Icewind Dale (a game created for windows XP) still plays on windows 10. not through GoG im talking about from disc. hell there are still some DOS games that run on windows 10 through DOSBox.
this game was developed for Windows first and foremost. when i see people asking for games to support an OS, the only ones i see are support for mac and linux. common sense would tell me that if i want to play video games, i should do so on windows.
Edit: its one thing to update an OS to a newer version, its another to have to update you whole architecture to a new one.
Hello,
Since you have made the decision to no longer support Mac due to their switch even though they are also providing a system for compiling a windows developed software into something that could run on a Mac, will you be providing a refund since the game still has not come to market?
You can use Rosetta 2, n Xcode, Universal to update your existing Mac code to make it work on the newer systems that will be coming out without making a whole new binary you just need to get the developer kit. Dropping support for Mac just because they are improving their system across the board even with these available resources seems more like a cop-out than staying true to your initial goals.
At the risk of being redundant, again I think there are two separate issues. Not supporting whatever future version of the Mac is the first, and I think is 100% reasonable. That’s still a year down the line, and I think most of us were hoping LE would have released before that.
The second issue is dropping support for existing Macs entirely, including a reasonably sized, devoted userbase, some of which probably supported this game since Kickstarter. I hope at some point the Mac users who put in a big chunk of money will be compensated somehow. Anyway, this is not like when a new phone comes out and everyone rushes to upgrade and dump their old machines. I suspect there will be a large percentage of Mac users that will stick with their existing systems for even longer now. It’s like “dumping out the baby with the bathwater” or whatever that old phrase is lol.