Pottermania has strike again . Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixpulled in $ 140 million in ticket sales in its first two week in theaters and at the stroke of midnight as Friday turns into Saturday , the terminal playscript in the heptalogy , Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , hit store shelves . A TV game tie - infor the new flick is shipping from biz giant EA , too , for just about every major platform except for the Mac .
Rewind to mid - June , and Steve Jobs ’ keynote to attendees of the Worldwide Developers Conference ( WWDC ) in San Francisco . On stage with Steve was Bing Gordon , co - founding father of EA , who denote that his caller was realise a play for Mac gamers start up with the new Harry Potter biz .
So where ’s the Mac version ?
Still in late development , near as I can tell . I could n’t really didder a straight answer out of EA Friday . And I ’m finding EA ’s Mac strategy , or lack thereof , to be quite irksome .
If you go to the video game World Wide Web site , you ’ll see dead no mention of the Mac version . The pressure release posted to that siteis from 2006 and has n’t been updated to reflect that the game is coming to the Mac . In fact , all the Mac edition merited was a bracketed , parenthetic [ Apple Macintosh ] character reference in a press discharge buried on EA ’s corporal site , announcing that thetitle had been released , back in late June .
But there ’s no signaling that the Mac interlingual rendition had shipped , and late on Friday I got verification from an out-of-door PR delegacy that works with EA that , indeed , the game has n’t ship — it ’s still going through a quality control unconscious process , the spokesperson insure me , and she hoped to give me more newsworthiness soon .
Let me be frank : I ’m not expectingHarry Potter and the rules of order of the Phoenix’srelease on the Mac to be one of those ground - agitate , skies - opening - up form of sea changes for the Mac game market . The biz itself is n’t probable to dress Mac game sales chart on fire .
The other Mac versions of Harry Potter games have done sanely well but have n’t burn down the house down . In fact , they were modest enough that EA ’s prior Mac publishing partner on Harry Potter titles , Aspyr Media , took a pass when the last game was relinquish . The Order of the Phoenixgame ’s inability to prevail on anything but Intel - found Macs is probable to limit its gross revenue , as well . ( As you may recall , TransGaming ’s Intel - only cyder technologyis being used to ready these Mac games . )
What I am hoping , though — and what i ’ve see precious fiddling beingness of — is that EA is really motivated or cares that much about the Mac market itself . And that worries me , because there ’s a lot riding on the achiever of these next few EA Mac titles .
It is n’t just about the Harry Potter game , although this is a sorry start . It ’s that , apart from Gordon ’s WWDC show , EA has n’t had much to say about the Mac . Calls to the company have go unreturned . There ’s piffling in the way of announcement , public or private , from EA . It just leaves a bad taste in my sassing , because this is n’t the way Mac game companies do patronage .
Now , I realise full well that EA is a multi - billion dollar mark publisher , and that the Mac is just one of many platforms that they substantiate , and something that ’s very , very minor — some might say totally inconsequent , as it stand now — to the company ’s bottom line .
But for us Mac gamers , EA ’s acclaim tax return to OS X is big news . Not because of what it means today , or a calendar month from now , but what itmightmean a year from now . If EA ’s successful with these title , it may commit more resource to Mac game development . In a perfect world , it ’ll handle Mac game development itself . And perhaps put the Mac on an adequate footing with other political program , as , for good example , Blizzard does . And if EA can do it , there ’s no intellect to recall that other companies wo n’t follow suit .
But the first footfall to that is translate your market and babble out to them . And to that oddment , Mac gamers are still waiting for EA to make the first move .
