I would agree that the PC vs Mac discussion is stupid, but for a different reason than mentioned here: The, uh, game has been changed by the consoles. Neither PCs nor Macs are the primary game machines anymore.
For example, a colleague of mine mentioned the other day that he is thinking about buying either a MacBook or a MacBook Pro to replace his Sony Vario. His reasoning? He knows he is getting a PlayStation 3, so he doesn't need a second computer "that plays games". He wants a computer to work with [I told him to avoid the MacBook because that white plastic stuff is crap, get the Pro with the metal body, but that's just BTW].
Consoles are good news for Apple, because they mean one less reason to buy a PC that can only run Windows. They are terrible news for publishers whose main market is PCs, of course. One way to fight this is to switch to consoles as your target audience, like Valve did with L4D2 (oversized weapons, dumbed-down enemies, glaring flashy HUD, feet removed, etc) coming from the PC-centric L4D1. The other is to expand your "PC base" as much as possible.
[As an aside, don't try to tell me it is too hard to write a game for PC and Mac if you're releasing it for PC and console. This is double-true for any Xbox game, a console that is based on an ancient three-core PowerPC chip.]
This is what Blizzard has always done, even when it made zero sense financially. They did it for the loyalty (which in my case worked). Valve has decided that they want to keep my friend as a customer, so if he goes to a Mac, they'll go to the Mac.
To those here who say it's not worth it because of the "small" number of machines, my answer is: If you are so clever, why aren't you running one of the most successful software companies on the planet, like Blizzard or Valve? I assume the key metric here is not current percentage of the market, be it 8 or 11 percent but the
growth rate that Mac sales have shown for years now. You want to grow with that market, not play catch in three or four years.
So in the end, it's Firaxis who are cutting themselves off from a growing revenue stream here with Civ V. I'm not sure this is very clever, especially because Valve seems to be doing what we all hoped
they would do:
[F]rom the sounds of it, if you already bought PC versions of games on Steam, you won't have to pay again to download Mac versions of the same games. That should be a huge relief to Mac gamers who've been booting into Windows to get some gaming done.
If this is true, then starting May, I won't have to worry about "buying a PC game" or "buying a Mac" game anymore if it is from Valve. That makes their stuff that much more attractive and is a definite minus for Firaxis' "Windows only" games, including Civ V. In fact, by Fall, Civ V would be the
only game I would have to reboot for, assuming
StarCraft 2 ever gets published and the L4D-series does in fact come out in a Mac version.
Follow the customers, Firaxis.
.
