I don't think it's really that difficult to explain: cross platform development is hard, time consuming, and expensive, you often find yourself encountering bugs that you didn't anticipate and they can take significant development effort to fix. These can show up late in development and require major efforts to fix. This is true of any cross platform development but especially video games. When you have limited development resources, you have to prioritize where you allocate them for fixing issues and sometimes you only have a few people that know how to remediate problems in various areas of the code. So you have limited resources to chase down and fix bugs in code that may impact the 4 platforms currently in development, which means you then have to re-test all platforms again after you change things.
So where do you prioritize? Fixing bugs in the currently released Windows version? The (at the time) up and coming PS5 release? The OS X version? If you were a program manager, honestly ask yourself which of those 3 would be the bigger priority.
It's not like the game for Windows came out bug free, either. I've put in over 200 hours since August 3rd and have had hundreds of crashes, numerous dialogue problems, scripting issues, broken quests, on top of the issues that were well publicized. The game was clearly rushed out the door with bugs and issues that should have been identified or fixed earlier in development. I'd expect it to be even worse if they were trying to rush all of the platforms out the door to meet a certain release date. The reality is this game should have been released in October after more testing/patching, with other platforms following later.
Also, you aren't being discriminated against, being a Mac user isn't part of your identity and it isn't a protected class. There are technical reasons why this happens and there isn't much that can be done about that, engineers/devs/PMs tend to underscope the amount of work required and that's how you end up with situations of this nature, but it's not discrimination. Being a developer myself, I can assure you getting this port off their back to focus on fixing bugs and other issues is something I'm sure they'd like to do, but there are likely bigger issues at play. I do agree the lack of communication is poor, though.
Last edited by Shinook; 08/09/23 02:54 PM.
