Electronic Arts chief creative officer Bing Gordon at Apple's latest Developer conference stated that EA would be moving some of their most appealing titles to the Mac coming available in the next few months. The first games to become available for Mac will include Command and Conquer 3, Battlefield 2142, Need for Speed Carbon, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is certainly great news for Mac gamers and now it sounds like I should finally be able to decommission Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro's hard drive. However there is one issue that was conveniently skipped over at the keynote.

Although these games are coming to the Mac they aren't being ported, well not in the traditional sense anyway. TransGaming's Cider which acts as an interpreter between the game's original code and the Mac OS frameworks will be used as a wrapper to get the games to run under OS X. The problem lies in the fact that interpreting code uses much more resources rather than running pre-compiled code, which pretty much every game is.

If you have ever used Azureus, a java bittorrent client you will know that it is much slower than say Transmission. While Azureus does more than Transmission, it is significantly slower considering than all it really does is display text and download files. The same thing would in theory apply to gaming under Cider. Since most of these games already require all the hardware you can throw their way, it doesn't sound like Mac gamers are getting a fair deal.

Worldwide the Mac platform accounts for roughly 5% of the installed base of PCs. However since most Mac users aren't gamers, rather than designers, power users and technically challenged folk, etc. I can understand why EA would not go to the trouble of investing more money to properly port their games to Mac versions. The bright side is that EA may only be testing the waters with Cider and hopefully all new future releases from EA will be proper fully compiled Mac versions.

If the EA Cider titles run close to the performance of their Windows versions then I will probably run the Mac versions. In the end, this is only good news for Mac gaming.