Are you a Mac gamer who bought Final Fantasy XIV only to find that your Mac couldn’t handle it? I have good news and bad news for you today. FFXIV head honcho Naoki Yoshida has penned a giant letter to fans explaining the problems with the Mac client and offering full refunds to affected players, regardless of whether you purchased it from Square directly or through a private retailer. There’s even a form you can fill out if your retailer balks at your request.
So what exactly happened with the Mac version to lead Yoshida to refunds? Yoshida writes,
I believe that the biggest problem with the Mac version release was the significant discrepancy between the performance of the product our development team produced and the expectations our customers had for it, which was due to the lack of information available on our product when sales commenced, as well as other issues.
Up until the official release of the Mac version on June 23rd, we were working to improve the client’s performance. Consequently, the system requirements which we should have released were not made available in time, which was a serious problem. Although our development and QA teams tested the client on Mac hardware, because of our last minute efforts to improve performance and the possibility that system requirements might change, we decided to prepare several versions of these requirements, with the one to be released depending on the final result. However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version’s official release.
Yoshida assures players that support for the Mac version “will not be suspended,” but the company has halted all sales of that client until it’s properly ready for release.
