EA should have realized in the first place that selling Mac games would be an uphill battle. Mac users are either completely uninterested in games or have long since purchased a console system. Lame, half-baked ports that turn up months after the PC release have become a fact of life.

The company raised a few eyebrows at WWDC when it promised to have four new games out in July followed by simultaneous releases of other games. Finally, a major game developer was going to give the Mac equal footing with the PC. Mac users could finally dump their consoles and erase their Boot Camp partitions, big-name titles were at last coming to OS X.

Unfortunately, EA's actions since then might have cost the company any good will or credibility it had with Mac users, and may have even cost the company its shot at building any sort of significant Macintosh gaming market.

It's not just the delay that did it, it's the handling of the situation.  Mac  gaming blogs and news sites had been asking about the status of the new games for weeks and getting the cold shoulder from the company. It wasn't until Madden was delayed and the likes of vnunet and news.com started to take notice that EA even acknowledged the shipping status of ANY of the games.

Then, without making any sort of attempt to apologize or even explain why the company's co-founder came on stage with Steve Jobs and made a declaration in front of a global audience that was now being tossed out the window, EA triumphantly announced that the four games slated for July were now shipping. One has to wonder if, had the company not taken a minor beating from the tech press, a release would have even been issued at all.

In the long run, EA won't be losing much sleep over the incident. Mac games are obviously the smallest of EA's gaming markets, making up what is surely a nearly insignificant portion of total sales. Still, the company can't feel good knowing that its own arrogance may have cost it a prime spot in what could have been a loyal and growing new market for its games.