"The Real Dirt"

March 24, 2008

At CodeWeavers, we believe strongly in truth in advertising. This section is an honest appraisal of what CrossOver Games can and cannot do, written after review of our own testing and what our testers have found. Hopefully this will help you to determine whether or not CrossOver is for you.

Just the Highlights:

• CrossOver Games will bring you real game playing joy. You can install games easily, the launchers are easy to use, and your games run at an acceptable speed. We have multiple level 70s happily playing World of Warcraft with CrossOver; we lose a lot of time to Team Fortress deathmatches, and our QA guy got lost for a week 'testing' Civilization IV. All of this without having to buy or run a copy of Windows.
• The catch is that CrossOver doesn't run every game, and some programs that do run, run with flaws.
• However, CrossOver does work very well for many people, so it is always worth a try. And when you do run into a problem, we have many excellent systems to help you triage that problem, including our compatibility center and our support systems.

Tangible things you will get now for your money:

• Software, including an easy-to-use configuration program, that makes it possible to install and run any of the games listed on our supported applications list. You can check our list of supported applications for full details, or better yet, explore our compatibility center for full details including user comments and ratings.
• A meaningful vote on our compatibilty center that will be respected.

Tangible things you will get in the future for your money:

• Support for 12 months

  For the 12 months after your purchase, you will be able to download all versions released and you will be able to obtain level 3 technical support. Upon the expiration of that time period, all customers will still be able to download the most current version of the software that they received while under the support agreement, forever (or at least as long as we can practically make that possible). See our Upgrade Policy for more details and instructions on how to upgrade.

• Documentation explaining how it works and how to use it, including both a nice HTML version and a printable PDF version.

Service you will get for your money:

Our customers will be able to submit problems to our Support Ticket System. A real human being will read every support issue entered, and will get back to you with suggestions and thoughts for fixes or work arounds.

If your problem is serious (as many Wine problems are), we will triage your request. If possible, we will have a Wine developer examine your problem and come up with a solution. At the very least, we will aggregate the worst problems and make sure that they are solved in a future release of CrossOver.

We're committed to providing community resources so that our customers can help each other. The compatibility center is a key to that, with tips and tricks, discussion forums, and much more. We also continue to host the Wine web site (www.winehq.org), so that you can always turn to the broader Wine community.

We also provide a 'Discuss' mailing list to foster direct communication between our customers and so that you can exchange tips and learn from the experience of each other.

Intangible benefit you will get for your money:

You will be helping to provide a much needed source of income to a Free Software company that has provided a large range of valuable improvements to one of the most key Free Software Projects - Wine. For a list of what we have done, please [click here].

CodeWeavers will use the revenue from the end user version of CrossOver Games to continue its work on Wine as well as to enhance and improve our products.

What works well:

• World of Warcraft and Guild Wars both install and run well.
• Team Fortress 2, along with many other Valve first person shooters, installs and operates quite nicely.
• Peggle, Civilization IV, and a range of other games available through Steam install and run quite nicely.
• We've had reports on a variety of other games with a surprising amount of success. Your mileage will vary depending on your application; the only way to know for sure is to try...

What sort of works:

• Some of the Mac video chipsets are buggy, notably the Intel chipsets on some MacBooks. As a result, their performance is not always ideal, and we have not yet ironed out all of the issues.
• Games that come on a CD and have on CD copy protection are a hit and miss proposition. Some of them work, and some game makers are now releasing patches to remove the CD checking so that they can work that way as well. However, many of them will not run due to the copy protection.
• Most of our testers have reported good performance, but performance is not identical to that of Windows, and some users of very high resolution displays have had to scale back on settings to get good frame rates.

What doesn't work:

• Some very high performance games such as Bioshock and Crysis don't work yet.
• Games that are Direct X 10 only will not run yet.
• Games that use advanced features in .NET, such as Lord of the Rings Online don't work yet.

What we will make work:

We will continue to improve gaming in Wine as rapidly as we can.

In preparing our CrossOver Games release, as we will with all future releases, we have carefully followed the votes and input from our customers. We rely on our compatibility center to help us learn what you need.