Why no D2R or D4 for MacOS?

Before I begin my little rant here, I’d like to address a few of the main talking points when anything mac-gaming-related is brought up.

“Bringing games to Mac just isn’t worth it. It costs way too much!”

There’s a meme “To be fair, Blizzard is just a small indie company.” My favorite part about the “not worth it” argument is that it boils down to that meme, but unironically. In the middle market, Mac support is abundant even among smaller studios that make their own game engines, and even among those who cant afford to employ Mac devs full time and so have to reach out to other companies to handle the porting. If it’s profitable for companies 1/100th Blizzard’s size that only ever sell 1/1000th as many copies of their games as Blizzard, then it should be profitable for Blizzard (who already has their own in-house mac team) as well.

“Macs just aren’t powerful enough to play the incredibly demanding games Blizzard is known for!”

The longtime most popular consumer Mac is the Macbook Pro, of which every model of the last half-decade has no problem running every game Blizzard has made available to MacOS thus far. That to say nothing of the current M1 lineup which grossly outperforms the bog standard 4core i5, GTX 1060 that’s been the median rig for Windows gaming for aeons untold.

“Apple just isn’t what they used to be! They’re a dying company going nowhere!”

Apple’s PC space market share is bigger now than it was when blizzard first made Diablo 2, and thanks to Apple’s terrible performance selling to schools and government institutions compared to Google and Microsoft throughout the pandemic, you can reasonably ascertain that their recent growth is almost entirely from the general consumers who, presumably unlike your local elementary school, might actally purchase Diablo games. Moreover, Apple’s marketshare skews more heavily towards developed countries and among individuals with (admittedly too much) disposable income.

AIGHT

I own an iMac and a PC - I do most of my gaming on my PC, adequate for blizzard stuff with a Ryzen 5 3600, Radeon 5700, and thanks to needing for work stuff, way more RAM than anything in blizzard’s library could ever hope to fully utilize.

I hate lot of things about Windows 10 - Even a little comparison of the UI they give you for changing program permissions vs the UI for changing your desktop background should tell you exactly where Microsoft’s priorities are in Windows’ development. But I enjoy the availability of professional software that just isn’t available to Mac, or isn’t as full featured on Mac. I’ve done a lot of gaming on both MacOS and Windows, and over the years I’ve found that while single-player titles being Windows-exlusive don’t hurt my personal experience too much, co-op and multiplayer titles benefit greatly from being on both Mac and PC - It should be telling that even the team behind that weeb-MMO people never shut up about decided even they should take their game to Mac, despite being mostly popular in asia where macs are nonexistant.

I didn’t used to think much of it before, but had a bit of a wake-up call when BL3 came out a lil while ago, which I find relevant because of it’s myriad similarities with the Diablo series. I was excited for the game’s release, and largely wanted to re-create the positive experiences I had with BL2 and TPS, where around or shortly after release, I could get together with my buddies from WoW, occasionally play with family and other friends, and enjoy it as a casual cooperative experience - Something that’s social, but is also a nice break from the raid schedules and maintenance-labor of raiding in WoW. I really liked the game, but it was a largely lonely experience for me, and I never ended up getting any of the DLC for it. What killed it for me was the release schedule - It first came out on the Epic Store, then was to come on the Steam store, then finally the Mac version would hit the Epic Store… I knew people who were waiting for it to hit different storefronts and a couple who’d only be willing to play it on Mac, but because the game couldnt get to them at the same time it got to me, I ended up playing it alone, and got bored of it and dumped it before many of my friends ever got a chance to start. And I haven’t ever had the willingness to go back it to fool around like I frequently do with Diablo 2, or seasonally on Diablo 3.
Similarly, I’d been extremely excited both for the announcement of Diablo 4, and the rumors of Diablo 2 as they began leaking around, as I’d been wanting to get more of the fun of seasonal Diablo 3, and maybe even get some nostalgia points and recreate some of my childhood experiences in Diablo 2 - It’s disheartening for me to see that those are probably never going to happen though, and I dread the experience I might get if I ended up getting those games to try and play them solo - Everything terrible about videogame-writing, everything terrible about itemization and the competitive components of multiplayer games, everything terrible about art design, it all just gets 100x worse when you’re looking at them alone, and to be honest I don’t trust Blizzard to make a game that’s WORTH playing alone. I think their style of games need the social element to make everything else click together.
It’s something key members of Blizzard have themselves have spoken on, at Apple Keynote events and elsewhere, that they’ve prided themselves on making their games available to markets other AAA companies weren’t traditionally willing to touch.

What I’d like to know now is what is going on and why - Blizzard personnel oft deny abandonment of the Mac Platform, giving interviewers meaningless “not at this moment” answers instead of anything definitive. I see them stringing the Mac audience along, I suppose afraid that if they just came out and admitted they don’t care about MacOS, they might lose that portion of WoW’s userbase. Though, as an observer I’ll freely admit that yes the MacOS audience DOES seem to have a strong enough ‘battered wife’ syndrome to continue supporting Blizzard regardless of how it regularly treats them, so I can somewhat understand blizzard’s taking advantage of them - Asking for it by showing weakness 'n all that.

But understanding something and being okay with it are two different things entirely. And since the MacOS users don’t seem to be willing to push the issue themselves, I think I autta throw my hat in the race on their behalf, since the games’ availability to them effects my own entertainment as well.
Why no D2R or D4 for MacOS?
Why won’t Blizzard just come out and say they no longer have any intention of developing for Mac platforms?
If that’s not the truth, then WHAT exactly do mac users have to look forward to from Blizzard? Diablo Immortal? Another by-the-books Hearthstone expansion? Another hero in not-DotA? Another 15 years of increasingly monotonous WoW content?
Why should they bother to continue supporting that?

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Just admit it. PC >>> Mac … in gaming … Enough said

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“HURR DURR APPLE BAD”

No, not enough said. What does “PC >>> Mac” have to do with Blizzard’s unwillingness to either commit to support, or commit to exclusivity? Why did they make Diablo for Mac back when Apple had 3% Market Share, but suddenly don’t want to now that they’re Apple’s over 12%?
Edit : Quarterly* Market shipments, IE Growth

Moreover, what did Apple do to Blizzard fanboys to get this level of a derangement syndrome? Why would anybody ever fight against bringing products to more platforms? Afraid of something?

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None of your reasons have anything to do with Blizzard not supporting Mac with recent releases. It all boils down to technical issues.

For example here is an explanation of why D2 is no longer supported on Mac.

Overwatch post with links and video on why no Mac or Linux for OW.

Because they would actually like to, but not if it means completely changing the game in ways that degrade the game quality and user experience.

If Blizzard can support games on Mac again, they will.

There is no grand conspiracy and most posters here have nothing against Mac or Apple users.

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For example here is an explanation of why D2 is no longer supported on Mac.

Blizzard has the ability to recompile 32bit apps as 64bit. I guarantee they didn’t get rid of their dev tools after making the original release. The only “technical issue” involved there is their devs unwillingness to put in the work.

Overwatch post with links and video on why no Mac or Linux for OW.

He said nothing even remotely technical to explain why OW never made it to Mac or Linux. The best theory I’ve heard is that the Anti-Cheat spyware they chose to keep OW safe from evil haxxors couldn’t work with the way MacOS compartmentalizes things. The easy solution there would be to just pick a different anti-cheat vendor. But I cant say that’s the problem for sure because they never gave any real reason.

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That is not a good theory and they did go into detail at various times about the video issues with OW on Mac. It had nothing to do with anti cheat. That is a very very strange conclusion pulled out of thin air.

There is no other vendor for anti cheat. Blizzard makes their own. It works fine on Mac.

If Apple fans want game dev on Apple then Apple needs to make hardware and software that the games run well on.

When they do that, Blizz will happily support Mac again. In the mean time, they won’t change or lower features in their new releases to suit Mac.

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That hasn’t stopped them from bringing products to the Nintendo Switch.
I said so in my original post but I don’t buy the “macs just arent good enough~” argument people keep spitting out. When companies with fewer resources than Blizzard can make it happen, Blizzard should be able to make it happen. MacOS is not such a closed ecosystem that you need to do anything crazy to develop on the platform. There is no Apple Store cut for games on Mac like there is on iOS. Blizzard does not make games that requires hardware above what Apple offers.
It is perfectly within Blizzard’s power to facilitate mac users. They obviously do it for WoW.

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Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit isn’t as simple as flipping a toggle in XCode. Code that relies on being 32-bit needs to be updated to support proper 64-bit functionality. Some is trivial, some isn’t. It took emulators years to transition to 64-bit versions, for example. Not because it wasn’t necessary in terms of RAM or addressing space, but because a lot of under the hood changes had to be made in order to not break things.

Overwatch never made it to the Mac because of *drumroll* Apple. Yes, Apple is responsible for this. They refused to give Blizzard the assistance with the (at the time) upcoming Metal API and by the time they finally did, it was too late. Management flat out refused to release it on the Mac. Blizzard had a working demo internally. It was pure politics caused by Apple’s refusal to be forthcoming with the new API that caused Overwatch to never materialize on the Mac side. Overwatch 2 will follow in those footsteps, partly because of those same politics, and also because the tech used to make the same look so good would run so unbelievably crappily on most official Mac hardware. Blizzard doesn’t cater to the sliver of a market percentage that are us hackintosh users with overkill hardware, so it’s Windows only again. The only reason the currently available games on the Mac continue to get updates is because they already existed and had been transitioned to Metal (except for D3 and Hearthstone, both of which use OpenGL). There is a reason so few games are developed with native Mac ports these days. Even the WINE wrapper ports are in decline. Apple only cares about gaming as it pertains to iOS and the new ARM64 Macs since those can run iOS apps natively. They certainly aren’t going out of their way to make non-iOS game development easier. This is especially egregious on the graphics driver front where Apple only supports specific chips for a year, maybe two and then just flat out stops issuing even bugfix updates to those drivers unless it’s critical enough that it is required for overall stability. And when they blocked nVidia from even making new drivers starting with Mojave, they gave a huge honkin’ middle finger to every game dev out there, especially Blizzard (nVidia is one of Blizzard’s premiere partners).

The Switch is a gaming specific console/platform with a much larger audience than the Mac could ever hope to muster outside of the iOS walled garden. It is a bit ironic that Apple’s variant of ARM64 blows the everloving crap out of the Tegra X1 SoC Nintendo uses for its Switch (it’s based on nVidia’s Maxwell platform from seven years ago because Nintendo decided nVidia hadn’t gotten their Pascal platform ready in time for dev SDKs). Unfortunately, Tim Cook hasn’t exactly been receptive to gamers in the least and Apple, as usual, decides it knows best and wants everyone else to follow their lead. Blizzard isn’t doing that, and as someone that’s used macOS since 1984, I can hardly blame them. It’s a shame too, since macOS has better accessibility options than Windows does overall.

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Jeez, what a wall of text. And it says nothing.

Don’t you think Blizzard has looked at the numbers? They know how much it cost to bring D3 to the Mac, and how much it sold. The game is almost 10 years old, and has had constant patches despite them not charging a monthly subscription. So there is ongoing costs of developing and implementing the patches and fixing the inevitable bugs, plus the ongoing tech support, vs the revenues of what it has sold and continues to sell. Ultimately, if it doesn’t make a business sense to continue supporting a platform, they won’t. Not that difficult a concept, is it?

Using that as a baseline, they would predict the cost of developing and maintaining either D2R or D4 for years, vs the potential sales. If it isn’t favourable, they won’t develop them. And it seems that they’ve reached a certain conclusion, doesn’t it?

They did. If Apple does not want to provide their proprietary information Blizzard will move on without them.

Problem solved.

You are not some sort of victim and no gaming company owes you anything. Insulting and deriding Blizz certainly is not going to change any minds.

P.S. the person you were replying to is a long term heavy Mac user.

Honestly, good thing I don’t work for Blizz. Do you really think your comments and insults will make Blizz change their mind?

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you can download a copy of windows and not activate it if you wanted to play d3. Quite frankly, most games are made for windows.

Because mac (apple) computers are for education (mainly) and streaming music/videos, not playing video games. DUH!

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They haven’t moved on though. They keep stringing Apple’s userbase along with maybes and not yets, instead of just cutting them off and being done with it - Apple’s userbase should be absolutely reprimanded for their stupidity in believing Blizzard might one day start caring about them, but one party’s stupidity doesn’t mean we should just accept the other party taking advantage of it. There are plenty of “long term heavy mac users” out there who play almost nothing but blizzard games, and it’s difficult to peel them away to greener pastures because they operate under delusions that Blizzard has had a hand in creating.

I don’t need to be a victim to complain about things I don’t like. I don’t even play diablo on a Mac - Like I said I have my PC for gaming. I want more, blizzard is capable of giving more, but they’re holding out on me. The opportunity value is worth arguing for.
Every company owes me everything I purchase from them under the pretexts of those purchases.

Blizzard is part of a multi-billion dollar corporation, not a tween with delicate feelings. I don’t need to be nice to them while complaining at them.
If you think my complaints should be made in a nice and friendly manner, feel free to edit them to your liking and send them to Brack’s doorstep with flowers and chocolate.

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Is there already any information about whether there will be a Mac version for D4 or not?

Honestly, it’s not blizzards fault this time. Apple hates fun more than blizzard.

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Believe it or not, this isn’t the kind of thing you can simply throw money at and get working faster. And as it happens to be, they’ve got one dedicated Mac developer left that I know of. That’s it. One. There is no more “Mac team”. That went away long ago. And the one who’s left handles not just Mac stuff, but the Windows clients too. Quite a lot for one person to deal with, wouldn’t you agree?

Without the proper support, there was no way Overwatch was going to make it to the transition to Metal from DirectX. Remember, Metal hadn’t been released yet. As a pre-release (i.e. alpha/beta) API, Blizzard absolutely needed help. And they were the first to come out with a Metal based game client with WoW. But it took over a year to fully materialize there and would have happened sooner had Apple given Blizzard what it needed. It’s just like with DirectX 12. Blizzard had to work with Microsoft’s engineers to incorporate that API into its games too. That’s why it took even longer for DX12 to get into WoW than it did Metal. There’s some irony in that given how similar DX12 is to Metal. A lot of what Blizzard learned with Metal went into DX12’s implementation. But they wouldn’t have learned without Apple.

Unfortunately that support came too late for Overwatch. Once management had decided against porting it over, even with the alleged internal demo ready, that was it. Management’s decision was essentially to avoid getting burned by Apple again. Why do you think D3 is still using OpenGL when that has been deprecated for nearly a decade now on the Mac side? Again, the only reason WoW got that native M1 support was because Blizzard had already begun experimenting with ARM64 on Windows, and the similarities between DX12 and Metal made that transition slightly easier since they already had most of the codebase there.

Blizzard can’t fix a lot of this stuff without Apple. Take for instance the Intel driver bug that causes crashing with particle effects on Mojave and later. Blizzard couldn’t find a workaround for that even after nearly a year and a half. Apple needed to get the bug fixed with Intel first. All Blizzard could do was hard disable those effects on Intel IGPs in macOS. That’s still the case today. And because Apple doesn’t put out bugfixes for chipsets that are no longer shipping (a.k.a. Vintage in Apple parlance), it’s almost a guarantee we’ll never see a fix for those players on affected systems. Solely becaus Apple stops supporting them properly once they are EOL on the retail side. That’s why the pixelation issues persist with Diablo 3, particularly on AMD hardware under macOS.

There’s only so much Blizzard can do and nearly all of that is hacky workarounds without proper fixes on Apple’s end. Microsoft, AMD, and nVidia fix things on the Windows side. nVidia is still putting out bugfixes for hardware as far back as the Kepler generation. Intel still puts out bugfixes as far back as the HD3000, which is nearly a decade old now. But not Apple. It isn’t politics for Blizzard to cut their losses where feasible. They can’t make bugfixes to software they don’t make or design appear out of thin air.

See above. Blizzard doesn’t design the graphics drivers, Apple does, in-house with Intel and AMD engineers. nVidia’s locked out because they refused to hand over 100% control to Apple, so Apple no longer notarized nVidia’s drivers, preventing them from making updated drivers for even existing hardware. That’s why my 1080 Ti works up to 10.13.6 and that’s it. I can’t install Mojave, Catalina, or Big Sur without AMD hardware appropriate for those OSes. Once again, it’s Apple acting as the brick wall. Blizzard can’t do anything about it. nVidia can’t either. Drivers must be notarized to run on Mojave and later. High Sierra had that mechanism but didn’t enforce it. Mojave onward does. The best nVidia can do is make their own drivers in-house for their own specific computers. Because they raen’t notarized they will only run in self-signed mode on the computer they were compiled on.

“Every other studio” is barely scraping along. Feral Interactive still makes Mac games, but they didn’t start getting Metal clients out until well after Blizzard did. Why? Apple didn’t release proper documentation on the API for a very long time. Just like they still haven’t released full documentation on APFS, leaving backup software developers to fend for themselves. Bombich Software has been nipping at Apple’s heels for a while now and they just barely get feedback and support for bugs and issues they submit. That’s why it took over a year just to finally get bootable APFS clones.

Apple doesn’t want to share anything because they want full control. Game developers can’t work properly under those conditions.

You want to know why I’m still on macOS? Because it’s currently the only way for me to play World of Warcraft. And that was a lucky happenstance, really. For the entirety of the Battle for Azeroth expansion I was locked out even on macOS because exclusive fullscreen mode was removed from both OS’ game clients. I needed that to prevent the app from losing focus, which breaks my very carefully configured mouse acceleration curve that I set up to deal with my deformed right arm.

Last September, after making what was the eleventy billionth comment on the Mac TS forum for WoW, Rommax, the Mac dev for Blizzard reached out and asked me what I needed. I told him and as it turns out, what was removed, at least on the Mac side was a hack he previously had in to work around a rendering path issue with Metal and WindowServer on macOS. Yeah, Metal only initially worked in “true” (exclusive) fullscreen mode because of a Blizzard hack. When it was removed, I couldn’t play.

So he put it back in. If he could do that on the Windows side I’d be there instead where I can get butter smooth framerates and all the bells and whistles (and quite importantly, good fan control for my 1080 Ti). Blizzard cared enough to reach out to me with their accessibility team too on twitter. That’s why controller support is appearing in more and more of their games.

Sure, the CVAA had something to do with it, but mostly it was players letting them know they had problems playing. Now, I can’t use Blizzard’s built in controller support on either platform yet because it requires an insane deep dive into CVAR configuration since there is no proper UI yet, but thanks to the “hacked” exclusive fullscreen they put back into the Mac client, I can play again using my own setup with USB Overdrive. It sure as hell wasn’t Apple helping them by establishing an EFS render path in Metal (the same can be said about Microsoft and DX12, which also lacks an EFS render path). Thankfully that was all Blizzard had to do to let me play again. More than that and I’d likely be 100% SOL.

Currently it’s radio silence, but with the Diablo franchise being consolidated into one umbrella team now and D2R not showing Mac system requirements and likely no Mac client for it, the odds are fairly heavily weighted against a Mac client for D4. There’s still the possibility it will get a Mac client like Warcraft 3 Reforged did (which came almost at the end of the beta cycle with near zero QA testing time), but we aren’t going to know until it gets closer to D4’s release most likely. Blizzard is currently mum on the situation I’m afraid.

Apple doesn’t hate fun, they just hate anything they can’t snag 100% control over. That’s why all of their actual effort toward gaming is vested in Apple Arcade and iOS games, which will run natively on their ARM Macs. Everything else is currently just an afterthought to Apple. It’s entirely left up to the developers to figure out how to transition to ARM and/or keep up with the tighter and tighter grip Apple has on its OS (See: APFS containers and the near incessant installation issues Blizzard games have on them). When Apple doesn’t keep up with GPU driver bugfixes so developers can more readily maintain their games on macOS, it makes little sense to continue to beat their virtual heads against the wall day after day after day.

I suspect we’ll find out the final answer when the two year transition to Apple Silicon is complete and Apple retires Rosetta 2 from macOS. At that point, if Blizzard hasn’t migrated their entire (currently) Mac enabled lineup to universal binaries with native ARM64 support, it will signal the end of Mac support over time.

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I don’t read anything, but looks like Apple lover user

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Check the names under Macintosh Programming in the credits of any recent Blizzard game with a MaOS client, see that those guys are still employed at Blizzard, and search their names through the credits to see what else they do for Blizzard (nothing) - There are at least 5 around from the D3 team alone. I obviously wont name their names, but MobyGames is a a good resource for that kinda thing. I haven’t heard anything about them moving to any of Blizzard’s various splinter-companies, and there arent any recent non-blizzard games on their profiles, so I think it’s safe to assume they’re still around.

Rather than working around the constraints of their customers’ hardware and OS to provide those customers with the best possible experience, Blizzard is expecting the rest of the world to revolve around them and their vision-of-the-day.

Indeed it’s in their hands - Glad to hear you got that worked out and here’s hoping Blizz puts more into accessibility and control support in the future. I don’t expect it could’ve happened any other way though - It’s in Blizzard’s hands. If I thought Apple was to blame or had the wherewithal to make D2R and D4 available to MacOS, I’d complain to them.

You’re the strawman that makes the world go round. Keep being awesome.

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I’m the Man Who laught about people like you that try to make companies change their mind, because your thinking is the only correct one.

I’ll keep with my poopcorns while you’re trying to reply this message with your angry Apple face.

<3

What’s wrong with potential customers trying to make companies change their mind? Would you prefer it be the other way around?

I said so in my original post, I don’t even play Diablo on a Mac. I just want the ability to play Diablo with people who use macs, because that variety in the community is what makes co-op games worth playing.
If I was going to play something like Diablo that was Windows Exclusive, I’d just play PoE like 90%+ of the rest of ARPG fans.

I’m getting google translate vibes. Regardless, you’re free to white knight for multi-billion-dollar corporations as hard as you want. Keep it up <3

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