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?