Why no D2R or D4 for MacOS?

Ah, wish I would have read that you had a PC. Because now it’s more apparent that this thread is pointless. I’ll say nothing further.

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Because Reasons…

Uhhh…you can’t tell which players you play with are on macOS. The game doesn’t divulge that information, nor does it care. There isn’t a Mac pool of players or Windows pool, they’re all lumped together.

This is most definitely a “you” problem here.

Oh, the grand irony arguing for macOS support when Apple is decidedly anti-choice. See: nVidia, lack of 32-bit userspace support (the hardware does support it, but it was removed from the mach kernel), and still the lack of an affordable G4/G5-esque tower with internal expansion that doesn’t require a rat’s nest of wall warts and cables everywhere.

You mean the Steam library where 90% of the previously Mac compatible games are no longer compatible? You know, because of the aforementioned lack of 32-bit userspace being in the kernel anymore? The only way to run 32-bit software as of Catalina and later is in a VM. Nobody in their right mind plays any kind of even halfway modern game in a VM if they want any semblance of performance.

New Mac users looking for games that don’t have any currently are going to find the field excruciatingly limited. That’s a stone cold fact. Outside of Feral Interactive and Blizzard, there is virtually nil available post-Mojave. I’m all for getting rid of 32-bit operating systems - modern hardware runs far better with the now mature 64-bit driver landscape. But getting rid of 32-bit userspace? There was no reason to do that on the Intel version of macOS. None at all. ARM version? Yes, as ARM64 has limitations depending on the iteration of the architecture (i.e. 32-bit support depends on the manufacturer/vendor including the required architectural components for that, and most don’t).

Adding a fraction of a percentage of market share for your audience isn’t growth when it results in a net negative return on investment. That’s the fiscal equivalent of pissing into the wind and having it blow right back in your face.

No need. A fair number of tech savvy gamers that like macOS do in fact use PCs as hackintoshes, as I do. Apple’s trash can pro was the best they had to offer, and in order to get pitiful HD 7950 performance on that machine you had to spend $3.5k on the GPU upgrade alone because consumer GPUs weren’t offered, only AMD’s W series workstation GPUs, which are terrible for gaming. eGPUs didn’t exist back then either, and there were and still are no retail vendors that produced GPUs using Apple’s G4 ZIF rebirth connector.

My machine is built with overkill in mind. Unlike Apple’s machines, all of which thermally throttle (yes, the M1 Macs thermally throttle just like their Intel counterparts), my PC does not. I not only have a minimum of twelve available 2.5" bays to avoid being forced into bus sharing on a thunderbolt connection, to say nothing of the external clutter, I have seven fans aligned in proper fashion to create just slightly positive air pressure internally to force air to expel through the rear and top exhausts, and I have a shiny Noctua NH-D15 CPU cooler to ensure that regardless of what I do I’m not going to throttle. Ever. My machine won’t bake itself to death like Apples will before turning up the fans either. I even get my choice of NVMe storage that isn’t soldered to the motherboard. Same with RAM.

My 9900k build with two SSDs, two NVMe drives, PSU, CPU, RAM, and motherboard cost less than a half of what a pitifully spec’d iMac that throttles under load does. I don’t have a choice with Apple other than thin, thinner, and thinnerest.

It’s sad too because ARM does scale very well, especially with the potential Apple’s variants have. But lack of choice, and lack of proper support other than “here, go do it yourself” from Apple to developers means so much of that potential is going to be wasted outside of the iApps and the Apple Arcade walled garden.

Apple doesn’t care about anything but Apple and its walled garden. Everything outside of that is an afterthought, and developers know it.

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Tias,

The OP does not even use a Mac. They are here to insult people and attempt to get people riled up into a Mac vs PC argument with a dash of corporate shill thrown in and a frosting of boomer.

I don’t think your post is going to make a dent. They are not here to have a logical discussion in good faith.

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Basically he is a troll …

Those who I play with personally, have played with for over a decade now? I mean, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve visited, so I GUESS it’s possible that during that time they may have abandoned the MacOS platform.

Yes. I am an unsatisfied customer, it’s my problem and Blizzard is the one with the solution. They’re refusing the offer that solution, which is what makes me unsatisfied. There is nothing wrong with me complaining and asking for what I want.

Two wrongs don’t make a right. I want Apple to open up their ecosystem, and I want more Diablo on MacOS regardless of whether or not Apple opens up their ecosystem.

Then you aren’t in the market for the products this thread is about - D2R and D4.

That’s wrong on many levels. The trashcan, like all previous and the subsequent mac pro, is meant to fill a niche and not address typical consumers. The most popular mac is the Macbook Pro, and that mac best addresses the use-case of most people. The highest-performance mac from a gaming perspective is usually whatever iMac they have at the time, but that shouldn’t matter because the high end of a lineup is never the one most people own.
Most people in the civilized world game for entertainment, but do not and never will own a purpose-built gaming PC, which is great for Blizzard because Blizzard is not in the business of making the type of games that require a purpose-built gaming PC to run well, which is another edge they have over other AAA studios.

If that was true you should have gone AMD. Team Red hackintoshes are easier to keep updated anyways.

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When it comes to Diablo, they pretty much are. They allocate considerably small teams to the Diablo games. At some point not long ago, they had a grand total of 1 person responsible for d2 and d3

How do you figure? Of everybody on the Diablo 3 credits, all of the mac guys still work at blizzard, and almost all of the rest of them still work at blizzard. A lot of them aren’t on the credits for more recent games at Blizzard, so what exactly are they doing if there was only 1 person on the Diablo team?
If that’s REALLY true though, Blizzard could act as a publisher instead of a developer, and just sub the porting out to NetEase - They did a good job on that mobile MMO, and Blizzard already has them working on Diablo April Fools.

That is more or less what they are doing. D2R is developed by Vicarious Visions, which is pretty much a separate studio.

Sadly those kinds of decisions to allocate more people and resources for the developments of the games aren’t made by anyone who reads these forums, but by the guys in suits who own stonks and probably don’t play videogames at all.

As for the source, at some point a fairly relevant streamer who got invited to blizzcon claimed to have met the “one guy left working in D3”. That was a few years ago though and there’s likely more people now since many job postings related to diablo have been taken off. Still, very unlikely to be a big team, and in the D2R Q&A they did claim that they are a very small team.

If Blizzard’s community managers aren’t bringing public forum grievances up the chain, then they need new community managers.

I mean, the CMs change almost every week around here lmao. They probably do bring those issues to the guys above, who probably laugh at it at their golf games after work.

Executives who are more out of touch tend to also be more open to suggestion. I bet even Bobby Kotick could be made to see the value that being multi-platform brings to Blizzard’s image.

Idk man, I tried asking for Linux support even at Blizzcon itself and got nothing.

In reality, my posts, while quoting this forum Nagilum, my posts are more designed to offer others insight into the present situation. I’ve no grand delusions that our Tormentor Under the Bridge™ has a shread of sincerity in him.

Besides, I needed something to take my mind off my mega migraine.

Just my 2 cents on this.

Coming from my company’s directions to OS supportability, it tends to bow down to the number of users using the aforementioned OS. Usually ending support of OS previously support is always tend to lack of number of users to maintain the developing and support team for the OS. This help the companies realign their directions to better support OS that has majority of users.

Long history short, apple doesn’t want you to play D4, D2R, OW, OW2 on their machines because they plan to launch similar games in Apple Arcade, and they dont have a mmo planned so thats why they support WOW…just follow the money and you will get most answers :pensive:

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That’s Dutch Disease.
Not all markets are infinitely scalable with investment, there’s a finite return Blizzard can achieve from each market it invests into. Once that that level of return is reached, further profits can only be gained from additional markets. Blizzard is fully capable of saturating their PC market AND having enough left over to invest into MacOS.

Apple is not launching any games on any platform. They are neither game developers nor are they game publishers. If Apple (like Microsoft’s been doing) were to get into the business of putting billions into studio acquisitions followed by mass firings of anybody who develops on competing platforms, there’d be an internet-wide outcry about it.
Apple does not greenlight what apps can and can’t go on MacOS - It’s not a walled garden like the iOS App Store or Google Play store. The responsibility lays entirely on the Developer to choose whether or not they support MacOS, not the other way around.

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Apple is jumping architectures. There is no point in developing for Intel macs, because they are dead. Apple only has a glorified iPad available on ARM.

It simply isn’t a good time to put money or effort into Apple ARM.

I suspect that will change after they complete the changeover (in about 2 years).

The point in developing for intel macs is to A : Sell to people who have intel macs, and B : have a jumping-off point to start working on ARM native apps, or using Rosetta when necessary.

This is the best time to put money and effort into Apple ARM. Apple users suffer major confirmation bias when it comes to products - The first to get to them is usually the one they stick with forever, which is why so many Mac users still tolerate Blizzard despite Blizzard’s terrible Mac support lately. Apple’s architecture shift is an opportunity to get another decade of customer loyalty, which blizzard is in dire need of right now what with so many of their old guard having left to start new studios.

That type of thinking gives too much credit to the “corporate” element of Blizzard’s corporate culture, as if the company’s staffed entirely by unfeeling robots programming to to only care about money and be as risk-averse as possible.
They’re people who - like most of on their forums - Consider Macs to be a joke, regardless of what the actual market decides. They have no interest in the MacOS audince not because they don’t think it’d be profitable to sell to them (it’s obviously profitable for, as I’ve said, companies 1/100th blizzard’s size that makes 1/1000th Blizzard’s sales), but because their own biases put them in an adversarial position not only against the MacOS platform, but also against their userbase.
It’s something you only hear much of from ex-blizzard employees, after they’re no longer under the confines of Blizzard’s silly PR strategy, but it’s pretty clear that’s part of the culture at the company.

I want to make it okay to attack those biases, and ask for more MacOS regardless of what the Blizz employees want to work on.
I want to buy product, and I want to get excited for next product.

Yeah, well I was on the Mac for 20 years - gaming on it has always sucked. That isn’t why I abandoned them last year, but it was a small, contributing factor. Apple is no longer interested in having the creatives making things on a mac. They just want the folks that consume media.

X86 is a dead platform on MacOS; the number of those users is on a terminal decline. See: Osborne Effect.

As far as ARM macs - have you actually looked at what is available? It is a 'roided iPad. Full Stop. And it may be years before anything better than a 1st gen ARM is actually available - It was over 2,000 DAYS between the release of the 6,1 Mac Pro & the 7,1 Mac Pro - which was obsolete on Day 1.

The Mac platform is a joke. Paying today’s prices for yesterday’s technology is the height of stupidity. I still can’t believe I waited 3 years for timmy to get his act together wrt the Mac Pro.

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