I don’t want to use Windows any more, I used Windows for 20 years and it’s enough, I tolerated it, I even enjoyed it sometimes, but now, Windows 11 is pure garbage, the future of Windows looks grim, it is not something I looking forward to.
Why? I don’t want data-harvesting Bing AI/ads OS, I don’t want laggy Edge/Web apps, I just don’t want an OS that lags and stutters, with flash bangs in dark mode.
I recently bought my first Mac, the MacBook M2, I love this device, so I bought the iMac M3, gold color. Stunningly beautiful device, super refreshing and enjoyable to use with smooth beautiful animations and a real dark mode, 0 flash bangs in dark mode.
But problem is, I do play Blizzard games: Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, but apparently Diablo 4 can’t run on Mac, so either you need to hire the right people, or you need to fire someone.
I originally gamed purely on Battle.net, now you are forcing me to look at Steam, GOG, or w/e. You pushing me and probably other (new) Mac users to other storefront if there is no Mac gaming for Battle.net.
It has nothing to do with who Blizzard hired. It has everything to do with the decisions Apple made for Mac software, hardware, and support.
Blizzard does not have Mac support for most of their games that came out after a certain date. Overwatch for example does not run on Mac, nor does D4. They discontinued Mac support for D2 (2000) and LoD years ago.
It is not that Blizzard does not want to support Macs, it is that Apple made it nearly impossible to do without major game sacrifices. At least from my limited understanding.
There are people here who are well versed in the technical aspects who can probably explain it!
So there’s a couple factors to consider why Blizzard and other gaming studios have stopped trying to make their games compatible with Mac.
#1 reason is the amount of Mac users versus PC. Which just comes down to time spent to tweak the game to be compatible with Mac and if it would even be worth it. Blizzard has the numbers, and given their most recent decisions to not support Mac it’s obvious the majority of their players are on PC.
#2 reason is Macs use Metal, which is Apples graphics API, instead of using DirectX, which the majority of PC games run off of. Essentially it comes down to tweaking the game to become compatible, but again, referring to reason #1, it’s probably not worth the cost.
Now I agree it sucks for our Mac brethren, in a perfect world you could play every game on every O/S or platform you wanted. Sadly we do not live in such a world, and realistically speaking, I don’t see this changing for Mac users.
Ubisoft is releasing their new Assassin’s Creed on Mac, PC, Console. Just recently they state it will also come to iPad.
If there indeed limited understanding among the people, then hire the people who don’t have a limited understanding. Or if you don’t want to fire people, then invest in your own people… train your employees for it.
I personally have a limited understanding. MVPs are other players, they don’t work for Blizzard, don’t speak for Blizzard, and don’t represent Blizzard. I am not a Mac expert, or even user. I don’t pretend to be an internet expert in things I don’t know about. I clearly state what I know, and what I don’t.
I think you misunderstand my role and are thinking somehow work there.
I am telling you what information I know about the development decisions for Blizzard games on Mac. Information that has been publicly shared so that us players are aware of it.
From a personal standpoint, it is probably good I don’t make decisions for Blizzard. Insulting staff, demanding people get fired, belittling people - when you have zero idea what was behind decisions, makes me want to NOT ever do the thing you are demanding.
Diablo IV plays perfectly on Mac using Crossover. M1 MacBook Pro here - get consistent 60+fps with mid-high settings (some individual settings tweaked). Is it native? No, but who cares if it works?
You have to remember Blizzard has the numbers of the amount of players that play on Mac VS PC. Obviously they aren’t huge numbers or there would be more effort put into making their newer games compatible with Mac.
For Crossover to work on Diablo you have to install the Windows version of Battle.net on Mac. Super clunky…
I already have Mac version of Battle.net, basically I have to run 2 of the same launcher.
Other than that, no the performance is not good, the game runs on a Win32 translation layer, which is an unnecessary overhead. A big company like Blizzard should be able to port their games to Metal properly. If not, there is some talent issues… I know it is harsh, but this is the truth.
The outdated statement about “metal too complicated” is no longer valid when smaller companies and Ubisoft are able to port their Windows games to Mac, iPad and even iPhone, bizarre.
Heh. Just don’t use external displays with it. HDR is giga screwed on non-Apple displays and VRR is buggy as all get out. You can use GPTK to install/play D4 on macOS, and on an M3 (anything other than the base version, which kinda blows) you can get surprisingly good framerates out of it. It even allows ray tracing using D3DMetal via Metal’s RT API, though at a significant hit to framerate. And by significant, I mean AMD ray tracing hit to framerate significant.
But sadly, short of Apple discontinuing its yearly OS abandonment cycle and some serious developer relations improvement, you can forget Blizzard ever porting another game to macOS again. Apple poohed the screwch with Blizzard too many times.
The Steam version won’t run either. It’s still installed via Battle.net, but controlled by Steam. It’s a weird mix. And just because a game can be controlled by Steam doesn’t mean it can be installed in macOS natively. There is no native macOS installation for D4, just via GPTK. You can look up guides on how to do so if you’re interested, but be aware that there is zero support for that configuration, you’ll need to make sacrifices a la render scale + FSR, and you’re on your own.
No, it’s Apple being Apple. They are not an enjoyable company to work with. Period. Which is sad given the strives they’ve made with GPTK. That’s why a few AAA games are being ported over. I wouldn’t expect support for those games to go on more than a year or two though given Apple’s yearly cadence of abandoning their OSes and never, and I do mean never backporting a driver fix and in many cases never fixing them at all because once the model that contains the affected hardware is no longer sold, Apple kills internal updates for it on the spot minus the two years of security updates. No driver fixes, no bugfixes, nada. That is not conducive to maintaining good support for games in macOS and is why Blizzard threw in the towel for everything that didn’t already have a working macOS client using Metal (D3 is almost nonfunctional now as it uses the long deprecated OpenGL API and HotS/SC2 are also in the same boat despite HotS using Metal).
Just use windows 10 kid, and stop capitalizing MacBook, it’s called a macintosh laptop.
same for your Imac, it’s a macintosh, and no one cares about your color
god i crapple sheep are insuferable in their tech ignorance
I doubt about that… Apple has a thriving app store.
Warcraft Rumble.
It is not a game I enjoy playing, but it is there.
I rather want Activision-Blizzard-King/Microsoft to port the game to the Mac than use Crossover/GPTK2.
I know this is energy consuming for some, but there are people who actually look a bit ahead of time.
No need to get this emotional by mere product preference of some people. How do you go through real life if you fall on your knees by mere “i crapple sheep”?
Again, not going to happen unless Apple seriously changes their stance toward developers and stops abandoning OSes on a yearly basis. It’s extremely difficult to maintain a working game when Apple does that. All you have to do to see the effects of Apple’s shenanigans is look at the state of WoW, especially The War Within beta and the Classic versions of the game. Stability and issues are all over the map. And that’s on top of the Battle.net client still being Intel based, thus requiring Rosetta. There’s a good chance that if that doesn’t get changed, once Apple ditches Rosetta from the OS, which will likely happen in the OS after Sequoia, that’s all she wrote for macOS. WoW: TWW already almost doesn’t even work at all on Intel Macs. It’s unbelievably difficult to support macOS on two platforms when Apple has long since abandoned one of those platforms, and even its first gen M1 is showing signs of being abandoned in terms of support.
We’d all love to see macOS users happy, but Apple needs to do more than throw developers a soggy bone.
Their app store has the most draconian policies of all the app stores. And they’re so intent on controlling everything in their walled garden they’re fighting tooth and nail to stop other app stores from being allowed on iOS/macOS (EU is likely to force that issue though since Apple is running afoul of antitrust laws just about everywhere).
It’s mobile only. It can be sideloaded into macOS on their AMR64 systems, but is not supported this way. Note that their support page for Warcraft Rumble lists only iOS and Android. iOS and macOS are similar, but not the same due to the iOS’ forced walled garden.
Wish in one hand and in the other and see which one fills up faster. Seriously.
in the other and see which one fills up faster. Seriously.