Before you guys say to just buy a windows pc know that I already have one that runs the game at a solid 240fps.
Outside of the west, mobile gaming is pretty much the dominant force. I have been living in japan teaching for 5 years now and more and more of my students choose to play on their phone over owning a console and if they do own one its usually a switch. They tend to go for ipads and iphones.
With the switch port OW has already been brought over to the ARM architecture. The chips inside modern ipads and iphones already stomp the switch and would have no problem running the game at 60fps. Heck the pro ipads run fortnite at 120fps to match their high refresh rate screens. I am sure OW could run that well too.
Well today they announced the transition to ARM. On it was a demo of the a12z chip (the newest one in the ipad pros) running shadow of the tomb raider. But here is the thing, it was being emulated entirely and ran perfectly smooth. That takes a lot of power to do that which shows the apple ARM chips are no joke.
Then they announced that the macs will get their own custom apple silicon which is going to be more powerful than what is in the ipads. If the ipad chip can run shadow of the tomb raider via emulation then OW should be no problem.
On top of that they are trying to unify the code base so one port would work across all iOS devices and macs. This would open up a large amount of people to the game especially in the eastern countries dominated by mobile (excluding korea)
This unification is the perfect time to bring OW over to the apple devices
The switch to ARM actually means porting Overwatch to macOS is more difficult than ever. The emulation layer will only be there temporarily (2 years, according to Apple) - the idea is for developers to write ARM code, not rely on the emulation to do the work for them.
Having to maintain a separate macOS/ARM codebase for such a tiny number of users makes very little financial sense.
The game already exists on ARM with the switch. Bringing it over to ARM mac and ios devices would be like killing two birds with one stone.
You know the chips in the ipad pros can compete with the xbox one s right? In many ways does better
The target audience isnt the west but the east. Its not always about you guys. As said earlier mobile dominates here so the userbase would be extremely large.
Blizzard knows this which was why they made that mobile diablo game.
EDIT: Also just to remind everyone that this will bring a massive graphics update to the macs.
A big part of the argument was that most macs lack the graphics power needed to game. Well the mac mini (which has the weakest integrated graphics of all the macs) was able to emulate shadow of the tomb raider with a very good frame rate. Once the custom mac silicon hits these macs then pretty much every mac out there would be able to handle graphics well above what current gen consoles (outside one X) can do.
Not all ARM architectures are the same - the nVidia ARM architecture the Switch uses is not necessarily compatible with Appleâs custom ARM-based chips. The Switch OS is also completely different from macOS.
The reason mobile platforms are popular in the east is because they are cheap.
Macs are not cheap, and a change in platform architecture will not suddenly make them cheap. The current Mac Mini is garbage-tier PC hardware but it still costs a ton of money for what it is.
As someone who has had iPhone for over a decade because of family communication reasons I can safely still say Apple products are still always drastically over priced for the power they provide.
Donât think they will ever corner anything in the gaming market outside of gimmicky mobile games.
I like your optimism, but I donât share it. I find myself in a really uncomfortable position right now. I can happily game on my 2016 MBP, but its starting to die on me, but with the recent graphics update in the 16" MBP I was all set to upgrade as soon as I had an idea what Apple had in store for us today.
Didnât like what they had to sayâŚ
Maybe youâre right about ARM making it easier to port Overwatch, I genuinely donât know. I also donât know what this means for my Steam library which I mostly use in windows only (especially since Catalina killed 32-bit).
Overwatch getting ported to Macs would be a huge win for me, but I still have a really tough choice to make in the next few months and I am NOT looking forward to itâŚ
They arent game devs my dude and that isnt a game conference. They showed that the chips inside can emulate shadow of the tomb raider which by itself without emulation is a demanding title.
They are showing devs the power that the chips offered and then announced a dev kit that devs can purchase.
I realize that. All Iâm saying is that itâs too early to know what this move spells for traditionally non-Mac games. The chip is incredible, now itâs more a question of who will answer the call.
I agree. But this could be huge imo. If devs can make 1 game and it just works across 3 platforms with little tweaking then that would be huge for developers bringing their games over
Again, love the enthusiasm, and truly hope youâre right. I just wish I wasnât in the market for a new computer as we enter this era of gaming uncertainty⌠while also in a world of financial uncertainty, and a crap ton of other uncertainties. Iâm not typically a gambling man. Guess weâll just have to wait and see though.
But even the mobile market is different in the east. People spend differently on games, there is different competition, and they donât buy into marketing the same way.
Itâs a whole different ballgame when youâre basically shipping a disposable product to a disposable device in a region where brand loyalty is also disposable.
And you are right. Most people do. However apple mobile devices have a large base and fortnite is very successful on those. OW can be ported to those. And with the mac transition to arm it would be little effort to bring the ios version of ow to mac if blizz chose to