Apologies if this is incorrect forum but the D4 announcement said that D4 was for “PC”. I can’t find any other info. Did that include MacOS? (I certainly hope so! Especially since I played D2 and 3 on my Macs!)
Relevant thread in Diablo forums
It looks to me that Diablo IV will not be available for the Mac. That seems to be the direction Blizz has been going in. Overwatch was never made available for us and I doubt this will be any different. Just look at the lack of attention to Mac related technical issues in WoW. Blizzard is slowly but surely abandoning our platform and that makes me sad.
I can’t post over there for some reason, but in this thread there are claims that in 2019 Apple/macOS still can’t support Overwatch, with said claims coming from Kaplan himself, and that this basically transfers to D4.
This smells like bologna to me. It was true several years ago, but these days Metal is more or less as capable as Vulkan and DirectX 12, which makes me think that they haven’t actually taken another look since then or simply don’t care. Very unfortunate, especially with eGPUs becoming more common and fixing the issue of weak hardware…
Not sure what’s with the entire departure from the Mac platform. Guess not too many Chinese people are using Apple computers.
Those ‘claims’ were from years ago… Someone just reposted them.
They don’t apply today at all.
Damn. I’m being locked out of Blizzard games. I’d rather not get a PC or play on a console.
That’s actually lies. when overwatch FIRST came out metal couldn’t support it yet on 10.11.x. by 10.12.x it was fixed. In fact apple reached out to blizzard and others to establish an improved relationship between apple and game companies, so they can regularly give them feedback on metal needs for their games.
apple quickly got them what they needed for overwatch. However, blizzard decided that they ultimately didn’t want to support it despite that fact.
As for diablo 4 and overwatch 2. Believe me I already have feelers out to try and find out anything. However, I’m not confident we’ll see either one. It’s not an api limitation, it’s just blizzard deciding whether or not our playerbase is worth their time. So I hope they do.
I figured that’s what was going on. Porting games to macOS is easily the easiest it’s ever been, at least for DX12/Vulkan native titles… it boils down to their willingness to pay 2-3 software engineers to actually do it.
But that’s the real kicker here…
If they can’t be bothered to support MacOS on Overwatch2 or Diablo4… how long will it be before they can’t be bothered to support WoW?
We’re talking a company that is in cost-cutting mode and quite frankly, it’s cheaper to drop support for MacOS than it is to support it.
After all, bootcamp is their easy out. No one else develops for MacOS, why should they?
I wouldn’t quite say nobody… the Mac tabs on Steam and GoG are in ok shape. None of it is cutting edge, but neither are any Blizzard games – you’re not gonna need anything close to a 2080Ti and 9900k to play Overwatch 2 or Diablo IV.
Is it cheaper? Let’s say engineering costs are $3M for a small team of Mac devs/QA. Do you really think they won’t sell $3M worth of D4 or OW? I do. I think the entire thing is more political than technical.
This is a good question. While, I have both a Windows Desktop and a Mac, I actually avoided Overwatch, due to there being no macOS client, and would do the same for Diablo 4, though I’ve been a pretty die hard Diablo fan.
In the short term, yes.
But at the scale Blizz operates at, the added costs can be recouped so quickly that they’d barely even qualify as “long term”. This isn’t a random Joe putting his homemade Unity game on the App Store, it’s a world renowned AAA game studio with a long history of good Mac support making their games available to an audience that has few other titles of the same calibre available. The port would sell like hotcakes.
You would think…
I certainly hope they do support Mac. I’ve been playing blizzard games for years. And wow and Diablo since launch. I’m really excited about Diablo IV. But I noticed it just said PC and they said the same about overwatch when it was announced and we all know how that’s turned out.
I just wanted to chime in and say that the Overwatch 2 fact sheet from the press center says ‘Windows PC.’ It’s not that surprising since OW2 is going to be an expansion - not a new game or a sequel.
‘PC’ by itself isn’t definitive.
The D4 fact sheet doesn’t include any platform information. But if D4 has no macOS version that’s pretty much the end of the line for Macs in Blizzard’s AAA titles. I imagine they’d keep supporting it for WoW’s expansions but anything that came after? No way.
Wow has a MUCH higher user base than diablo and overwatch, combined, but requires same level of engineering to support as other titles. it’s still within good bottom line to support us here even if not supported elsewhere. Especially since each expansion doesn’t have to reinvent wheel either. Existing code is updated, not replaced or created from scratch.
The clincher is whether it’s going to be worth the hassle going forward with Catalina and beyond and the APFS issues that are bound to show up as poor game performance (even though it isn’t the game for the most part except for CASC’s fragmentation issue itself).