What does this mean for battle.net or classic?
If the software you are running uses Rosetta 2 then it isn’t written for ARM. As such, it requires Rosetta 2 to run on an ARM based machine. The implication is obvious.
Blizzard will likely get an ARM version of classic and Battlenet sooner rather than later. If they do not, you will know their answer about supporting ARM going forward.
The rumor mills have jumped the gun on this one. It says “some regions” which implies only a few regions will be impacted. Since it hasn’t actually happened, take it for what it is… a rumor.
Apple certainly isn’t choosing to kill Rosetta 2 this early unless they are trying to force the hand of developers to get switched over. Most likely it’s some legal issue that is forcing them to do this. Blame the Government or local regions for this action as it is being imposed onto Apple.
Again, this is just a rumor.
But what it does highlight is that ARM based Macs are not going to run INTEL based software for much longer. That is a given.
wow and battle.net will be just fine. There is still one person left on wow team that cares about mac. Now if they ever leave blizzard then wow is trouble too.
I would expect zero mac support for any other blizzard game going forward to be honest. Diablo 3, SC2, SC1 and WC3R days are numbered in my opinion, simply because they don’t want to deal with maintenance of porting these to arm. Blizz actually uses a lot of x86 explicite instuctions in their apps and making arm is not a simple recompile. Adding arm support to wow was a 9 month effort of internally rewriting a lot of functions to not use x86 specific instruction sets or to use arm equivilents when running those instructions on arm. apps that are in soft support only aren’t gonna get that kinda effort, so they will continue to run on intel macs or M1 macs so long as they have rosetta 2.
basically, they’ll get diablo 2 (classic) treatment. supported only up to point it was inconvient to do so (ie it’d require code refactoring. that won’t do that for apps in soft support)