While game developer Blizzard has a long-standing history of bringing its games to OS X in addition to Windows, the developer today confirmed at its BlizzCon fan convention that it will not be bringing its new game, Overwatch, to OS X, according to Polygon.
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Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan confirmed the news, acknowledging that the company has longstanding support for Apple's computers. However, Kaplan says the company focused its efforts on Windows due to the "technology behind Macs."
"Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it's just too challenging for us at this point to support it," Kaplan said. "Our focus right now is entirely on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4."
Kaplan didn't specify what Mac technology was making it challenging for Blizzard to make the game for OS X, but Apple's support for graphics technologies such as Metal and OpenGL may be part of the reason. Some of the early developers who committed to Metal, such as Adobe, have backpedaled a bit as they work with the new technology. Apple has also been criticized for not adopting the most recent versions of OpenGL, which is also heavily relied upon in modern game development
Most recently, Blizzard launched free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena game Heroes of the Storm for Mac OS X on June 2, 2015.
(Thanks, Teyla!)
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Top Rated Comments
Anybody who's serious about gaming on their Mac probably has a Windows installation anyway.
And a big company like Blizzard can certainly afford to put more engineers on the OS X port to support Metal if they wanted to. This isn't the Blizzard of 10 years ago.
As far as Apple being behind on the high end gaming hardware, that may very well be true. But a company like Blizzard doesn't just make games for the bleeding edge -- they need the support of the more casual players that don't go out and buy the biggest and best hardware just to play games. And that's true on Windows as much as it is on OS X.
Finally, if the game can run on console hardware like the Xbox One and the PS4, it can certainly run on recent Mac configs. By the time the game actually ships next year, Apple will have most likely upgraded their machines again and the difference between a higher end Mac and the consoles will widen even more.
More likely, IMO, is that someone at Blizzard (or the higher ups at Activision) looked at the sales numbers for first person shooters on the Mac, did some calculations, and decided that it wasn't worth the effort to support the Mac. I don't know if that's a good idea or not -- it might work out on paper for them, but there might be some unseen consequences of this move. For one, Mac gamers have been awfully loyal to Blizzard over the years. Blizzard has been putting out Mac versions of it's game since the classic MacOS era (I still have my copies of WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft -- all originally ran under MacOS 7.5, 8 or 9). For them to decide now, after Apple's largest quarterly Mac sales in history and with a growing marketshare, to not support the Mac on a new title may come back to bite them.
Why do posts on Blizzards site like this even exist if Apple is so awesome at video drivers? http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300616773
As a gamer I cant even barely run World of Warcraft any longer on a modern Mac. Im lucky to get 15 fps in most areas. Ive had to resort to boot camp and running my game off Windows 8.1 where I can get 100 times better graphic performance and options than I can running in Mac OS. Mac OS is total **** for graphics and apparently Apple couldnt give a crap about it because developers have been telling them for years to get their act together. Ive developed for Macs and Ive owned more Macs since 1985 than you probably can count up to. They haven't "baked" anything but their brains. Devs would be more than happy to take advantage of modern APIs and graphic device driver calls if they existed in OS X AT ALL!