Blizzard's Upcoming Game 'Overwatch' Won't Be Coming to OS X

[SmileyDude]

The first game to ship on the same discs and same day was Diablo 2 in 2000. Before that it was a delay for the Power mac versions. But that was in the days before OS X.

I had forgotten about D2 launching on the same day for both -- mainly because D2 had an annoying stutter on my Macs at the time and I ended up putting D2 on the shelf for a few years. I didn't go back to D2 for another 8 years -- by then, pretty much anything could run it just fine.

 

[SmileyDude]

The thing is, Blizzard has been trying to hire mac engineers for 3 years now. They just cannot find any. A multibillion dollar company cannot get mac engineers whenever they want because mac engineers who have experience with desktop gaming is a very small group.

This is almost certainly a big issue for them. It takes time for people to learn the ins and outs of a platform. Almost all of Apple's influx of developers these days is on the iOS side, not OS X. There are similarities (Metal, Foundation, ObjC, Swift, Xcode, etc, etc), but there are lots of differences too (OpenGL vs OpenGL ES, ARM vs x86, Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch).

If you happen to be passionate about game engines, there are plenty of platforms where gaming is actively supported by the platform owner. For most people, why would they even consider investing in the skills necessary for writing game engines on OS X?

 

[SmileyDude]

So glad I ditched Mac and built a hackintosh. This thread is hilarious, so many apple apologists. Been saying for years that Apple doesn't respect it's consumers, and this kind of news is evidence of that; garbage hardware will give you garbage results.

And you guys are surprised?

The biggest difference between the Windows and Mac offerings is that anyone can build a Windows PC while only Apple can (legally) build a Mac. But I would wager that most Windows users do not build their own PCs these days (not everyone has the skills or the desire to build their own). And if you compare the typical Windows OEM box with Apple's gear, they are competitive.

Apple's hardware is not the gating factor in Blizzard not making a Mac version of Overwatch.

 

[Ishayu]

Apple's search for talent

It's not like Apple has been sitting on the couch. For years there are many open jobs for "GPU Driver Engineer" and "GPU performance Engineer". It's not just 2 jobs in that direction, but at least 20 that should contribute to better GPU performance in OS X. Think of 20 engineers working full time on improving the GPU drivers in OS X, that would help a lot. And than I'm not even talking about OpenGL engineers and other people that could contribute well if Apple only got the people for it.

I did not know this. That's very interesting, since I actually do happen to be a software and scientific computing engineer who specialises in GPU technology and parallel programming, meaning I am fairly competent OpenGL, OpenCL, Direct3D9, Direct3D11, and CUDA, and I am also an avid gamer. I've also done a lot of OpenMP, which is not currently support by Apple's Clang (grr!) despite the fact that a version of Clang exists, made by Intel, which does support it.

Yep, there's a reason I want a dGPU in my Mac!

Unfortunately, I'm pretty much fresh out of university, and I live in Denmark. Between the lack of work experience (yet, anyway) and the family/location barrier, I think it's gonna be difficult, but I actually think I just might take a closer look at this.

If I can help my fellow Mac enthusiasts by providing them with a non-terrible GPU experience, then I will do that. However, before I take any job in this area, Apple's gonna have to promise me to actually put some damn decent GPU's in their laptops, and not just the +$2000 models.

Here's a link:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/14059366060?page=2

The post is called "ENGINEERS WANTED".

Yeah, it's been like this for ages. I've considered this as well but I lack the experience they ask for still.

However, I genuinely do think Blizzard decided to not even try this time around. While their Mac team is small, it is also VERY talented, and the Overwatch engine is almost 10 years old already (it is based on the Titan project, which stalled and failed. Engine was carried over)

The 2011 Macbook Pro used a 6770M. Even the Iris Pro should perform faster. I'm still not getting why everyone expects something like a 970M now when Apple has never put such dGPUs in their laptops.

According to some benchmarks it does, according to others it doesn't. Mostly, it beats it in Parallax and Tesselation and loses in every other category. In addition, it has to drive 4 times as many pixels and it's 4 years later. That's just not good enough.

Wanna hear a really funny joke though?
The R9 M370X is 15% faster than Iris Pro HD 6100. It's just a hair faster than the HD 6770M.

I don't even know why they bothered with that junk. At least they could've put in a modern GPU?! All modern NVIDIA GPU's are supported, all they have to do is walk over the NVIDIA and say "can we build your newest driver in? Thnx"
Not so with AMD, which is why they chose this GPU that's based on a practically ancient architecture despite its name.

 

[Ishayu]

The biggest difference between the Windows and Mac offerings is that anyone can build a Windows PC while only Apple can (legally) build a Mac. But I would wager that most Windows users do not build their own PCs these days (not everyone has the skills or the desire to build their own). And if you compare the typical Windows OEM box with Apple's gear, they are competitive.

Apple's hardware is not the gating factor in Blizzard not making a Mac version of Overwatch.

I don't think I've ever seen a gamer with an OEM build in the desktop space. Laptop space is of course different, but the desktop space is pretty friggin' dominated by custom builds.

 

[iBug2]

However, I genuinely do think Blizzard decided to not even try this time around. While their Mac team is small, it is also VERY talented, and the Overwatch engine is almost 10 years old already (it is based on the Titan project, which stalled and failed. Engine was carried over)

I think they are simply very busy. I believe that once they are done porting the current engines to Metal, they'll deliver with Overwatch for Mac.

 

[thatanonymoususer]

OS X 10.11 has Metal... FYI...

I know this post is a bit old, but I think of it this way: Let's say you're a Latin speaker, and you spoke Latin for years. You know it, breathe it, love it. Along comes someone speaking Spanish and talks about how the new language includes more direct words that mention things like cellphones and laptops so that you can more easily communicate these things.

You can kinda/sorta understand Spanish since it's also a Latin language, but maybe you don't want to spend the money and time on Spanish Rosetta Stone, and while Latin+ uses some of these new words everywhere else, your Spanish-speaking friend will ignore you unless you only use old latin. You might just decide to not talk to your newly Spanish-speaking friend rather than learning their language if this goes on for 5 years.

 

[goMac]

The nice thing about Metal, if I understand correctly, is that it's the same between OS X and iOS. You can write your shaders once and have them run on both platforms.

And that's great if you're writing Angry Birds for iOS and Mac.

 

[jaymzuk]

I think they are simply very busy. I believe that once they are done porting the current engines to Metal, they'll deliver with Overwatch for Mac.

Precisely.

If you have a team available to use, do you have them work on a new expansion for Hearthstone that will generate a lot of revenue, or do you have them work on a Mac client for a game that will generate comparatively little income, but stop some whining on a forum?

Blizzard don't normally mess around when it comes to doing a good job of something, and they have to prioritize their resources accordingly. Mac owners know the trade off when they buy their machine. You get the brand, the image, the 'secure' OS, and sometimes you don't get all the nice things that others get because you dared to be different.

 

[coolfactor]

I'm not a game-player myself. But I need to ask... why do these high-profile games always have so much killing and blood-shed? Can't companies focus their efforts on delivering an equally-riveting game without that, or is that just part of human nature? Nature is all about the strong surviving, and yet humans are bypassing that with medicines, hospitals and emergency response teams. So maybe these games bring that part of ourselves back to the surface?

 

[sudo1996]

You mean they could release a different iMac, bigger and thicker with desktop GPU inside, for how many people to buy exactly? Btw iMacs already have desktop CPU's.

Those people would want a tower, not an iMac. It would be a thicker Mac mini or just a weaker Mac Pro. Oh yeah, and no ****ing soldered on RAM, jeez.

 

[Manderby]

I'm not a game-player myself. But I need to ask... why do these high-profile games always have so much killing and blood-shed? Can't companies focus their efforts on delivering an equally-riveting game without that, or is that just part of human nature? Nature is all about the strong surviving, and yet humans are bypassing that with medicines, hospitals and emergency response teams. So maybe these games bring that part of ourselves back to the surface?

Mankind at its current cultural state is a cruel beast. We desire, we murder, we punish, we rape, we greed. That's who we are today.

In order to live a happy life, we ban things in real life which hurt a large portion of mankind using law and ethics which become morals. But we can not not get rid of inequalities just yet, we can not defie our human nature, our reactions to our surrounding, induced by ourselves.

In order to live with that, we just move these desires into a virtual realm: Games.

There, we can fight, we can murder, kill, curse, we own things, we own people, we feel in control, we have power. We balance out. And noone gets hurt.

Even so called equally-rivaling games express the same thing. Think of it: Even the smallest game of tictactoe is about winning, therefore besieging the opponent. But we can put our rivalries behind us just by saying gg (good game) and be done with it. Most of us can anyway.

Doing a good game of sports is fine, but there are deep desires in many of us which can not be expressed in real physical action. But as we have the gift of comprehension and phantasy, we can project ourselves into a virtual world. This can be a simple game of chess or it can be an egoshooter. When we quit the game, we are back to our former self. Humans are capable of doing this as has been shown over many centuries. "Panem et circenses" latin quote.

Many people do not like weapons, killing and blood in Real Life. But in games, we express our depression, desolation and desperation and can become something great and feared. Balancing out the human spirit.

Maybe in 100 or 200 years, the human culture evolved into a more community-like social and commune state. But we are not there yet. I think we can be happy to have games and not be involved in war. Well some of us at least.

But we are getting there. Be patient.

 

[cycledance]

Mankind at its current cultural state is a cruel beast. We desire, we murder, we punish, we rape, we greed. That's who we are today.

In order to live a happy life, we ban things in real life which hurt a large portion of mankind using law and ethics which become morals. But we can not not get rid of inequalities just yet, we can not defie our human nature, our reactions to our surrounding, induced by ourselves.

In order to live with that, we just move these desires into a virtual realm: Games.

There, we can fight, we can murder, kill, curse, we own things, we own people, we feel in control, we have power. We balance out. And noone gets hurt.

Even so called equally-rivaling games express the same thing. Think of it: Even the smallest game of tictactoe is about winning, therefore besieging the opponent. But we can put our rivalries behind us just by saying gg (good game) and be done with it. Most of us can anyway.

Doing a good game of sports is fine, but there are deep desires in many of us which can not be expressed in real physical action. But as we have the gift of comprehension and phantasy, we can project ourselves into a virtual world. This can be a simple game of chess or it can be an egoshooter. When we quit the game, we are back to our former self. Humans are capable of doing this as has been shown over many centuries. "Panem et circenses" latin quote.

Many people do not like weapons, killing and blood in Real Life. But in games, we express our depression, desolation and desperation and can become something great and feared. Balancing out the human spirit.

Maybe in 100 or 200 years, the human culture evolved into a more community-like social and commune state. But we are not there yet. I think we can be happy to have games and not be involved in war. Well some of us at least.

But we are getting there. Be patient.

maybe...

i think the explanation is simpler. it's a game. this sounds obvious but that's something u gotta realise. what's the nature of the activity.

the fps gameplay works. you feel good when u stay alive. you feel good when you line up your aim and hit your target. you feel powerful when u hold a weapon.

you don´t inflict pain when u chase each other with a water gun but it's fun. cause you experience how your body successfully chases and hits a target. this is the same with basketball or other ball games.

and yea...it's drama. it's conflict. death and violence and horror work very well to stimulate our senses and give us a rush. very easy to understand concepts. our primal brain stuff gets tingly.

 

[iBug2]

Those people would want a tower, not an iMac. It would be a thicker Mac mini or just a weaker Mac Pro. Oh yeah, and no ****ing soldered on RAM, jeez.

I think those people should just buy a PC. I don't remember a single time when someone could simply get a Mac Tower with desktop components inside, and add in any GPU they liked. During the G4,G5 days the GPU's offered by the vendors themselves were extremely rare, so you had to whatever Apple gave you. During the Mac Pro era we started seeing some 3rd party GPU's or rom flashed ones, but even then the towers had server chips inside and were much more expensive than a comparable PC box.

 

[antonis]

If you launch a game and it performs badly, you get backlash from your users, the problem is that Apple has very poor driver support.

And example

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/18300616773

Go to any forums that currently support games on a Mac, and the same topic pop up, really poor performance on the mac version using the identical hardware. Apple has to improve its drivers / software, not once or twice a year but on a regular basis every few months to keep up withe the windows experience.

So strategically as a business decision why bother with the mac version, to upset your user base, cause they will blame the company that develops the game. And when it comes to FPS games like first person shooters, you cannot have poor frame rates.

This. Nvidia drivers on PC are getting updates every few days. Especially when a new AAA title is released, focusing on performance tuning for the new title. I understand that Apple could not do that so often. But if they weren't the control freaks they are, they could simply allow the GPU vendors to write the drivers for them.

Of course that would also require to get their act together regarding the support of a recent OpenGL version, instead of expecting every s/w house to jump immediately on the Metal wagon like it is the messiah of graphics.

 

[PRIMECHUCK]

While I "get" the difficulty of producing a game for a much smaller platform than the PC or the smaller profit bottom line, you would think that they would support a company and its user base considering a majority of Blizzard employees use an iPhone, iPad or have mac laptops. I have watched a few behind-the-scene videos of the Blizzard studios and one thing that struck me was how many Apple products were sitting around their desks. Very disappointing.

 

[winston1236]

Yeah, kinda hard to fault Blizzard when the only Apple machines that would be able to run it are $2500 iMacs and Mac Pros. Hardly anybody buys the highest-end Apple desktops (relative to the mega-selling 13" MBPs and MBAs)

Anybody who's serious about gaming on their Mac probably has a Windows installation anyway.

It should run on lower end machines ok in Bootcamp. If you have Nvidia graphics they have a program that will optimize the game settings automatically to make it run best on your machines specs. You would be giving up visual beauty for speed though.

 

[iBug2]

Blizzard games are known by their ability to be run at very low configurations in playable framerates. Overwatch should be no different. Just decrease visual quality and it should run at 60 fps on most Macs with bootcamp.

 

[andromeduck]

Might be because OpenGL support is stuck at 4.1 with few vendor extensions to help bridge the gap.

OpenGL 4.5 was released last summer so this makes them 5 years behind spec.


Graphics drivers on mac are pretty bad.

 

[sudo1996]

I think those people should just buy a PC. I don't remember a single time when someone could simply get a Mac Tower with desktop components inside, and add in any GPU they liked. During the G4,G5 days the GPU's offered by the vendors themselves were extremely rare, so you had to whatever Apple gave you. During the Mac Pro era we started seeing some 3rd party GPU's or rom flashed ones, but even then the towers had server chips inside and were much more expensive than a comparable PC box.

They should just buy a PC right now. Those people end up either getting stuck using Linux or Windows or get stuck with a non-expansible Mac. But if Apple offered such a computer, they wouldn't need to. It would be great for programmers because a lot of them use Macs, need a lot of power, but don't need pro graphics and ECC RAM like in the Mac Pro. And there are also kids who like to play computer games but want to use a Mac for schoolwork and computer nerds who like Macs.

I came close by buying an old Mac Pro, so I ended up with a cheap and expandable Mac. I stuck in a regular GTX 650Ti Boost, like one that would go into any PC, and it worked fine. Though I should have gotten the 660 because it has better Mac drivers. I use it for work, programming, and occasionally games.

 

[jblagden]

This is NOT an Apple hardware issue. Overwatch even supports Intel integrated graphics at the low end. People keep ignoring this fact here on purpose.

The issue is more likely related to the perceived cost vs revenue to make the OS X port and/or issues with metal and other Apple coding stuff that Blizzard feels it's not worth the time and effort to deal with. If Blizzard really wanted to deal with this, they would. They are large enough to do so.

Yeah, it is an issue of the perceived cost. This could easily be solved by the Vulkan API. Since Vulkan is related to OpenGL, Blizzard’s engineers might be able to convert the OpenGL code to Vulkan code without having to rewrite it. That could essentially eliminate the need for the Windows-only source code, at least for the graphics API. They might even be able to write a program to automate the conversion of OpenGL code to Vulkan code. With that program, they could probably move all of their current games to Vulkan in under a week, though I’m guessing about the timeframe; I don’t know how long it would for them to write the conversion program.

 

[the8thark]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/14059366060?page=2
Blizzard blue post there:

We have 4 open positions for the Mac team, these positions are for WoW, SC2, Heroes, D3, and future games.

We are working hard to add Metal and OpenGL 4 support to our current games.

This is interesting. I am surprised Blizzard can't fill the positions. I hope they can be filled. I don't want their OS X support to die due to a lack of talented OS X programmers who want to work for Blizzard.

I believe that Overwatch will run ok on most newer Macs in bootcamp so it's not just a hardware issue. The main issue I believe is Blizzard partnering with Microsoft for the development of this game.

If this was true then there would be no PS4 version of Overwatch.

 

[jaymzuk]

While I "get" the difficulty of producing a game for a much smaller platform than the PC or the smaller profit bottom line, you would think that they would support a company and its user base considering a majority of Blizzard employees use an iPhone, iPad or have mac laptops. I have watched a few behind-the-scene videos of the Blizzard studios and one thing that struck me was how many Apple products were sitting around their desks. Very disappointing.

I'm sure one or two of them might own a Windows Phone or use Linux at home. It still doesn't make it a compelling case

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Apple has never develop a competitor to direct X. No SLI support. No desktop graphics in any computer they make.

If you're going to use absolutes like the word "never" then you should be prepared to defend that statement against past systems. Apple most assuredly has used desktop GPUs in past Macs (my PowerMac had one; many former Mac Pros had consumer level gaming capable desktop cards, etc. Even the new Mac Pro has a "desktop" card in it, even if it's a Pro card). Yes, right now the GPUs are sad. It wasn't always that way for every model.

If you are using a Mac to game, you are doing it wrong.

Wrong eh? I've got over 60 games ranging from Pinball Arcade to Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel on my mere Mac Mini and haven't had trouble playing any but ONE of them on this machine. Am I playing at 4K? No. Can I play every single game out there? No. But this word "wrong" is wrong to use. The point is that I'm getting a lot of multi-purpose use out of this Mac. There are a lot of games I haven't played and might be interested in that don't require the top-of-the-line setup out there. Really, the only game I want to play at the moment I cannot play on this Mac is Dragon Age Inquisition.

If Apple simply stepped up their drivers support and offered even ONE model that was catered towards gaming (even if it was better suited to using Boot Camp a lot at first) they could start changing that perception quite quickly. Metal is a good step towards fixing one of the problems, at least. Thunderbolt III might help solve the GPU issue next year as it will be easily possible to take a Macbook Pro and plug it into an external hub/graphics card with ONE wire to dock it to a desktop and have a desktop gaming capable machine. The question is whether that hub will cost less than just getting a second computer of equal power. Even if it's the same price, it's one less desk space to take up room

I love my Macs for work, but I have a PC to game. Apple only cares about iOS gaming. Activision/Blizzard just bought candy crush, stick to that or get a PC.

So the answer to gaming is buy another whole computer? Why even get the Mac, then? Or why not a PS4 instead? Spending ~$1200 on a second computer just for gaming seems like a lot of expense just for gaming alone unless you're a die-hard gamer.

 

[havokk]

Sure Apple has a role in this, but Blizzard has some blame too. Diablo 3 has been out for almost three years now and still ships as a 32-bit application on OS X, while requiring a 64-bit only OS. This is allegedly because it's easier to support Windows with a single 32-bit app.

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.

While I, of course, agree that the graphics capabilities of many current Macintosh models are lacking, this truly comes down to an issue with Activision. Blizzard has always, always, always been a staunch supporter of the Macintosh platform, even when Apple was that beleaguered computer company struggling for relevance in Cupertino. On the other hand, Activision has never cared one whit for Apple or any of Apple's customers. Given that this is really a first for Blizzard and given that Activision's grimy fingers haven't been on Blizzard for that long, we know where the blame lies. We may find that we never see another Blizzard game for Macintosh computers ever … and, I've purchased every single previously-released game from Blizzard so I am certainly quite disappointed.