If this is truly a new engine as rumours state, the cost of porting to Mac might have been higher compared to their existing engine which already ran on Macs.īlizzard so far didn't give any more detailed answer, so we're mostly left with the statement above and hypothesis. But while Overwatch has been out for months now, Mac owners have been left out of the fun. They also made Overwatch on the very weak Switch so why not Overwatch 2 on Mac The number of Mac users is not that low across the world (hundreds of millions).
Blizzard already has WoW and most of its IPs on Mac. The reason might be in the needs of FPS games, which stress a lot network and fast effects (you can feel a lot more if a sniper hit goes wrong than a spell casting on a target goes a few milliseconds longer in Heroes of the Storm or Diablo or Starcraft). Apple just released their new Macbooks with new custom SoCs, and they look really powerful (on paper). Doubly fun when one gets an email for the beta, then find.no client. They should've communicated this tiny tidbit to the community before the Closed Beta. Their Mac team is too tiny at this point in time to be able to take on another project at this point. Blizzard apparently used the same game engine for all of its games (an evolution started since he early Warcraft 3 engine), and Unity for Hearthstone, while for Overwatch rumors say they started from scratch. It's not coming to Mac in the foreseeable future, even when it goes Live. He's probably talking about software, not hardware. "Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it's just too challenging for us at this point to support it" So when Jeff Kaplan (Overwatch Game Designer, Blizzard VP) in an interview said:
A MacBook Pro from 2016 is about 2-3 times faster than the 2013 one I mentioned above, so hardware is clearly not an issue.
Of course gaming PCs get higher numbers, however it's equally obvious that there's still enough performance to run it and enjoy it on a Mac that was out 3 years before Overwatch release. Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play. It's however important to notice that the hardware isn't a problem, as Overwatch is playable in Bootcamp on Macs from 2013: 73FPS on low settings, 25FPS on epic given some benchmarks you can find online.