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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

Is it?

Putting MS in charge might have saved Blizzard from Activision. Maybe they'd have brought WoW to Xbox, or done something new with the Starcraft IP. Perhaps even a new Blizzard MMO...

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Activision selling Blizzard to Microsoft would be a deal I could get behind!

On the other hand, as a Mac gamer, maybe it wouldn't be so great? Blizzard have been great at Mac support, with all their titles - except Overwatch - being available on Mac since day 1. But Microsoft hardly releases anything for Mac now days.

Diablo 4 won't be released on Mac either. I feel the days of Blizzard being a champion for Mac gaming have ended. They will continue to support it in WoW and the other legacy titles they continue to update.

I'd be surprised, merger or not, if they ever release any of their new AAA titles on Mac again.

There's not many Macs with suitable GPUs for higher-end gaming, are there?

And between the move to Metal as a graphics API and the transition away from Intel CPUs, porting PC games to Mac seems like it'd be rather more of a pain these days.

Arguably, all modern Macs (with M1 and M2 chips) have GPUs suitable for reasonably high-end gaming. These have the same GPUs used in high-end iPhones and iPads, but with more cores, more RAM, and more memory bandwidth.

Some of Blizzard’s titles (World of Warcraft, Hearthstone) were already ported to be M1-native. But even the older titles that haven’t been ported (StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, etc) run great despite being emulated. In fact, they run much faster and smoother on my M1 Mac than they ever did on my Intel Macs!!

You’re right, though, that Apple’s attachment to Metal and lack of built-in support for industry standard APIs like Vulkan is an issue (although a 3rd-party Vulkan implementation is available).

I can play Subnautica, Prodeus, Total Warhammer III, WoW, Metro Exodus, etc. Various settings all at 1080p on the monitor I have connected externally.

And that's on a base M1 macbook Air with the 7C GPU setup. Although it does have a fan rigged up underneath my laptop stand. Every other Apple Silicon Mac has even more gpu oomph.

Friends with M1/M2 Pro machines are plenty happy with their GPU performance but most of them all just play WoW. One with a M1 Max Studio is enjoying plenty of performance at 4K.

There’s also a simple mod you can do to the MacBook Air (installing a thermal pad on the SoC) which significantly improves heat dissipation - check YouTube.

I have a similar setup (except 8 core) and with the mod I don’t feel any need for an external fan for gaming.

Yeah I was tempted to do it to make my fan cooling work even better, but I want to be able to resell this Air soon. It's being replaced with a M2 Mini with 24GB of RAM. Finally tired of the 8GB life.

Blizzard was never really about the high end. Couldn’t have had 10 million active subscriptions on an MMO if they did.

Fuck, even Torchlight is going PC only. Still don’t know why Apple had to steer away from OpenGL.

It's weird how most small indy titles/studios on Steam seem to support Mac just fine but it's the big guys that seem (increasingly?) reluctant to do so!

Perhaps because small studios start with ready-made game engines that are already ported to Metal?

Yes, if you're using Unity and primarily developing on Windows, most things will 'just work' on Mac. But if you're a big studio with an in-house engine and toolset, supporting a new platform and additional graphics API can be a whole lot of work.

People developing their own frameworks make a lot of simplifying assumptions that turn out not to be true, and then it makes it very difficult to walk them back later. Often people get defensive and try to argue that this is a feature.

Leaving out your deep pocketed customers seems like a pretty dumb move to me.

But would have prevented many players from actually enjoying Blizzard games. Personally, I am not interested in purchasing an Xbox or installing Windows on my PC, even if the merger is finalized.

That's not true, they've committed to continuing to release on other platforms.

Platform-exclusive titles have been around for as long as games consoles, that's not going to change.

It's annoying that so many great Nintendo games are only available for Switch, and I can't run them at 4k/60fps+ on PC or higher-end console. But that's just how things are. And at the end of they day, they're unimportant entertainment products, we're not talking about monopolies/oligopolies controlling something important.

> It's annoying that so many great Nintendo games are only available for Switch, and I can't run them at 4k/60fps+ on PC or higher-end console.

You technically can via emulation, though how legal that is depends on the laws where you are I guess.

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