The quiet sunsetting of Mac support in Blizzard games

The recent Warcraft Direct event had plenty of big announcements, but we noticed something Blizzard didn’t say: the lack of Mac support for the Warcraft and Warcraft 2 remasters. It’s the continuation of a concerning trend, as games that were available for MacOS on their original release are no longer supported upon their re-release. But dwindling Mac support goes beyond remasters. It follows a change in direction at Blizzard, in which new franchises and sequels over the last decade that have launched without a Mac version. With Overwatch there never was an Apple release, but with the Warcraft and Diablo franchises, the lack of Mac support is a break from tradition.

Many Blizzard fans became fans growing up in Mac households. If there was one thing Apple lacked in the 90s, it was quality games. Blizzard bucked this trend early in its career by making sure all major releases would be available for Mac after the PC release. This was a 20 year direction for Blizzard starting with the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans RTS, but those days seem to be well in the past.

With Diablo 2: Resurrected, Blizzard launched its first major re-release, but it was a re-release that wasn’t supported on MacOS. Though the game was available on multiple platforms — Windows and major consoles — Mac support was never included even though the original Diablo 2 was initially available on Mac when it hit shelves in 2000. Then Diablo: Immortal came out — a game that was specifically designed to run on iPhones (and other mobile devices) — but can’t be played directly on a Mac, despite the release of a desktop client (Windows only) after the game launched. The final nail in the Mac coffin for Diablo came with Diablo 4, which launched on nearly every major gaming platform except Nintendo Switch and MacOS. Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, released in March of 2014, became the last Diablo game to be seen on Mac.

Now we’re starting to see the same situation come true for Warcraft. It should be stated that World of Warcraft is still fully available and supported on the Mac with no foreseeable plans to change. Warcraft 3: Reforged does have a Mac version, like its original release, but that isn’t true for the recent Warcraft 1 and Warcraft 2 remasters. And Warcraft Rumble, which is coming out for the PC soon — with beta testing starting December 10 — has not said whether there will be Mac version as well (and frankly we expect it will go the way of Diablo: Immortal). Many may find this to be an unexpected disappointment as, again with Diablo 2, both games were available and popular on the Mac platform soon after their initial release.

Whether or not Blizzard is expecting Apple, the largest company in the world with over $3 trillion in market cap, to not be available as a vehicle for its products has yet to be seen. However it can be said that Mac is the only platform that Blizzard appears to be restricting, with no new Mac releases (other than World of Warcraft expansions) in the last decade, even as the company expands support for consoles and mobile devices.

Whatever the reason, Blizzard’s efforts (or lack of efforts) have made for a growing sparseness every time Apple users sign into Battle.net. This is compounded by the games that aren’t supported on Mac being prominently advertised in the client, even on a platform they won’t run on. For most players this is of no concern but for many other users it stands as a digital tombstone with growing concerns of their original platform of choice being shut out all together from the Blizzard world.