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World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

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Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#41

Post by an_opabinia »

slg wrote: post #11

This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to b…

> What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware?

It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs.

Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market.

Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already support Metal on iOS. However Switch games sell for $50+, already higher than PC or macOS titles, so it's usually pretty bad economics - you'd rather the user buy on their Switch than their Mac.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#42

Post by mortenjorck »

slg wrote: post #11

This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to b…

For Unreal and Unity-based games at least, ARM MacOS will be more or less just another compile target. For less-popular licensed engines or in-house ones, MacOS was never all that popular to begin with, so I think Apple Silicon may actually not represent that big of a change for Mac gaming.

As another comment mentions, there is the iOS to MacOS pipeline, but given that a large proportion of these are already Unity-based, the fact that MacOS now shares an architecture with iOS may prove largely incidental.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#43

Post by adewinter »

yreg wrote: post #14
jimbob45 wrote: post #8

For anyone out of the loop: Blizzard is a dead, dead company for many reasons, some political, most game-related, all stemming from mismanagement. Yes, they make money now, but their IPs have lost the goodwill they once had with their customers. I’ll hold my excrement until I see a similar announcement from Epic.

They are consistently making wildy successful games over many genres: Warcrafts, Starcrafts, Diablo, WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch. I wouldn’t be so trigger-happy to call a company dead just because it has been a few years since the last major title. Same goes for Bethesda.

In fairness, the only real moneymakers from that list are Overwatch and Hearthstone. We could maybe add WoW to that list due to the die hard players still paying a subscription (if that's still a thing?) but Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft and basically hibernating IPs at this point. None of those hibernating IPs have seen any major movement or releases in _many_ years. Starcraft is still viable as it's considered to be a mainstay of completive RTS (and therefore great for branding of Blizzard in general) but I don't think it's earning them buckets of money.

So we're down to 2 properties making the majority of earnings, both on Free to Play but not Pay to Win models. That model has a very distinct shelf life of, I'd say, 5 years before you need to either release a sequel or change it up with a new IP.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#44

Post by philliphaydon »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…

I think one of the other reasons is that Apple designed their own cpus. And put a lot of effort in. Microsoft just grabbed some off the shelf stuff for the surface. So it’s not even close in terms of performance.

Imagine if Microsoft said you could get a surface with arm processor, 16gb of ram, with 20+ hours of battery life and the same perf as an i5 processor. And it lived up to the hype. People would love it.

My 2c

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#45

Post by joshuamorton »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #25
yreg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are consistently making wildy successful games over many genres: Warcrafts, Starcrafts, Diablo, WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch. I wouldn’t be so trigger-happy to call a company dead just because it has been a few years since the last major title. Same goes for Bethesda.

All those games you list are bloated games that are really only fueled by nostalgia players now. When is the last time Blizzard really innovated and made something we all had to play like Diablo I and II, Starcraft, and of course WoW? I don’t think it can anymore. It sold its soul to Activision and all the passionate people are gone, judging by their recent games.

Wow peaked at ~20 million players. Overwatch has 40 million and Hearthstone 100 million. I think by most metrics more people are passionate about the newer games.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#46

Post by ocdtrekkie »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…

It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.

Oh, sure, and Enterprise SKUs are going to be pinned into those holes forever, but Microsoft could've been more aggressively pushing their platform on the consumer side if they wanted to make any of the changes they've tried in the last ten years stick.

The view from the outside on every Windows platform initiative in the past year is dismal failure, even if the platform has incrementally benefitted a bit from each.

Most software is effectively still written on the same platform it would've been for Windows 7. That's a bad look for everyone building everything there since.

Even internally: Microsoft's own platforms largely failed to embrace UWP. If your own internal developers aren't buying in, why would anyone else?

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#47

Post by usrusr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…

It’s probably more complicated than that: Microsoft’s customers have traditionally been very different from Apple’s, and they valued perpetual backwards compatibility over Apple’s approach.

Basically Apple is selling a cozy computing environment that some people really like, whereas the operating system division of Microsoft is selling a compatibility layer between a bazillion of long tail niche applications and every single piece of hardware in existence that isn't either significantly smaller or larger than a PC (phones, supercomputers) or made by Apple. If Microsoft had an LTS version of Windows 2000 that was 64 bit, a lot of people would be willing to pay a premium. Microsoft thinks they are selling another cozy computing environment, but generally people don't really want more OS level bells and whistles.

Off topic ramble: unfortunately, Microsoft to have a bit of an acquired blindness regarding what users actually want (LTS Windows, innovate in Office or other installable software if you like) because paid software updates has so long been their culmination of visible success. Had they somehow switched to subscriptions by the time they moved to 32 bit Windows would be an entirely different beast today.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#48

Post by adewinter »

adewinter wrote: post #43
yreg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are consistently making wildy successful games over many genres: Warcrafts, Starcrafts, Diablo, WoW, Hearthstone, Overwatch. I wouldn’t be so trigger-happy to call a company dead just because it has been a few years since the last major title. Same goes for Bethesda.

In fairness, the only real moneymakers from that list are Overwatch and Hearthstone. We could maybe add WoW to that list due to the die hard players still paying a subscription (if that's still a thing?) but Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft and basically hibernating IPs at this point. None of those hibernating IPs have seen any major movement or releases in _many_ years. Starcraft is still viable as it's considered to…

So that's Blizzard. ACTIVISION on the other hand? (the other half of the same parent company): straight up killing it.

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#49

Post by thatguy0900 »

an_opabinia wrote: post #41
slg wrote: post #11

This is a related tangent, but I haven't seen this addressed anywhere else yet so might as well ask it here. What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? With the death of bootcamp and the apparent difficulty with emulation, is the only hope for individual developers to update to native support like Blizzard is doing here? And what does the future of GPUs look like? Are there expected to b…

> What does Apple silicon mean for the future of gaming on Apple hardware? It is definitely the death of gaming as we know it on PCs. Blizzard didn't bother porting Overwatch to macOS, their latest engine, and even that game was released in 2016. They ported to the PS4. It's just too small of a market. Nintendo Switch level games should port fine, many are developed on cross platform engines like Unity that already s…

Curious why you think it's the death of pc gaming, unless you just mean Mac gaming

Re: World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

#50

Post by Iv »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #6

This is why Windows on ARM has largely been doomed while Mac on ARM will immediately succeed: Apple told its partners that this is the future of the Mac and expected them to deliver if they intended to continue to be on Apple platforms. Microsoft has constantly and aggressively failed to commit. Be it to Mobile or ARM or HoloLens or whatever. They simply haven't made it clear that supporting their new platforms is co…

Microsoft can't even let go of x86 and make x86_64 mandatory. It could them years to recognize ARM as a valid target.
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