Blizzard 'Overwatch' installer may herald macOS version coming soon

AppleInsider · November 4, 2017 11:46PM

An executable which appears destined for a macOS version of shooter "Overwatch" has been discovered -- but after completing an install process, the binary delivered appears to be for Windows.

Users on Reddit manipulating link download flags have discovered what appears to be a legitimate installer front-end to install the game from Blizzard's Battle.net. Initial AppleInsider testing shows that the installer is properly signed by Blizzard -- but the delivered binary is useless to macOS players.

When triggered, the download package delivers 8.75 GB of data, and does pop up in the Blizzard Battle.net game launcher.

Blizzard has not announced "Overwatch" for macOS. Vice President Jeff Kaplan said in May that the company is "open-minded" about delivering the game to the Mac, but there were no plans at the time to do so.

The company has Mac versions of "World of Warcraft," "Hearthstone," "Heroes of the Storm," and older titles like "StarCraft," "StarCraft 2" and assorted "Warcraft" titles.

A Blizzard representative said that the company has "nothing to announce at this time," according to Polygon.

"Overwatch" can be played in Parallels Desktop 12, and received some optimizations in 2016 for the title.

macxpress · November 5, 2017 12:10AM

I know its not a Blizzard game, but I'd rather have pubg for macOS. I got sick of playing Overwatch in about 2 months. I've tried playing pubg on beta of NVIDIA Now for macOS and it works okay, but there is a bit of lag.

hexclock · November 5, 2017 1:13AM

What application are you using to evaluate the executable?

ksec · November 5, 2017 10:59AM

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU

.

And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

cloudmobile · November 5, 2017 2:47PM

ksec said:

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU
.
And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

Yes but only a fraction of total PC users. And when the Macs that can actually support high performance games are considered - this excludes the MacBook Air and many lower configuration MacBooks meaning you are basically talking about MacBook Pros and iMacs - then it gets much smaller.

Gamers try to get as much power for their buck as possible. They don't care about things like ecosystems, aesthetics, support, user experience, resale value etc. They aren't going to pay $1500 more for a machine with the same specs because it's Apple. They will use that $1500 on more RAM, a better graphics card and CPU etc. in a heartbeat. Apple waa the leader in video gaming for PCs in the the Roberta Williams era just like they were the leader in education but times have changed because the tech has. Look at the Steam stats. There are more gamers playing the really demanding titles on Ubuntu Linux than there are on Mac. With Ubuntu the OS is free so you can spend every last cent on hardware. You can also play many Windows games using Wine emulator and kvm. But hey gaming is a niche. Nintendo will sell fewer $250 Switches in a year than Apple will sell $1000 Phone Xs in a month. They don't need the gaming enthusiast community because they make more off games in the app store than all the companies who cater to PC gaming enthusiasts combined.

edited November 2017

macxpress · November 5, 2017 3:08PM

cloudmobile said:

ksec said:

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU
.
And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

Yes but only a fraction of total PC users. And when the Macs that can actually support high performance games are considered - this excludes the MacBook Air and many lower configuration MacBooks meaning you are basically talking about MacBook Pros and iMacs - then it gets much smaller.

Gamers try to get as much power for their buck as possible. They don't care about things like ecosystems, aesthetics, support, user experience, resale value etc. They aren't going to pay $1500 more for a machine with the same specs because it's Apple. They will use that $1500 on more RAM, a better graphics card and CPU etc. in a heartbeat. Apple waa the leader in video gaming for PCs in the the Roberta Williams era just like they were the leader in education but times have changed because the tech has. Look at the Steam stats. There are more gamers playing the really demanding titles on Ubuntu Linux than there are on Mac. With Ubuntu the OS is free so you can spend every last cent on hardware. You can also play many Windows games using Wine emulator and kvm. But hey gaming is a niche. Nintendo will sell fewer $250 Switches in a year than Apple will sell $1000 Phone Xs in a month. They don't need the gaming enthusiast community because they make more off games in the app store than all the companies who cater to PC gaming enthusiasts combined.

All of this may be true...but Mac users play games too! We just shouldn't have to buy a Mac and also put together a $1500 gaming PC. They should just be making the games for the Mac to begin with.

xzu · November 5, 2017 3:23PM

macxpress said:

I know its not a Blizzard game, but I'd rather have pubg for macOS. I got sick of playing Overwatch in about 2 months. I've tried playing pubg on beta of NVIDIA Now for macOS and it works okay, but there is a bit of lag.

PUBG is a lot of fun, their servers are very bad... so everyone suffers from lag. It should be on the Mac. A l o t of games should be OS X, but Apples hardware is just not up to the task. Macs have annoying mouse acceleration, slow refresh rates on their built in monitors, and mobile graphics. I don't really consider laptops gaming machines btw. Its a market Apple has never cared about and shows no sign of changing.

Its much cheaper to just put together a windows gaming machine, you can get much more bang for your buck. I would hope there would be a Mac that Star Citizen runs on, but again, having used Macs since 1987, its better to give up and get a cheap gaming PC with a good graphics card, it will last longer.

Dont hate me, its just a fact. I am as sad about it as everyone else.

cloudmobile · November 5, 2017 7:56PM

macxpress said:
All of this may be true...but Mac users play games too! We just shouldn't have to buy a Mac and also put together a $1500 gaming PC. They should just be making the games for the Mac to begin with.

Well look at it this way. For reasons that I will not get into to, I use a 2-in-1 Chromebook laptop with a touchscreen that runs Google Play Store Android apps as my main tablet. No, developers are never going to release the great apps that exist on the iPads and iPhones that my wife and kids use for my platform. Why? Because virtually no one buys Android tablets other than the $99 7' slates that people use for watching Netflix and YouTube and updating Twitter, and certainly no one buys Chromebooks but cash-strapped public schools and Android fanatics. So no app developer is going to create good tablet apps for my platform because the money isn't there. Consumers who want to play the best mobile games and use their tablets for creative, productivity and even educational work get iPads first and after that Surface-type tablets (who are not only made by Microsoft but are also made by HP, Dell, Lenovo and Samsung ... Samsung probably sells more Windows 10 tablets these days than Android ones, especially among those ones that cost more than $200) second.

Gaming is the same thing. The people that are serious about PC gaming get Windows and to a much lesser extent Linux machines. Unless we are talking about very mainstream mass market titles that can run with less than 8 GB of RAM on an older CPU with a middling graphics card, that title isn't going to get ported to macOS because only a tiny percentage of Macs that get sold have better hardware than that. Somehow macOS is great at getting more performance out of productivity and other general software while using less RAM and less CPU than Windows does. And even most of those are for enterprise/professional use by engineers, graphic designers, video editors etc. and not video gamers.

It is similar to how the iPhone 8 boat races Android phones with 8 GB of RAM and 8 core SOCs. But specialty applications are where machines with the latest CPU, the best graphics cards and a ton of RAM show their difference and gaming is one of them. Apple is unlikely to target the high end gaming community because it isn't big enough for them to make enough money to make it worth the effort of getting whatever few enthusiast gamers that are willing to pay substantially more for the same hardware in order to get the other benefits of being in the Apple ecosystem.

The one thing that Apple could do is completely redesign the desktop Mac to make it completely modular. Some folks on MacRumors had a long thread on that a while ago when discussing what direction Apple should take with the Mac Mini and also about how Mac Pro users were complaining about their machines aren't powerful enough to do cutting edge engineering work. Were Apple to come up with a truly modular design for the hardware that allows people to put whatever CPU i.e. the latest AMD Ryzen https://www.pcworld.com/article/3176907/components-processors/ryzen-cpus-explained-everything-you-need-to-know-about-amds-disruptive-multicore-chips.html as well as their own memory modules (some of them use 64 GB of the highest seed RAM they can find), their own graphics cards (the Nvidia GTX Titan XP which costs $1200 by itself!) and network cards (needed to prevent stutter and lag from dropped frames while online gaming ... most NIC cards that CLAIM to be able to support gigabit speeds really can't so there are specialty nework cards just for gamers) then you may see some movement on Mac for the serious gamers. However, the downside is that were Apple to take that approach they would remove the main benefit of the Apple ecosystem - the vertical integration of hardware and software components engineered and tuned for each other - and be more akin to a general purpose OS like Ubuntu.

Failing that, Apple could put macOS on low-end x86 server hardware ... or iOS on ARM server hardware! https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/08/23/arm-servers-qualcomm-now-contender and market that to both the gamers and the professional/audiovisual/engineering communities, as well as to enterprises for small server applications that they don't plan to migrate to the cloud. I think that it would succeed, but it would be a mighty impressive engineering feat. Especially if they opt for iOS on some server-class Ax chip.

strangedays · November 5, 2017 9:47PM

ksec said:

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU
.
And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

i used to be a hardcore gamer (was a reporter for a few E3 conferences back in the day), but i don’t think apple is interested in that crowd. it’s niche even on the PC platform.

nightmare! · November 6, 2017 2:53AM

Who cares about Overwatch?

Blizzard proved that Mac/Apple users weren't an important client base when they decided to release the title as Windows only. Now, that the game is over a year old, 95% of the population is completely caught up to the game and are nigh-experts. Mac users would jump in and get wrecked and would only hear about how much Macs suck. It serves no Mac user to adopt and reward Blizzard for that complete and total abuse.

Worse still is what they said about Macs when they dropped Overwatch. They said and I quote "Apple needs to make good computers". Good computers? Seriously Blizzard? Never mind that Overwatch runs on a toaster and my 2013 iMac with a 780m ran Overwatch beta in bootcamp at 1440p/medium settings at 45 fps. Since then we've had far stronger Macs like the 295X, 395X, 580 iMacs. The Mac Pro with two D3/6/700s. And the MacBook Pros with the 455, 460s each capable of running the game perfectly fine. But they made the computing/gaming community think that no Mac could run Overwatch. Please. I've run Doom at 1440p high settings just fine. Overwatch would easily run on Mac. If they'd just optimized to OpenGL or Metal (either one really), they could've dropped the title relatively quickly.

The question really is, would the sales compensate for the additional work? And as a professional programmer, I can tell you that if you make solid code that is not API-intensive, you'll likely have to spend less money porting because of a reliance on DX12 (Wintel/Xbox), OpenGL (PS4/Linux/Mac) or Metal (Mac). The problem is that they took the cheap way out(unlike past games) and dropped their title as quickly as possible and that meant that customizations/optimizations were made primarily for Wintel first...PS4 second. And because the Mac was an outlier in technology...they instead decided to slime Apple products outright by claiming that Apple *literally* needed to create "good computers". As if the preponderance of crappy 400 dollar computers you get at Best Buy, Office Depot, Costcos and the like, were amazing machines. It's insulting.

If Overwatch was properly coded, porting it to Mac would've cost a million dollars tops. The engine, art assets, sound assets and more are all platform agnostic. That means just a scant 25,000 Mac sales at 60 bucks a pop would've made their money back and then some. They easily could've kept their mouths shut and just said the Mac version was coming, and then sold it 6 mo later and made a small profit out of it. Instead they made nonsense claims about hardware, and insulted a business partner that has made them a TON of money on the iOS platform via Hearthstone (iOS devices generate more cash for them than PC...surprise!). And now they want to give us the game 1.5 years late, at full price as sloppy seconds, likely unoptimized, and watch us get wrecked by players that have way more experience for us while new, interesting titles are dropping left and right?

Go swivel on it Blizzard.

ksec · November 6, 2017 11:21AM

StrangeDays said:

ksec said:

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU
.
And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

i used to be a hardcore gamer (was a reporter for a few E3 conferences back in the day), but i don’t think apple is interested in that crowd. it’s niche even on the PC platform.

Ok. By nice GPU, i dont mean it have to be a hardcore top end GPU, just anything from Nvidia or AMD will do. Intel's drivers just aren't good for gaming.

And It isn't about targeting gamers, so it is not about building a good gaming Machine, and convince gamers to buy a mac. It is more like a Mac, but also capable of gaming. By "they" will come i mean Games will come. Not users ( They are there ) Support Mac Platform is much easier with Middleware and iOS user base.

A funny enough, it is the casual group of games, or casual in the sense that it doesn't require top end Gfx to play that are making the most money. Especially in China, and it is still growing. Another trend that is happening and will happen soon, is the seamless switching between a Game on your Mobile and Game on your larger machine.

In case no one realize, all these so call in App services revenue are 80%+ Gaming Revenue, since Google is left out in China, iOS or Apple is the largest gaming platform in the world in terms of revenue.

I dont think SJ ever liked games, may be he thinks it is a waste of time. And funny enough iOS never were about gaming either, but the money and usage forced them to rethink. I think it is time to rethink too, Apple TV, Mac. What can Apple leverage the gamers on iOS to their other parts of ecosystem.

Note: The largest of group of casual Gamers is now nearly 60% female in China. Majority of are in their 10s and 20s. Use and Love Apple. Mac are doing well and still has many potential in Chinese consumer market.

edited November 2017

macxpress · November 6, 2017 1:52PM

The thing too is...you don't need a top of the line card to play most games today. Sure, they make them look better, but you can turn the settings down and still play the game. Not everyone needs a 1080TI to play games. If you all you did was play games day and night then obviously the Mac isn't the computer you're looking at, but for someone like me who uses a Mac on a daily basis and wants to play a game at night then I don't see the issue with them not creating it. If they would stop all the BS and put some effort into creating the game for the Mac and not just a shitty port that just gets it up and running with little to no optimizations then maybe the Mac user would be more willing to buy it. I think Apple has a good platform to develop on now and its something more gaming studios should look at.

ksec · November 6, 2017 2:54PM

And we are close .........

https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/new-intel-core-processor-combine-high-performance-cpu-discrete-graphics-sleek-thin-devices/

Every Mac will have AMD's Graphics and Intel's CPU.

tipoo · November 6, 2017 2:55PM

Hope this uses Metal 2 and direct to display - I really want to see some good benchmarks of the combination of the two, vs DirectX 12.

strangedays · November 6, 2017 3:26PM

ksec said:

StrangeDays said:

ksec said:

Apple will just need a small team to help a few middleware engine optimized for Mac and Metal 2 API. There already have this for iOS but not for Mac, and there are finite amount of Middleware now for games compares to years ago when everyone are making their own Engine.

And have decent GPU for Mac from Top to Bottom. No more silly Intel iGPU
.
And that's it. You just need a to make a platform they could use and they will come. The numbers from the recent quarter report just shows that there are more Mac users then ever.

i used to be a hardcore gamer (was a reporter for a few E3 conferences back in the day), but i don’t think apple is interested in that crowd. it’s niche even on the PC platform.

Ok. By nice GPU, i dont mean it have to be a hardcore top end GPU, just anything from Nvidia or AMD will do. Intel's drivers just aren't good for gaming.

And It isn't about targeting gamers, so it is not about building a good gaming Machine, and convince gamers to buy a mac. It is more like a Mac, but also capable of gaming. By "they" will come i mean Games will come. Not users ( They are there ) Support Mac Platform is much easier with Middleware and iOS user base.

A funny enough, it is the casual group of games, or casual in the sense that it doesn't require top end Gfx to play that are making the most money. Especially in China, and it is still growing. Another trend that is happening and will happen soon, is the seamless switching between a Game on your Mobile and Game on your larger machine.

In case no one realize, all these so call in App services revenue are 80%+ Gaming Revenue, since Google is left out in China, iOS or Apple is the largest gaming platform in the world in terms of revenue.

I dont think SJ ever liked games, may be he thinks it is a waste of time. And funny enough iOS never were about gaming either, but the money and usage forced them to rethink. I think it is time to rethink too, Apple TV, Mac. What can Apple leverage the gamers on iOS to their other parts of ecosystem.

Note: The largest of group of casual Gamers is now nearly 60% female in China. Majority of are in their 10s and 20s. Use and Love Apple. Mac are doing well and still has many potential in Chinese consumer market.

IMO casual gaming doesn't require more than the typical Mac GPUs. My iMac has something, I don't even know what, which a couple gigs of VRAM that lets me play Pay Day, Left 4 Dead, Bioshock 3 and other fare from Steam...And that's probably more intense than what I'd call casual gaming.

Blizzard 'Overwatch' installer may herald macOS version coming soon

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