Why isn't Overwatch coming to Mac OSX?

It's hard to pinpoint a true reason. 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.

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. 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.

So when Jeff Kaplan (Overwatch Game Designer, Blizzard VP) in an interview said:

"Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it's just too challenging for us at this point to support it"

He's probably talking about software, not hardware. 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. 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). 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.

Blizzard so far didn't give any more detailed answer, so we're mostly left with the statement above and hypothesis.

Your query should be directed to the developer,presumably Blizzard Gaming.

Ciao.

Cole ~ Welcome to the Community. According to Blizzard's Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan:

"Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it's just too challenging for us at this point to support it..." [Source]

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Hopefully someone at Apple with nag someone at Blizzard and maybe Blizzard will release it for MacOS now that the MacBookPros have (slightly) better graphics capabilities. In my opinion, it should be embarrassing to Apple how slightly better the graphics are. These machines have the "Pro" moniker, yet they have budget graphics cards. Sad day.

I know this thread is old but here is what I think was happening.

I develop in UE4 on Mac, I was working on making some snow in my scene and started my usual process of using a rendering technology called "tessellation" to give my snow some depth and make it capable of accumulating over time. The tessellation never rendered, it had worked fine in Windows. Turns out, tessellation wasn't supported by the Metal API, it is now in the macOS Sierra update but for a while it wasn't. UE4 still doesn't have an update supporting tessellation yet but hopefully Q1 2017 we will see it according to the Devs.

Long story short I believe that there was a rendering technique, maybe even tessellation, that was used in Overwatch that the Metal API didn't support. Hopefully Overwatch will come soon though as Apple keeps refining Metal.

Happy Holidays,

-Dave