Once the only big-time developer to consistently support Mac gaming, Blizzard disappointed us when it didn’t release Overwatch on Mac.

Every other game from Blizzard is available on Mac, so why not Overwatch? And to make matters worst, Overwatch went on to become one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed shooters in years.

May 28, 2019 While many discarded it as a free-to-play Overwatch clone, Paladins has proven to be much more than that. Most of the playable characters may be locked behind a paywall, but the game is still a lot of fun, with refined gameplay and shooting mechanics, good graphics and smooth MacOS performance. And, did we mention it was free-to-play? Jan 15, 2020 First-Person Shooters 1. Fortnite Battle Royale. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year or so. Hi-Rez Studios’ Paladins is a nearly identical Overwatch clone which is available on. Fistful of Frags. Fistful of Frags is another great first-person shooter for.

And in the meantime, Mac support (or lack thereof) was never even acknowledged, until last year…

Is Overwatch ever coming to Mac?

Overwatch wouldn’t just instantly become one of the best FPS games for Mac, it would be the hottest games the platform has received in a long time. That explains why the entire Mac community went insane when a Reddit user found a way to install it on MacOS:

And even though the game was unplayable, many believed it was proof Blizzard was secretly working on it. Apple Insider went ahead and performed more tests to confirm the installer was properly signed by Blizzard and recognized by Battle.net.

The “Blizzard is working on it” theory also made sense because Jeff Kaplan, VP at Blizzard, once said:

We are open minded to it, we just need the priorities of our development process to line up with the capabilities of the platform in order for it to become a reality.

So could Blizzard be preparing for a surprise launch?

Don’t get your hopes up

Gadget 360 eventually interviewed Tim Ford, lead engineer for Overwatch, who unfortunately said:

We have no plans of giving this game on the Mac.

There are several technology decisions that Apple has made that has made it a little difficult for us to release Overwatch in the way we want it to be consumed, and that is why we haven’t pursued it.

So there you have it, Overwatch on Mac isn’t happening anytime soon. That said, there are still ways to play it on a Mac (or worthy alternatives should you refuse to use Windows).

How to play Overwatch on Mac

While we prefer to run our games natively, some games are so good, we are willing to boot Windows to play them. Overwatch is definitely one of those games.

But what is the best way to run Overwatch on Mac using Windows?

There are several methods at your disposal, each with its advantages and drawbacks:

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As Bootcamp and Parallels are the most popular choices, we went ahead and tested Overwatch on both for you. We used our in-house 2014 27-inch iMac with a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 16 GB RAM and a 2 GB Radeon R9 M290X:

All our tests were performed on Low Graphics Quality and 720p resolution (we know, these are surprisingly low settings but we wanted to give Parallels a shot):

As expected, Parallels struggled, even on Low settings, while Bootcamp, on the other hand, performed great:

Parallels: What went wrong?

Parallels is the easiest way to run Windows on Mac. There’s no need to reboot your computer and it gives you access to both MacOS and Windows at the same time. I use it all the time as it covers all of my basic Windows needs.

Parallels is often fast enough to properly run games with low requirements and the team over at Parallels went as far as to work directly with Blizzard to ensure compatibility with Overwatch.

But running two OSes simultaneously is too taxing to run a game like Overwatch. In our tests, Overwatch runs at barely 17 FPS, which is much too low to be playable.

We even configured Parallels to prioritize gaming performance, but the results were not any better.

Bootcamp: The safe bet

Unlike Parallels, Bootcamp allows you to run Windows on your Mac in the same way any other computer runs Windows: natively. If you’re looking for performance, Bootcamp is the way to go.

With Bootcamp, our 27-inch iMac runs Overwatch at a whopping 177 FPS, meaning you’d be able to easily run the game on Medium settings and 1080p or more.

What about the other methods?

There are other methods out there, such as Wine or Streaming. Both methods can work but I find Wine to be unnecessarily complicated and Streaming too expensive. In any case, whatever the method you chose, make sure your Mac meets Overwatch’s system requirements:

• Processor: Intel Core i3
• Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, ATI Radeon HD 4850, or Intel HD Graphics 4400
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Storage: 30 GB available hard drive space

But what if you’re not willing to deal with Windows? Are there worthy alternatives to Overwatch on Mac?

Top Overwatch Mac alternatives

We’ve covered the best FPS games for Mac before, but if I had to recommend a few, these are our favorites:

But what if you’re looking for a hero shooter? In that case, you have two excellent options:

Paladins

While many discarded it as a free-to-play Overwatch clone, Paladins has proven to be much more than that. Most of the playable characters may be locked behind a paywall, but the game is still a lot of fun, with refined gameplay and shooting mechanics, good graphics and smooth MacOS performance.

And, did we mention it was free-to-play? Paladins is so good, it’s hard to believe it’s free. You’ll see!

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 basically invented the hero shooter genre. While not as fashionable as it once was, Team Fortress 2 still has one of the most active and engaging communities out there. Thousands of players still play it every day, and being another free-to-play game, you can download it and test it out for yourself.

What’s your favorite hero shooter on Mac?

Are you a Team Fortress 2 loyal fan or are you willing to go through the trouble of using Windows to play Overwatch?

The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?

There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.

GeForce Now

PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.

For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!

The Wine Project

The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.

Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.

As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.

You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.

Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.

CrossOver Mac

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CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.

CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.

My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.

Boxer

If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.

With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.

Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.

Some final thoughts

In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.

Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.

How do you play your Windows games on Mac?

Let us know in the comment below!

Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.

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