Wizards of the Coast revealed today that Magic: the Gathering Arena will be coming to MacOS “by the end of summer.”
A MacOS version of MTG Arena was first announced last year and was scheduled to come “shorty after” the game was released on the Epic Games Store in January. After few months of waiting, we now know that Wizards is “targeting delivery [on MacOS] somewhere around summer of this year,” according to Principal Game Designer Jay Parker.
Don’t miss our coverage of today’s other announcements: MTG Arena is still coming to mobile in 2020 while eight-player draft pods are coming to the game with Ikoria.
The Transition to 64-Bit
Wizards said that the delayed Mac release is due to their ongoing transition to a 64-bit game client. Apple’s latest operating system, MacOS Catalina, released last year and ended support for legacy 32-bit applications. Wizards is currently transitioning its Windows client to a 64-bit architecture and, since they want to support the newest version of MacOS (which only allows 64-bit applications), they need to complete that transition before releasing MTG Arena’s Mac version.
MTG Arena’s 64-bit client will debut with the June 2020 game update, at which point the current 32-bit client will be retired. Wizards is working with Skybox Labs, a development studio based in Vancouver, BC, to complete the 64-bit Mac client “with the plan to release a macOS client by the end of summer.”
Magic Has Never Been on MacOS
Since the release of Magic: the Gathering Online (neé Magic Online with Digital Objects) on PC in June 2002, one of the biggest community complaints about Magic’s digital form was that it was only available on PC—not on Mac. That trend continued when MTG Arena was announced in 2017 as PC-only to start.
But a few months later, in an interview with Hipsters of the Coast, Wizards CEO Chris Cocks said that they were intended to bring MTG Arena to Mac eventually. “We will support other platforms like Mac,” Cocks said. “[T]hat likely won’t be until either the later stages of the Beta or around when we declare it as a launch game, but Mac will be a platform that supported as well as all the other platforms you would expect us to do.”
It took a bit longer than expected—around a year after launch, if the current schedule holds—but Magic will be making its debut on Mac and mobile in 2020.