World of Warcraft offers day one support for Apple’s M1 chip

Being a long time World of Warcraft player and Mac user, I had wondered if World of Warcraft would be ported over to the new Apple M1 chip. About 10 p.m. Central time last night the following forum post was made on Blizzard:

With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta. We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.

This came as a surprise to most since Blizzard has been totally quiet concerning this. The only official mention of a possibility was by an Apple vice president at 25:00 in this video.

A few months ago players had noted that the string “Arm64” was embedded in some beta versions of World of Warcraft. This gave hope that Apple silicon would be supported, and today, it is supported on day one of the release of Macs with the Apple M1 chip. This marks the first AAA game title to announce native support for Apple Silicon.

World of Warcraft is an online MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). It is one of the most popular of all time. Launching in 2004, it reached 12,000,000 subscribers with its second expansion, Wrath of The Lich King. 

In August 2019 Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic, which as much as possible emulated the game as it was originally. Due to this, subscriptions tripled during this time. 

It’s nice to know that Mac users will be able to play World of Warcraft on the latest and most powerful hardware offered by Apple.