I’d love to tell you that things like this are some sort of grand strategic vision, but honestly we don’t work like that. It started with someone here thinking 'maybe this would be cool,' and it slowly gathered momentum as more folks joined, including a bunch of help from Apple.
We like a challenge and we like to bring this game we love to as many people as possible. It really appealed to release this as a free update to our millions of existing Steam players.
It would probably be easier to just do a basic port of a game to new architecture, but we wanted this to feel like a native game, something built for the hardware. It meant adopting a new rendering pipeline, shifting development to xCode and Mac machines, and revisiting everything from controls to load times to reimplementing multiplayer. Certainly it’s painstaking and meticulous work, but it wasn’t painful, it’s the type of challenge we enjoy.