About GWonMac & Related Projects
Where GWonMac comes from, the open-source projects it builds on, its licence, and how it relates to Guild Wars 2 on Mac.
GWonMac is a free, open-source macOS app that runs ArenaNet's official Guild Wars client natively on Apple Silicon. It exists because there is still no official desktop Mac client, and the usual workarounds (virtual machines, Wine-based layers) take more setup than most players want to deal with.
Built on community work
GWonMac builds directly on earlier community projects:
- gw_in_browser is the upstream project that first ran ArenaNet's official WebAssembly client in a browser. GWonMac is a fork that develops this approach into a standalone Mac app.
- Marc Henderkes / dub_le wrote gw_in_browser: the work that figured out how to host ArenaNet's WASM build outside the browser and hand it the platform surface it expects. That is the foundation everything here stands on.
- Jon / 3vcloud maintains gwdevhub and contributed to that work, and shared the proof of concept that got this project started.
- GWToolbox++ contributed the macOS launch wrapper that GWonMac's native host grew out of.
- The gwdevhub community umbrella hosts several other open-source Guild Wars projects worth checking out.
Upstream is licensed GPL-3.0, and so is GWonMac. If you find this app useful, the credit belongs upstream first.
Screenshots on this site are by Snapshot Henchman. The QT Friz Quad display font is © QualiType, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Related projects
gwnative is a second, independent Mac project with the same goal, built as a native Rust host around WKWebView instead of Electron. We share notes and fixes rather than compete, and a few ideas in GWonMac came out of that exchange. The macOS icon GWonMac ships was prepared by gwnative from ArenaNet's official Reforged App Store artwork.
Licence and what's inside
The application source is licensed under GPL-3.0 and published at Mat4m0/gwonmac. The app does not bundle any proprietary game binaries. The official client and game data are downloaded directly from ArenaNet, and you play with your own account.
Guild Wars 1, not Guild Wars 2
GWonMac runs the original Guild Wars (Reforged), the 2005 classic and its campaigns. It does not run Guild Wars 2, which uses a different engine; ArenaNet discontinued the native Guild Wars 2 Mac client in February 2021. If you came here looking for GW2 on Mac, GWonMac can't help you. The original runs natively now, if you ever want to revisit it.
Not affiliated
GWonMac is an independent fan project, in no way affiliated with or endorsed by ArenaNet or NCSoft. Guild Wars and all associated content are © ArenaNet, Inc. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. The full picture on account risk is on the safety page.