Speaking of which, maybe you could just run the games with Apple’s WINE “game porting toolkit” direct with Rosetta2. Worth a Google.
EDIT: indeed, you can already play x86 windows games on Mac using software written by Apple: https://gist.github.com/Frityet/448a945690bd7c8cff5fef49daae...
Running x86 code on ARM macOS is the most solved part of the stack, if anything needs work it's the API translation layers.
> Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/10/apple-to-phase-out-rose...
Why would Apple ever invite Valve to potentially do the same to them?
But, I do think it might actually be a net positive for them on the Mac by expanding the audience of people who might buy a Mac.
Given that full PC-Game-style game sales via the Mac App Store are likely abysmal, at least compared to mobile game revenue, I don’t think they have that much to lose.
Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.
When Cyberpunk, AC, and a couple other AAA titles came to macOS, Apple made a big deal of them being in the mac app store, specifically. They didn't go out of their way to call out that they run on mac, you can get them from Steam, etc. The big deal was they are in the app store.
That's where Apple wants mac gaming to happen so they can get their 30% cut.
I wish that weren't the case, but Apple's gonna Apple.
You guys remember when you bought a computer and could run the software you wanted, independent of political motives? In perpetuity? Reading excuses like this makes me feel validated for cutting macOS out of my professional workflow. The concept of paying Apple to provide high-quality long term support only works if Apple does better than the free offerings. Free offerings that still run 32-bit libraries, run CUDA drivers and other things Apple arbitrarily flipped the switch on.
Above all, Apple wants to show that their hardware is awesome, especially because it really is. Running x86 games or compatibility layers even with great emulation will make that $3000 Mac look half decent at best, against a $1500 gaming laptop. Simply not the story Apple want to tell.
I previously played through Returns, Dragonfall, and part of Hong Kong on Mac before the 32bit-apocalypse.
I actually see it as the reverse. Valve might be going for the whole pie and want to carve out a niche for their Steam Box. Inviting Apple to the party might detract from that effort. Or at the very least distract from their main focus.
For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.
apple on a desktop/laptop is not a primary gaming platform; edge cases, at best
mobile gaming is a different story, but at the end of the day apple is making money off of hardware sales first and foremost, esp. w/r/t laptops and phones.
I don't think I've installed anything from the App store on my Mini, instead I have just dropped all kinds of images into my Applications folder.
The Windows store is about as marginal as it can get. My corporate desktop at work is locked down with the Windows store disabled, they made it so I can elevate and do almost anything I need to do as a developers but I can't touch Policy Editor stuff and can't unlock it. I miss WSL2 but that's the only thing I miss. I install all sorts of things for work and just install them the way we did before there was Windows 8.
In the Windows 8 era my home computer always got the metadata database corrupted fror the store pretty quickly even though I didn't use it very much. The only thing I really wanted from it was the application to use my scanner back when I had an HP printer. It was obvious that it was possible to rebuild that database because it got fixed temporarily whenever it did one of the 6 month updates but people I talked to in Microsoft Support said I should nuke my account and spend hours reconfiguring all the applications that I actually use just so I can use this one crapplet. Switched to Epson and they have their own installer/updater that works like a normal Windows application. [1] I don't think the machine I built that started on Win 10 has any problems with the store but all I really know or care about is that WSL2 works and it does.
Microsoft dreams that you might buy games from the Windows store but it has an air of unreality to it. If Microsoft tried pulling Activision games out of Steam you know it would just force them to write off the Activision acquisition earlier rather than later.
If they stopped restricting the iPad, those people would only have to buy an iPad.
And as someone without a single interest in an iPad, I would worry that removing the iPad limitations would increase its market-share and lead to Apple reducing even more their interest in the MB, which would be terrible news to me.
I don't think Apple wants any non-Apple store addressing their weaknesses, especially a solution as competent and well-funded as Steam.
If Valve gains Apple-user mindshare on Mac, what prevents them from expanding to iPhones and iPads in the EU, and likely elsewhere if anti-monopoly laws get entrenched? IIRC, Services is the fastest growing revenue source at Apple.
This is speculation but I suspect there's something in that contract that prevents Valve from competing with Crossover on MacOS.
[1] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/a84120449d817...
They don't need Apple for that. People who game already game elsewhere. Steam on Apple feels pointless. I wouldn't be surprised, if Valve will go for smartphones with their own at some point
There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.
Apple is a terrible choice by that metric.
Maybe not 'tons', but they've got a solid reason to consider some investment: additional sales from millions of Mac users able to access a huge library of games they were previously denied.
This wasn't an inconvenience, it was a deliberated decision.
A phone that can run my Steam library is super-compelling -- I travel a decent amount, so being able to chuck something smaller like a Backbone One in my bag vs. a Steam Deck would be a meaningful change.
I think the pentium compatibility stuff in the powermac was also supposed to attract gamers, but I recall not being able to progress past the installer for Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, which would have been the game that made me change my mind. Ran the installer tho, which was something.
Apples decisions are often wrong when it comes to third party software.
Current MS' approach is to not do exclusives and sell all their games on every platform available except Apple's
The real barrier is DX games.
It does suck if you just want to play games on hardware you own that can handle said games.
Apple's real goal isn't even the 30% from the Mac App Store. Their vision is to build a library of games that run on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and potentially Apple TV and Vision. You can connect a controller to all these devices, so any game would work (without clunky touch controls). That's why they're pushing Metal and will never adopt Vulkan. They want to make their ecosystem as strong as possible against competing ecosystems.
It's also why they've been pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst, why they don't care for web apps, why the Mac and iPad have gotten closer (they want each device just be a form factor that lets you access the same apps and files, though I expect they'll always keep the Mac as open as it is now), and why they made all their platforms adopt one design language. They probably ported Preview to iOS/iPad, and Home and Clock to the Mac, because they went through the Springboard/LaunchPad and asked themselves: "which of these apps could we bring to every OS?".
It's also why Google is dropping ChromeOS and switching everything to Android. One platform, one app ecosystem. They did it only to keep up with Apple. The tablet/desktop-ish side of their ecosystem lags far behind.
And it's why Valve is going all-in on Linux. Kickstarting an alternative ecosystem.
Steam frame is more for streaming PCVR than running existing PCVR games natively.
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
But you can always install Linux on your Macbook.
For sure, you can squeeze a few percentage points more out if you optimize for TBDR, and there are some edge cases where it's possible to make TBDR architectures behave pathologically, but it's not that big a deal in the real world.
I also disagree that the Steam Frame is for streaming primarily. If it was, why put such a powerful SoC in it or using it as the prototype device for doing x86 emulation with Fex?
The Adreno 750 is a 3 TFlops GPU that _should be_ substantially faster than a PS4 or a Steam Deck. It'll play plenty of low-end PCVR games pretty well on its own, if Fex's x86 emulation is performant, which it is.
Like the Meta Quest 2, it's a crossover device that a lot of people will just use standalone.