At the same time, you can control the game that’s running on the Windows PC from your Mac. The game starts on that gaming PC and, through its connection to your Mac, the gameplay gets streamed onto your screen. We won’t get into any technical details, but the gist of it is this: rather than downloading and running a given game directly from your Mac, cloud technology is used to establish a link between the Mac and a powerful gaming Windows PC rig that has the game you want to play already installed on it. There’s a big number of such services and all of them, more or less, operate the same way. We’ve separated them into three main categories: Cloud gaming, Windows emulation, and Others.Ĭloud gaming platforms have been around for a while now, but they really only took off in the last few years. If the game you want isn’t supported for Mac, we recommend you take a look at the suggested workaround methods for gaming on a Mac. Most Steam games are available for cloud gaming and the vendor is by far the most commonly used by cloud services. You either use Windows Emulation (look in the sections below) or you go for Cloud gaming. So what can you do to play Steam games on mac? You have a total of 2 choices. There are no plans to develop a similar layer for Mac and nearly 99% of titles on Steam are unavailable for Apple products. A case in point is Steam’s Proton layer for Linux which makes hundreds of titles available for the OS. If on the other hand you think you’ll be using Windows emulators to run the game on your Mac, you better open and read the guides we’ll link to, to determine whether you believe you can properly set it all up because these methods require tech-savviness.Īs the preeminent gaming platform in the world, Steam offers many benefits to make users choose it over other competitors like Epic Games.We’ll put a link to a list of supported games if there’s one available. You can check this in the platform’s respective section. For example, sometimes, a platform supports streaming from Steam, but not Epic games, so you shouldn’t purchase the game on Epic if you want to use it. If you think you’ll be using Cloud gaming solutions, carefully check which games are supported by platform.Not only is this another way to determine if a game has a Mac version, but if there is an upcoming announced version it’ll probably be listed in there as well. Check the game’s Wikipedia page (yes, seriously).However, even if it’s natively supported, check out the system requirements for the game in order to ensure a satisfactory performance. This entire article is dedicated to solutions for games that are not supported.
If it’s supported, you just need to purchase and install it. Before you commit to anything, check the steam page of the game you want to play on your mac. Steam is the only vendor that lists native versions for mac.You should always check if the game you wish to play on your Mac has a macOS version. Remember, however, that there are still some games that are natively supported for macOS.
The next part of the article will introduce you to all methods of how to play PC games on mac we’ve been able to find, explaining their pros and cons. While Mac gaming is undoubtedly a niche subject, it’s one that’s certainly not gone and forgotten, and you may actually be surprised to find out how many different ways there are to get a certain game running on a Mac. So, do all we’ve thus far said about Mac gaming mean that you should give up on trying to play PC games on Mac? Certainly not. The other possible reason is that developer studios are put-off by Apple’s 30% commission margins for all mac apps. Most of the time, the simple reason for this is that there aren’t enough Mac gamers to justify supporting a macOS version for a given game. If you want to play a given gaming title on your Mac, chances are the game won’t be natively supported. Some games, usually highly popular ones, such as League of Legends, CS: GO, and DotA 2, have official macOS versions, but those are few and far between. However, here comes the actual main obstacle that stands in the way of Mac users who wish to play PC games on their Macs – most Windows games lack native support for macOS. With the release of the M1 chip and Mac models that are significantly more powerful compared to their Intel predecessors, so much that PC gaming on a Mac seems like a legitimate option now.
Does any of what’s been said thus far mean you can’t play PC games on mac? In our opinion – not by a long shot.