[KronisLV]

As someone who has about 800 Steam games (mostly various indie titles, some free games, few AAA games grabbed on a discount:

  * all 800 of those work on Windows, in very few cases any of those work better on another platform
  * about 600 of those can be made to run on Linux distros with Proton (with varying degrees of success, relatively few actually have native versions)
  * when it comes to Mac, only about 120 of those have native versions that run and Proton doesn't seem to be an option
  * I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists, but haven't really looked that much into it, I probably should in the future
  * none of that, not even Proton would be really necessary, if people bothered to export versions of their games for all platforms, which is at the very least an option that is offered by all big mainstream game engines, or even smaller ones like Godot; but we don't live in that kind of a world, sadly
  * oddly enough, in many cases games won't run because the developers explicitly choose not to support additional platforms, especially in the case of the various anti-cheat solutions, which plain sucks

It's quite unfortunate, because otherwise I could definitely enjoy more gaming even on my slightly dated M1 MacBook Air - because while I wouldn't be playing that many cutting edge AAA games, if you could have a satisfying gaming experience even on a Nintendo Switch, then I see no reason why the same couldn't be said about Apple hardware.

[solardev]

There's just not a big gaming market for Macs (and I say that as both a gamer and a Mac user). It's a chicken and egg problem. Apple historically has not cared about desktop gaming much, and don't provide an easy way to port games to it. They don't even support Vulkan, so developers have to port to Metal or use GPT. A lot of devs in turn skip the Mac because it's a lot of additional work for a tiny market. And without the devs, there are very few Mac-only gamers.

Apple had a chance to do what Valve did with Proton here, using GPT and custom first party patches or configs to certify a collection of games as working. But they never bothered, instead handing that off to Crossover (who does an OK job but leaves a lot to be desired in terms of UX). It's still a huge pain to get games running on Mac, even worse than Linux. Way worse, actually.

Unless Apple suddenly has a change of heart and really tries to support and help game devs, they're not going to entice anyone no matter how good the Apple Silicon GPUs are. And they're probably not going to do that since Steam is so dominant and they wouldn't be able to make the 30% they do on iOS. Even for their new platforms like Vision, gaming was an afterthought. It's just not part of their culture. Apple Arcade on Mac is a sad little market compared to any other games ecosystem.

Thankfully there's at least GeForce Now, which works way way better anyway.

[icebergonfire]

> I know that Game Porting Toolkit exists

There's a wrapper over this called Whisky (https://getwhisky.app) that makes it really straightforward to install and run Steam or other Windows binaries.

I use it on an M1 Air and an M1 Pro. Less demanding titles run very well, heavier games like Cyberpunk 2077 don't really reach a stable 30fps even with Steam Deck-like settings so keep your expectations in check.

[aweiland]

The problem with Whisky is they are a major Wine version behind as to not step on Crossover: https://github.com/orgs/Whisky-App/discussions/257#discussio...

Some games like Half Life have sound issues on the older Wine versions.

[solardev]

Even Crossover doesn't work all that well. It has a small list of supported games, many hundreds of untested games, and even on the games it supports, there are frequently glitches, significant slowdowns while loading new textures & levels, occasional crashes, etc.

I'm a paid customer, occasional beta tester, and frequent compatibility database submitter. I don't think I'll continue using it after my subscription expires, though. It reminds me of the DOS days of having to tinker with config.sys to get your game to run... which is the last thing I want to do these days, in middle age, just to play a game for an hour or two. I often end up spending more time fighting Crossover than actually playing the game =/

Some games work better in Parallels than Crossover, too. (Parallels uses Windows for Arm, which uses Microsoft's own x86 emulator instead of Wine.) Some the other way around. Neither is anywhere near Proton-level seamlessness, much less native Windows gaming. Neither would come anywhere close to passing the "girlfriend/wife/mom test" in terms of ease of use.

I still game on my Mac everyday, but almost entirely in Geforce Now (streamed from the cloud) instead of fiddling with all the virtualization and emulation. Hugely better graphics and no local fan noise or heat to deal with, or any incompatibility issues. Just one click and the game launches and runs at max setting and runs flawlessly for hours, which is definitely not something that I can say about Crossover.