Valve Removes Mac Support for Some Games While Apple Improves Gaming on macOS

TapTechNews June 18th news, according to imore reports, in the same week that Apple announced at WWDC24 that it will significantly improve the gaming performance of macOS Sequoia, the game developer Valve quietly removed the Mac platform support of many of its games.

According to the information of Steam database SteamDB, Valve removed the support of some games for Mac in the update patch pushed on June 12. The known affected games currently include:

Team Fortress 2

Counter-Strike: Source

Day of Defeat: Source

Half-Life 2 and its derivatives and additional levels

Portal

Portal 2

Left 4 Dead 2

It should be noted that some of the newer Valve games (such as Counter-Strike 2) have not supported the Mac platform since their initial release. At the same time, some older games (such as the first-generation Counter-Strike and DOTA2) still retain Mac support, indicating that this removal is not a total halt.

TapTechNews noted that as early as May 2010, Valve had announced that it would launch the Steam platform for Mac and some games. Over the years, games like Portal 2 and DOTA2 have achieved simultaneous launches on Windows and Mac platforms. However, after Apple announced in 2020 that Mac computers would switch to using self-developed chips, Valve has remained silent on whether its Steam platform will be adapted to the M chips. Now, with Valve removing the Mac support of some games, we can also get the answer.

But Mac players do not need to be too depressed, because with the game porting toolkit (GPTK) released by Apple in 2023, third-party developers can more easily port Windows games to Mac for operation. For example, software named Whisky uses the GPTK framework, allowing players to download the Steam client for Windows through it, so that they can play purchased games smoothly on the Mac based on the Apple M-series chips.

This means that players can still play these Valve games that could originally only be played on Windows on the Mac with the M-series chips. Although we still hope that Valve will change its mind and re-provide native support for macOS in the future, software like Whisky currently also provides a good solution. And the GPTK2 released at this year's WWDC has further enhanced the effectiveness of this framework, and can even make some large 3A games (such as Returnal, Uncharted and other PS5 games) run on Mac.