Why Valve gave up on Mac gaming

Quick video about why Valve stopped development of Proton on macOS and why the partnership between Valve and Apple has declined over the last few years.

Want to run Windows games on Mac?

Timestamps:
00:00 Valve's Proton isn't coming to the Mac
01:06 Sponsor
02:51 Steam dominated Windows PCs
03:44 Valve Mac ports and SteamVR Apple partnership
04:49 32-bit Mac games deprecated
05:32 Valve abandoned ALL Mac projects?
06:48 Rise of the Steam Deck
07:50 Proton on SteamOS FIRST
08:55 Valve gives SOME Mac support
10:07 Windows gaming Proton alternatives for Mac

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[awolsam]

I believe that Apple not adopting Vulkan was the main reason Mac support got dropped from Proton. With that move Apple complicated supporting their platform, and also sabotaged the momentum of the only competitor to DirectX. Apple also changing CPU architecture and abandoning old certainly did not help either.

[Zoolookuk]

I was with you until you said "it would be relatively trivial to update these ports to 64-bit" which isn't true. At the WWDC workshops they would always just show you the magic "compile for 64-bit" button, same as they do for "compile for ARM" but games are usually built from dozens of smaller libraries and have many interdependencies and it is those that haven't been updated, so it's impossible to update the game. That's the reason why when you install 20 year old games on Windows, it will install some 2005 C++ redistributable library, or .NET 1.3 or whatever. On Mac, all of that older stuff is long dead, not maintained and not supported anyway. It's not just Valve who haven't bothered updating their 32-bit games, I have at least a dozen games from the Mac App Store that won't run in 64-bit, like the original Rome Total War, Call of Duty 2 and 4, Flatout 2 and a bunch of others. I'll never do it again, because to your point, Apple might just abandon something critical in future and games purchased today might not work tomorrow. You video seems to leave the blame on Valve making selfish decisions for their own benefit, when it has really been Apple that has always been anti-gaming and frankly anti-consumer when it comes to backwards compatibility.

Windows for all its faults has kept compatibility back to XP in Games for 90 - 95% of all games without any special hacks. The rest can usually be hacked to work with some ini file changes or something else. I mostly game on Deck now, but I simply don't trust Apple to keep games working for 2, 3 decades.

[ChimpRiot]

Apple themselves are to blame. They did the same with all the PowerPC games by removing Rosetta 1 completely. It should have remained an optional inclusion in macOS. Who knows when they will remove Rosetta 2 64-bit support..

[BrianJones-wkcx]

While I have enjoyed my Macs for decades now, I think it’s a little disingenuous to put anything on Valve for “dropping support” for MacOS when Apple has arguably been the biggest culprit in its own lack of presence in the gaming world. The shift to Metal (instead of properly supporting Vulkan) seems perhaps equally limiting if not more so than depreciating 32-bit app support. Developers of all stripes (think emulators for lowest hanging fruit) decry MacOS for not having baked in Vulkan support. Even with community work around MoltenVK, Apple lags behind not because of Valve but because of its own choices. Even your esteemed Codeweavers has spoken out against the Metal limitation, citing it as a primary reason even they cannot provide more robust gaming support. Valve doesn’t need anyone to defend it, don’t get me wrong, but neither does Apple. They have not prioritized AAA gaming in the modern era, nor are they willing to play by open standards that would make the platform even more attractive. If Valve “gave up, ” it was only because Apple gave up first.

[Pikminiman]

Bear in mind Valve is a small company. Although they have deep pockets, their entire headcount is still just a few hundred people. The fact they were able to make and ship Steam Deck at all is incredible. But by the same token, it's not possible for Valve to allocate enough person-hours to fix and rebuild Source 1 games for Apple silicon. Valve employees have a lot of freedom to leave uninteresting projects, so the company only puts concentrated effort toward solving interesting problems.

[xnonsuchx]

The problem has always really been Apple’s mediocre support for gaming on Mac. They only seem to see mobile quality games as important and why they only tout iOS games being able to be run on Apple Silicon Macs. Paying for the RE Village port recently is maybe just a “testing the waters” thing, but I still see Apple as still only really caring about mobile-level games (for “filthy casuals”).

[MyurrDurr]

Valve have been the only large game company showing any support at all to Linux, which is great but very disappointing since no one else seems to want to and lots of large devs seem totally against it at all :/

[whigmalwhim]

LunarG, the company behind MoltenVK (the compatability layer for Vulkan to run on Metal), is funded by Valve. This goes to show that Valve is still interested in bringing games to MacOS and has R&D to back them up.

[RageAgainstMyMachine]

I feel like Andrew Tsai is the only hope for apple gaming. Love the content man!

[aag]

That's really sad. I lost access to a number of niche photography apps when the Mac went 64 bit only. I contacted the dev and he said that it would cost too much to update the software because he had to pay for a Mac developer to recode everything! Anyway - thanks for a great video! 🙏

[Evteboda]

i gave up on mac gaming and just get myself a Steam deck. it is perfect portable gameheld pc

[nisetsu]

Apple: spits customer in the face.
Apple customer: thank you sir, here is $5000, can I have some more?
Valve: quietly walks away.
Apple customer: come back here Valve! How dare you refuse the holy spit?!

[SamAmiri]

7:13 - yeah, with steam deck selling close to 3.5m already, they definitely created a platform that currently offers over 5m active players.
It’s crazy to think they pulled it off.

Probably in a few years time, they will hit 30m+ users on Linux/proton.

[untemi]

I used to love having 32bit games running on my Mac
it's so disappointing that Apple decided to drop it. I'm still confused about their reasoning behind it, and it's frustrating when advancements lead to things we loved being taken away.

[Simi]

It makes absolutely no business sense for Valve to help Apple get games running on Mac OS. Suppose Valve kept working on Proton and got it working on the latest Macs, some of which are as powerful as a PS5. Apple would simply steal that tech and add dozens of AAA games to their own store and cut out Valve like Microsoft tried to do with Games for Windows Live

[Echelon]

Steam OS 3.0 is a VIRUS!!!

After getting the Steam Deck, some how I got Linux on my desktop, and now everything is Open Source this and Open Source that. MAN MY WALLET IT GETTING FAT WITH ALL THE MONEY I AM NOT SPENDING!!!

:P

[MaximilianBieberDE]

It's really sad that it is that way. I would love to be able to play more Games officially on Mac. I'm not a huge fan of these thirdparty unofficial solutions.

[maartenc]

It is nice to see you are mentioning the steam deck, because in principal the steam deck is a portable steam machine.
So it is very easy for Valve to re-do the steam machine.
Our you could very easy build it yourself. Just search for HoloISO.

[RabbitConfirmed]

Valve really did everything they could! Shame on Apple for letting it slip like that!

[Piipperi]

Great video, but I feel like the macOS support was removed back then from Proton likely as Proton is focusing on translating stuff to Vulkan, not OpenGL. And at the time, I don't think MoltenVK (a very easy to implement Vulkan to Metal translation layer) was even properly out yet. It also took a really long time for Wine to get updated to support Catalina.
Tl;dr: They got rid of macOS support initially as it just was not going to work at the time. It could work now, but unless Apple Silicon keeps taking over the PC laptop space, I doubt we'll see a version of Proton on macOS.
And CodeWeavers likes to keep scamming their Mac customers with CrossOver, so there's also probably motivate from that side to not give Mac users a free way to play Windows games.