1. Can You Use A Windows Steam Game On Mac Computer

PC games: they can be the bane of a Mac gamer’s existence. The Mac may be a better computer than a windows box, but even so, most games don’t support OS X.

As featured in:

Instantly access to your favorite games

We have thousands of games from Action to Indie and everything in-between. Enjoy exclusive deals, automatic game updates and other great perks.

Join the Steam Community

Meet new people, join game groups, form clans, chat in-game and more! With over 100 million potential friends (or enemies), the fun never stops.

Create and Share Content

Gift your friends, trade items, and even create new content for games in the Steam Workshop. Help shape the future of your favorite games.

Automatic game updates

Hunting for patches and downloading from unorganized web sites is so twentieth-century. On Steam, your games stay up-to-date by themselves. No hassles.

Entertainment Anywhere

Whether you’re on a PC, Mac, Linux box, mobile device, or even your television, you can enjoy the benefits of Steam. Take the fun with you.

Available on PC, Mac, and Linux

We offer a catalog of PC, Mac, and Linux games, many of which support Steam Play so you can buy once and play anywhere, and Cross-Platform Multiplayer so you can play with all your friends, no matter where they log in

What's New:

Library

• Added a new game properties dialog, which replaces the old dialog for all Steam games.
• Fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game

Steam Input

• Added support for software calibration of the PS5 controller gyro
• Fix issue with Dpad emulation in games using the joyGetPosEx Windows API, ex: Shiren the Wanderer
• Fix Nintendo Switch origins in Steam Input API not reflecting the current Nintendo/Xbox layout setting

Steam Cloud

• Fixed an issue causing files to swap between users under separate Windows user IDs, and also with some file stored in paths with embedded 64-bit SteamIDs

SteamNetworkingSockets

• P2P connections now may attempt to negotiate a direct connection (punch NAT), if needed, to prevent connections from having very high latency. Added an option in the In-Game settings panel to control when your IP address is shared.

Server Browser

• Fix bug causing LAN server browser search to not show any servers

Linux

• Improved performance of processing incremental Vulkan shader database updates
• Fixed several issues around skipped Vulkan shader processing continuing in the background after a game has started
• Disabled shader processing on NVIDIA while driver issues are being looked into
• Fixed long delay in UI response when hot-plugging a controller

macOS

• Disabled “Enable GPU accelerated rendering in web views” and “Enable hardware video decoding” settings on Apple M1 devices due to poor HW-accelerated performance currently through Rosetta.

• Grab a few more games for your backlog
• Check out the Steam Award nominations

• 142 votes
  Uplay is Ubisoft's PC games portal, where you can find all their games.

  • Freeware
  • Windows/Android
• 265 votes
  Download Origin to play anywhere, challenge friends, explore exciting new games, and stay connected to the Origin community.

  • Freeware
  • Windows
• 27 votes
  GOG Galaxy is a fully optional client to install, play and update your games. It also offers online multiplayer, achievements, chat, game-time tracking and more - but it’s up to you which features you want to use.

  • Freeware
  • Windows/macOS

Can You Use A Windows Steam Game On Mac Computer

Valve officially revealed Monday that its Steam online gaming service, along with the Source engine that powers titles such as Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, is coming to the Mac in April.

Valve's library of games will be making the jump from Windows Machines, including Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series.

'As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,' said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. 'The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.'

Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve, said the partners who sell games through the Steam online service, are 'very excited' about embracing the Mac platform. The statement would imply that developers other than Valve intend to make their titles compatible with the Mac.

'Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge,' Holtman said. 'For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.'

In addition, Valve confirmed that the forthcoming Portal 2 game will be the company's first simultaneous release for both Mac and Windows.

'Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,' said Josh Weier, project lead for Portal 2. 'We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.'

'We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,' said John Cook, director of Steam development. 'The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360.

'Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.'

AppleInsider has affiliate partnerships and may earn commission on products purchased through affiliate links. These partnerships do not influence our editorial content.