Jul 05, 2017 When the rare game was ported to Mac, you’d have to purchase the Mac-only version to run it on your Mac. These days, many of the games you already own probably have Mac versions available. Some game developers are more cross-platform than others — for example, all of Valve’s own games on Steam and Blizzard’s games on Battle.net support Mac. Mar 10, 2020 Contrary to popular belief, there exists a bevy of awesome games available on Mac computers. From stellar indies like Night in the Woods to popular free-to-play Battle Royale Fortnite, take a look.
The Mac has plenty of games, but it'll always get the short end of the stick compared to Windows. If you want to play the latest games on your Mac, you have no choice but to install Windows ... or do you?
There are a few ways you can play Windows games on your Mac without having to dedicate a partition to Boot Camp or giving away vast amounts of hard drive space to a virtual machine app like VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop. Here are a few other options for playing Windows games on your Mac without the hassle or expense of having to install Windows.
GeForce Now
PC gaming on Mac? Yes you can, thanks to Nvidia's GeForce Now. The service allows users to play PC games from Steam or Battle.net on macOS devices. Better still, the graphic power of these games resides on Nvidia's servers. The biggest drawback: the service remains in beta, and there's been no announcement when the first full release is coming or what a monthly subscription will cost.
For now, at least, the service is free to try and enjoy. All supported GeForce NOW titles work on Macs, and yes, there are plenty of them already available!
The Wine Project
The Mac isn't the only computer whose users have wanted to run software designed for Windows. More than 20 years ago, a project was started to enable Windows software to work on POSIX-compliant operating systems like Linux. It's called The Wine Project, and the effort continues to this day. OS X is POSIX-compliant, too (it's Unix underneath all of Apple's gleam, after all), so Wine will run on the Mac also.
Wine is a recursive acronym that stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's been around the Unix world for a very long time, and because OS X is a Unix-based operating system, it works on the Mac too.
As the name suggests, Wine isn't an emulator. The easiest way to think about it is as a compatibility layer that translates Windows Application Programming Interface (API) calls into something that the Mac can understand. So when a game says 'draw a square on the screen,' the Mac does what it's told.
You can use straight-up Wine if you're technically minded. It isn't for the faint of heart, although there are instructions online, and some kind souls have set up tutorials, which you can find using Google. Wine doesn't work with all games, so your best bet is for you to start searching for which games you'd like to play and whether anyone has instructions to get it working on the Mac using Wine.
Note: At the time of this writing, The Wine Project does not support macOS 10.15 Catalina.
CrossOver Mac
CodeWeavers took some of the sting out of Wine by making a Wine-derived app called CrossOver Mac. CrossOver Mac is Wine with specialized Mac support. Like Wine, it's a Windows compatibility layer for the Mac that enables some games to run.
CodeWeavers has modified the source code to Wine, made some improvements to configuration to make it easier, and provided support for their product, so you shouldn't be out in the cold if you have trouble getting things to run.
My experience with CrossOver — like Wine — is somewhat hit or miss. Its list of actual supported games is pretty small. Many other unsupported games do, in fact work — the CrossOver community has many notes about what to do or how to get them to work, which are referenced by the installation program. Still, if you're more comfortable with an app that's supported by a company, CrossOver may be worth a try. What's more, a free trial is available for download, so you won't be on the hook to pay anything to give it a shot.
Boxer
If you're an old-school gamer and have a hankering to play DOS-based PC games on your Mac, you may have good luck with Boxer. Boxer is a straight-up emulator designed especially for the Mac, which makes it possible to run DOS games without having to do any configuring, installing extra software, or messing around in the Mac Terminal app.
With Boxer, you can drag and drop CD-ROMs (or disk images) from the DOS games you'd like to play. It also wraps them into self-contained 'game boxes' to make them easy to play in the future and gives you a clean interface to find the games you have installed.
Boxer is built using DOSBox, a DOS emulation project that gets a lot of use over at GOG.com, a commercial game download service that houses hundreds of older PC games that work with the Mac. So if you've ever downloaded a GOG.com game that works using DOSBox, you'll have a basic idea of what to expect.
Some final thoughts
In the end, programs like the ones listed above aren't the most reliable way to play Windows games on your Mac, but they do give you an option.
Of course, another option is to run Windows on your Mac, via BootCamp or a virtual machine, which takes a little know-how and a lot of memory space on your Mac's hard drive.
How do you play your Windows games on Mac?
Let us know in the comment below!
Updated October 2019: Updated with the best options.
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By Andrew O'Hara
Thursday, May 17, 2018, 10:28 am PT (01:28 pm ET)
What you can do
Using the new Steam Link app, you can play nearly any Steam game that you can play on your Mac or PC on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. There are a variety of asterisks with that, such as the fact both devices must be on the same network and connected through Ethernet or 5GHz Wi-Fi, but this is a pretty minor limitation these days.
Valve's official Steam controller is also able to be paired directly with your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV to control those games. If you either don't like the divisive Steam controller, any MFi controller will work as well, including the exceptional Steel Series Nimbus.
In reality, what is happening is your computer is doing all the heavy lifting, and streaming a live video of the game on the screen. Steam has had a version of this out for a while, but it was limited to going from one computer to the other.
We tried out a whole host of different games streaming from our Mac to an iPad and an Apple TV. While there were a few hiccups along the way, we were pleased with the experience, overall.
Getting started
For us to get up and running, we only needed a few things: A Mac or a PC with the beta version of Steam running plus an iPhone, iPad or Apple TV with the Steam Link app installed.
We then went through a small pairing process with the host computer before we connected our Steam controller to our device. Technically, you don't need a controller for every game. On some, touch controls can be acceptable, but it is a much better experience using an actual controller over the touch screen.
In the Steam Link app, a summary screen let us know that we were successfully connected to our Mac, Steam was running, our controller was connected, and the host connection was solid. A quick tap or click on the 'Start Playing' button jumped us right into the game after an exceptionally brief load time.
Playing games
We tested out a variety of different games, on several different devices. You know, for testing purposes of course. To start, we hopped onto our 12.9' iPad Pro and played several season matches of Rocket League. Rocket League, for those of you who haven't played it, is essentially an amped up version of soccer played with crazy vehicles, and a loose interpretation of gravity.
The experience was pretty smooth overall. During the game, we had absolutely no hiccups. The Steam controller felt extremely responsive as we played, with not a noticeable bit of lag to be found. After several rounds of gameplay, we did run into a minor issue on the menu screen. The live stream of the game was still coming through clear, as was the audio, but our Steam controller lost the ability to actually control the game. No amount of button mashing could register with the game. Fortunately, a quick exit of the game on the Mac and a relaunch fixed the issue.
We moved to our iPhone X next, which we were most skeptical about. The iPhone X is no slouch, being quite the capable gaming platform on its own. However, the graphics and smoothness were still extremely impressive on such a small device. We still did start to feel a bit old as we frequently squinted at our mobile displays to play a title designed for a computer setup —but it was fun nonetheless.
Playing on the iPad and iPhone is great, but nothing like playing on a 60-inch 4K TV. Our 4K Apple TV was used while playing on the screen, and really it felt like we were playing on a console, and not Apple's sub-$150 set-top box.
An Apple TV is more expensive, but at least in our installation, it's vastly preferred over having to pick up one of Valve's Steam Link hardware boxes that will run you between $37-$49. Just a quick app install allows us to play all of our best PC or Mac games on our TV with no additional hardware.
As far as the official Steam controller is concerned, it is still not an actual MFi controller, which means it won't work with any other games on your Apple TV that require a controller, or be used for other purposes on an iOS device. But, the controller can navigate the tvOS UI, as well as play/pause and other basic functions so at least in part, it mimics the Siri Remote in that regard.
We chose 'Rocket League,' 'Portal 2,' and 'Team Fortress 2' to test.
We had a few hiccups at first, with the controller able to navigate the tvOS UI, launch a game, but somehow unable to control the game. But, quitting the macOS Steam client fixed the issue.
When we asked Valve what was going on, they said they saw rare occurrences where after an initial session the controller will stop communicating, and relaunching Steam on the Mac would fix it. This seemed to be the fix in our case because it did not happen after that first time on the Apple TV —but we'd like to see it fixed in the future.
When playing games like 'Team Fortress 2' and 'Portal 2,' we noticed a few other issues. Both titles are made primarily for keyboard use, and while the Steam Controller is compatible with both, the lineage is clear. On 'Team Fortress 2,' we had a hard time actually launching a game likely because of the keyboard-centric design. It ended up being easier to start the game on our Mac then returning to the Apple TV to play.
Games also didn't fill the entire TV screen, resulting in black bars on the sides. It became less noticeable over time, but something that wouldn't be present if we were playing natively.Once we were playing on our Apple TV, the in-game experience was pretty solid. It wasn't a crystal clear 4K picture, but it looked good and we didn't have any issues with lag, even with everything going through the Wi-Fi connection we were using to test.
Inevitable downsides
There are going to be clear downsides to a service like this. Aside from a bit bit of stuttering that happened on occasion, the biggest limitation is the fact you are tied to your home network.
Steam Link, while great in its own right, is still no full replacement for more of these games getting ported to other platforms as they mature. That won't ever happen completely though: there will always be games that are exclusive to Mac or PC that just never make the jump to iOS, tvOS, or Android, regardless of how powerful those platforms become.
Also, be aware that if something happens on your Mac to change the app focus, such as a FaceTime call came in or when an alert appears in Safari, you have to go back to your computer to return to our game.
Love it or leave it
Sure, we had our fair share of minor issues while playing through Steam Link, but it was so much fun once we actually got into the games.
In-game, the stream was smooth, controller responsive, and graphics fairly impressive. Within settings, there are options to change the graphics to faster, balanced, or beautiful if graphics fidelity is important to you.
Steam Link is also a free app, just offering another way to play some of your favorite games. While it was pretty entertaining playing on the Apple TV, our favorite experience ended up being our iPad, which had the utmost portability within our home.
Some games we will continue to prefer to play directly on our Mac. But others have found a new life through all the different devices we have in our home.
Availability
Steam Link will be launching in beta, starting on Thursday. It is available as a free download on Android and will be available on iOS and tvOS as soon as it passes Apple's review process.
Later this summer, Valve will also launch the Steam Video app which provides access to TV shows and movies owned by the user. It will work over Wi-Fi as well as LTE, and includes streaming and offline modes.