Gaming on the Mac

Apple silicon and the Vision Pro mean that Apple is finally getting serious about playing games

- CLIFF JOSEPH

It’s only taken about 40 years, but it’s starting to look as though Apple is  finally getting serious about gaming on the Mac. For most of its history, Apple has simply ignored gaming altogether – in fact, there have been times when it actually made life difficult for gaming companies who wanted to develop Mac versions of their top titles. The result is a real dearth of A-list games on the Mac – titles such as Diablo IV, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy have sold millions on PC, Xbox and PlayStation in recent years, yet show no signs of ever appearing on the Mac.

Part of the problem was simply that most Macs just didn’t have the graphics horsepower required to run the latest 3D games. However, the arrival of homegrown Apple silicon processors – the M1, M2 and M3 – really shook things up, delivering a quantum leap in graphics performance for the Mac. Apple has also made more of an effort to court game developers – something it’s not done much of in the past – and we’re slowly starting to see a few more high-profile games appear on the Mac. The last couple of years have seen a number of big-name games arriving on the Mac, including the wondrous Baldur’s Gate 3 (see p92), the scarifying Resident Evil 4, and the bizarrely eccentric Death Stranding.

And, at last year’s WWDC, Apple released the Game Porting Toolkit, which was designed to help developers ‘port’ – or convert – their existing Windows games to run on the Mac. We’re still a long way from gaming paradise, but Apple’s new interest in games and the improved graphics performance of the latest Macs means that Mac gamers can look forward to a lot more A-list games in the future.