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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I hope Valve brings something like they have done for Linux to macOS.

I opened Steam the other day, and by default it’s filtered to only show the games my system can play. I was curious how many games I’d lost to Apple dropping support for 32 bit, I’d never looked before. I can play 94 of my 345 Steam games.

My heart literally sunk when I saw this.

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But why? Shouldn't Apple be doing the work?

Apple dropped 32 bit support, it was intentional. They’re not going back on it. They have a long history of showing no interest in software preservation.

Valve has the technology. Wine runs on macOS. Just need to apply it to Steam for Mac.

That's why Valve can do it, not why they should.

If Apple treats its platform like this, let it rot.

According to some gamedev friends, Apple is the single worst platform they support (at least for anything that isn't Apple-only).

And it's not just things like outdated APIs (OpenGL), but various tasks related to preparing a distributable program in this time (with codesigning etc.)

I think you're missing the spirit of the question. If Apple doesn't want to wreck gaming on its platform, and if there are few gamers on Apple platforms, and supporting Apple platforms doesn't give Valve the upper hand against MS the same way supporting Linux would... Why would Valve bother? Why shouldn't it be on Apple to make it work?

Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?

I think you miss Valves motives entirely. They want to sell games.

Windows 8 was bad for them selling games. Microsoft showed their hand at wanting an Apple-like walled garden. They made their own OS to sell games. They want to sell games.

There are a lot more Mac users to sell games to than Linux users or even potential Linux users. Mac users are far more willing to pay for software. If you can sell more games to Mac users, that’s money from selling games for Valve. They want to sell games.

That's a decent reason to have Steam on Mac, which they do. But I don't see the incentive to build proton for Mac, which would just move them from one potential walled garden into another one.

Obviously their motive is to sell games, but their priorities likely don't currently include Apple's hardware as a result of wanting to compete in the console market and wanting to twist away Microsoft's near-monopoly on PC. Not everyone is a Linux user, but there are lots of people who would be willing to use it if it was sufficiently packaged. The Steam Deck is likely to be exactly that.

Fine, they want to sell games. They can still sell games to Mac users. If the back catalog isn't quite there, that's probably not a huge deal, as it's not exactly where the most money is made.

Could they go ahead and license Crossover, today, for every Steam user that tries to open a 32-bit game on macOS? Probably! Could they slap together a distribution of Proton for Mac? Absolutely (and for a time, it existed)!

But my guess is that the Apple juice just isn't worth the squeeze. It's probably not super important to their strategy, it's probably not going to yield back enough profit to be worth it, and if it were really so easy I suspect they would have furthered their work on Proton for Mac (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344).

I noticed this the other day too-- a couple friends and I were looking through our Steam library to see what we could play together and it turns out that I, the linux user, could play more games than the MacOS users.

What a timeline we're in.

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