Valve does its homework the night before deadline: Switches Steam to run on Mac chips right as Apple announces it's ditching Intel for good
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: my 2020 MacBook Air is the best gaming laptop I've ever owned. Not because it can run anything I throw at it (it can't) or because it's some ungodly-powerful slab of RGB (it's not). But it runs everything I want it to run—Infinity Engine RPGs, KOTOR 1 and 2, things of that nature—silently and with battery life out the wazoo.
It does that because it's one of the first bits of Apple kit to use the megacorp's own, bespoke ARM line of M-series CPUs, breaking a dependence on Intel chips going all the way back to 2006.
Which is neat, but there was a problem—damn near every app out there is built to work on x86 chips like Intel's, and not ARM. Apple solved that little issue with a thing called Rosetta 2, which effectively translated x86 apps to ARM on the fly when you tried to run them on ARM-based Macs.
But nothing gold can stay: at this year's WWDC, Apple quietly pointed out to devs that, two macOS generations from now, Rosetta would pretty much be going the way of the dodo. Devs would have to make their apps ARM-native or sling their hook.
Which brings us to Steam. Valve being Valve—and macOS making up an absolutely infinitesimal percentage of overall Steam users—it never bothered to create an Apple Silicon-native version of Steam in all these past five years. Until yesterday. With Apple suddenly putting a time limit on how long devs could rely on Rosetta, Valve has gotten its act together and released an ARM version of Steam as part of yesterday's Steam client beta.
Gotta be honest, it's very relatable. It reminds me of all the university essays I scrambled to write the night before they were due. I imagine Gabe sitting on his yacht, watching Apple's coiffed execs intro WWDC, suddenly sitting bolt upright as he realises they forgot to make Steam run on modern Macs.
The Apple-native version of Steam is currently only available in beta, which you can swap to by heading to your preferences, then Interface, then selecting the beta version of Steam from a drop-down menu.
It works well! In my very limited (10 minutes or so) of mucking about with it, I've had better luck getting the Steam Overlay to work and game recording seems to actually function now (albeit without game audio, because Apple makes it borderline impossible to record system audio on Macs for some reason) which wasn't the case last time I messed with those features—which was admittedly a few updates ago.
Anyway, the perhaps dozens of people playing Steam games on Mac can heave a sigh of relief. For a minute there, I wondered if Valve would bother to update Steam for Apple Silicon at all. Macs are a tiny fragment of its audience and Apple Silicon users are a tiny fragment of that. I'm glad Gabe still cares enough about those of us who love overpaying for hardware to keep things in working order.
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