this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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Steam is a ticking time bomb. (www.spacebar.news)
submitted 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/games
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The decline of the Steam games platform is inevitable, and there are already warning signs.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

If you want a preview of an uncaring and anti-consumer Valve, look no further than the company's efforts on Mac.

Valve never updated any of its earlier games to run in 64-bit mode, because the underlying Source engine was 32-bit across both Windows and Mac (with the exception of CS:GO). Apple dropped support for 32-bit applications in 2019, with the release of macOS 10.15, making all of those games inaccessible on newer Mac hardware.

I think that this one is on Apple, not Valve. Windows maintained 32-bit compatibility. Linux maintained 32-bit compatibility. Apple could have maintained 32-bit compatibility.

Steam for Mac no longer exists to sell Valve's own games, and it has visibly suffered as a result. Steam is still not updated to run natively on Apple Silicon-based Mac computers, nearly four years after Apple's transition away from Intel CPUs started. It's now a slow and clunky barrier to playing the games I own on my Mac computers—a far cry from the pro-consumer persona that Valve and Steam usually enjoy.

Ditto about this being on Apple

there's no ARM-native Steam package for Linux, nor for Windows.

Valve isn't obligated to continue supporting all its games and software features on Mac, especially when Apple's reluctance to natively support Vulkan and other cross-platform technologies makes game development more complex. There's no excuse for Steam on Mac to be a far worse experience than on other platforms, though.

The stuff you are asking for is areas where Apple made changes that created problems for application software vendors that weren't created by Microsoft on Windows and weren't created by Linux distros, and where you're upset with Valve for not patching over platform issues. There's nothing specific to Steam about this.

EDIT: I do wonder, if there's enough interest, whether someone could make an x86 accelerator card for current Macs. Back in the day, I remember that Orange Micro made one for emulating Windows software. Not cheap, but you basically had a Mac with the guts of an x86 PC added, and you could run x86 software at full speed. I'd imagine that you could basically do the same...just for older Mac software. Today, computers are a lot cheaper than they were back then.

kagis

Here are some Mac users talking about those, with a full history of Mac x86 accelerator cards. It doesn't look like there's been any hardware vendor try to recently make one, though.

Probably need to be a USB device too, given the number of people on laptops these days.

EDIT2: Plus, be nice if it could run x86 Windows software natively as well.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

x86 accelerator

Why? Steam isn't all that heavy, so it should run just fine through Rosetta.

The bigger problem is getting games to support macOS, which:

  • uses a different CPU arch in newer hw
  • uses a different graphics API
  • has very few users who want to play games
  • doesn't seem to reach out to game devs
  • can't be packaged into an interesting form factor (e.g. handheld PCs)

It would make more sense for Valve to court mobile users than macOS. It would also be a lot easier to use a VM, though performance would probably suck.