The evolution of Mac gaming
For most of the 2010s, "Mac gaming" was a punchline. As of today we verify 629 games as playable on a Mac, and new AAA titles occasionally launch on Mac the same day as everywhere else. That turnaround happened in identifiable steps, and it is recent enough that each one has a date. Here is the honest version, with sources.
The low point, then the reset (2019–2021)
macOS Catalina dropped 32-bit support in 2019 and killed a large slice of the existing Mac catalog overnight. A year later Apple began replacing Intel chips with its own. At first, Apple Silicon looked like one more excuse for developers to skip the Mac, another architecture to support from scratch. It did the opposite. Every M-series Mac, including the fanless MacBook Air, shipped with a GPU worth targeting, and Rosetta 2 kept the Intel-era catalog running while the new one got built.
Persona 5 Royal
HITMAN World of Assassination
Grounded
Lost in Play
Frog Detective 3: Corruption at Cowboy County
Teardown2022: the signal year
At WWDC in June 2022, Apple introduced Metal 3 (modern GPU features including MetalFX upscaling) and, more loudly, announced that Capcom's Resident Evil Village was coming to the Mac. The port shipped on 28 October 2022, Apple Silicon only. One blockbuster doesn't make a platform, but it was the first time in years a major studio treated the Mac as a launch target instead of an afterthought. It's also why this site exists: Mac Games List started in 2022, and the catalog's archived history begins that September.
2023: the toolkit that changed the economics
At WWDC 2023, Apple shipped the Game Porting Toolkit, a Wine-based layer with Apple's own D3DMetal that translates DirectX 12 to Metal. Suddenly developers could test their Windows build on a Mac before committing to a port, and a much bigger slice of the Windows back catalog became playable almost overnight. That same month, No Man's Sky arrived on Mac with a Metal rendering pipeline. Porting to Mac was becoming a normal step in a release plan.
2024–2025: from ports to day one
Death Stranding Director's Cut landed on 30 January 2024. Then 2025 delivered two milestones that would have sounded like satire in 2019. Assassin's Creed Shadows launched on Mac on 20 March, the same day as PC and consoles, a first for that franchise. Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition arrived on 17 July, though it wants 16GB of unified memory minimum, so the fine print still matters. Metal 4 and Game Porting Toolkit 3 kept improving the plumbing underneath.
Satisfactory
Please, Touch The Artwork 2
Core Keeper
BlazBlue Entropy Effect
DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2What still doesn't work
Competitive online games with kernel-level anti-cheat are the one place none of this progress reaches. BattlEye, Easy Anti-Cheat, FACEIT, XIGNCODE3 and nProtect GameGuard ship no macOS support at all, so no Mac can run a game that requires one, no matter the chip or the workaround. We currently track 13 popular games locked out this way, among them:
- Hunt: Showdown 1896 (Easy Anti-Cheat)
- Black Desert (XIGNCODE3)
- Hell Let Loose (Easy Anti-Cheat)
- Insurgency: Sandstorm (Easy Anti-Cheat)
- HELLDIVERS™ 2 (nProtect GameGuard)
- Dead by Daylight (Easy Anti-Cheat)
- DayZ (BattlEye)
- Sea of Thieves: 2026 Edition (Easy Anti-Cheat)
This is a vendor decision, not an Apple Silicon or macOS limitation, and it hasn't moved in step with everything else on this page. Single-player games where anti-cheat only gates a multiplayer mode are a different story: those stay listed, with the affected modes named on their page.
Today, in numbers we maintain
The counts below come straight from our catalog at every site build, so they're today's live numbers, not a snapshot from when this page was written:
- 629 games verified playable on a Mac: 117 native Apple Silicon, 287 via Rosetta 2, 237 Windows games through CrossOver (ProtonDB Gold or Platinum only).
- Every label is re-verified against Steam and ProtonDB on a rolling schedule, and every change is logged publicly.
Why the changelog exists, proven by an outside source: the Internet Archive keeps its own dated copies of this site, independent of anything we control. Riven and Deponia were both already showing no compatibility label at all in the Archive's copy from 13 August 2024, and its most recent crawl of each, over a year later, still showed the same gap. Both are fixed now (Rosetta 2), but they sat unclassified, invisible on every list, for well over a year before this month's homepage rebuild happened to surface them. That's the failure mode the changelog exists to catch faster next time.
The honest caveat: progress is real but uneven. The wins above are single-player blockbusters and indie games; competitive multiplayer remains largely closed, and a Mac port arriving three years late is still the norm rather than the exception. We would rather undersell this than join the "Mac gaming is saved" chorus every June.
Common questions
Is Mac good for gaming now?
Genuinely better than its reputation, with caveats. We track 629 games with a verified way to run on a Mac: 117 native Apple Silicon builds, 287 Intel-era Mac builds that run through Rosetta 2, and 237 Windows games that run well through CrossOver. The remaining weakness is competitive online games, where anti-cheat software ships no macOS support.
What changed to make Mac gaming better?
Three things stacked: Apple Silicon made every Mac fast enough to matter, Metal 3 (2022) gave developers modern GPU features like MetalFX upscaling, and the Game Porting Toolkit (2023) collapsed the cost of bringing a Windows game over by translating DirectX 12 in place.
Do new games come to Mac at launch now?
Sometimes, which is itself the news. Assassin's Creed Shadows shipped on Mac the same day as PC and consoles in March 2025, a first for that franchise. Day-one Mac releases are still the exception, but they were unheard of five years ago.
What still does not work on Mac?
Competitive online games with kernel-level anti-cheat (BattlEye, Easy Anti-Cheat and similar ship no macOS support), games with no Mac port at all that also rate poorly through Wine or CrossOver, and VR titles. We track 13 popular games blocked purely by anti-cheat.