Don’t want to install Windows on your Mac to play PC games? Turn to programs like Wine, DOSbox, and GeForce Now instead.
Back in the day, you didn’t buy a Mac if you wanted to play games. It was Myst, Marathon, and the rare PC port. Luckily for Apple fans, those days are largely behind us. Mac gamers now have a much broader array of options, though there’s still a significant dearth of titles when compared to the avalanche of PC games hitting Steam every day. So how can you get these games to run in macOS?
Getting new PC games running on a Mac often meant installing Windows, a laborious task at the best of times. Beyond the onerous installation process, running another complete, processor-intensive OS like Windows didn’t do your system (or the games’ performance) any favors. Fast forward to the present, and Mac gamers are blessed with a plethora of options for getting a much broader slice of the PC’s best title’s running, without having to rely on such antediluvian methods.Check for a Native Mac Version
These days, most PC game storefronts—Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, Blizzard’s Battle.net—have a Mac version. Before you investigate extra (and more complicated) steps to get a game running on your Mac, do a quick turn of the relevant platforms to make sure a native version doesn’t already exist there. While hosting four or five different game storefronts on your machine can be a pain, they remain the best (and best-supported) way to find macOS versions of top titles, as well as an ever-growing number of indie games.
Having a Mac also means you can subscribe to Apple Arcade for $6.99 per month and get access to a growing list of games, some of which can’t be played anywhere else. The service is also packaged in the Apple One bundle alongside Apple Music, Apple TV+, and more.Leverage the Power of Streaming
With significant advances in technology from companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, game streaming has come a long way since the early days, when it was synonymous with crippling lag and terrible frame rates. Now, apps like Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming have managed to remove most of the technical hurdles, and it’s possible to reliably stream games to a huge number of devices, including your Mac.
To tap into the Xbox library of games, you’ll need a subscription to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. It’s also strongly recommended you invest in an Xbox Controller or other supported gamepad (Microsoft has a list of options guaranteed to work with its service). Then just point any browser on your Mac to the Xbox Cloud Gaming website, pick the game you want to jump into, and click Play.
