VALVe - What's Your Plan for Silicon Macs?

[LOVΞFIЯΞ]

Dear VALVe

The worse thing about having something that doesn't work anymore is the lack of communication from the developers and what their roadmaps is to resolve the hiccup or inform there is not going to be one.

There is more factors then just steam here I agree, something I didnt know about till know. though Apple play a part in this with Rosetta 2, and Game devs playa part in making the games native (which isnt garentueed)

VALVe just looking for some knowledge on the what Silicon Mac users have to do going forward, and if its worth waiting for you guys to make some native support.

[LOVΞFIЯΞ]

well there were already issues with that on intel macs, so not surpirsing it cared over to M1. headphones will genrally get worse audio qaulity when using a mic, bc of the codec and protocols. also just an apple thing as well.

[alanoctua]

I was actually searching for a roadmap for apple silicon version of the client from the devs and found this thread.

Looking for an M1 Air mostly for productive works, photo and video editing, since most of the design tools have already been ported or being ported nowadays. But I thought it wouldn't hurt to play some casual gaming from time to time.

Seeing some of my games like Disco Elysium in my library have been ported to M1 and assumed if I could play them too but it seems like the only way to enjoy them in native version is to get them from the Mac App Store, because Steam is emulated in Rosetta itself.

With recent Rome Total War: Remastered version they also indicated this issue too: https://www.totalwar.com/blog/total-war-rome-remastered-faq/

The game supports it, but unfortunately the Steam client does not; as soon as it does, the game is ready for M1 support. Until then it will run through Rosetta 2 on Steam. On the Mac App Store the game will run M1 native from release.

Being a veteran TF2 player, I know how Valve deals with problems. By completely abandoning it. So the lack of a roadmap about ARM processors, bringsback some PTSD. (which also lives on other platforms like Linux and Windows too even though not as charming as MacOS)

[LOVΞFIЯΞ]

at this rate, vavlue will slow push away macs and apple with start stealing the developers exclusive to there apple arcade for M1

[♥♥♥ Get Sum]

You guys are fighting over Steam on M1 and all I want is for steam to sell games for Android . But in all seriousness, valve will probably release a native M1 store in a few years and allow developers to sell games through that. Mac revenue is probably less than 5% of steam, so I'm pretty sure Valve would want to keep selling games on Mac.

[LOVΞFIЯΞ]

Android ... lol

[alanoctua]

Well, by the looks of it, if Valve continues to stay unaware of new advancements in the industry, someone's gonna pull a spotify on them, just like they did to itunes store. Streaming services with many different business models are booming and valve doesn't even try to enhance their experience. Let alone trying to adapt for new environments, announcing something lol.

♥♥♥ Get Sum님이 먼저 게시:

You guys are fighting over Steam on M1 and all I want is for steam to sell games for Android :csgo_despair: . But in all seriousness, valve will probably release a native M1 store in a few years and allow developers to sell games through that. Mac revenue is probably less than 5% of steam, so I'm pretty sure Valve would want to keep selling games on Mac.

Well, if you find a x86 device rocking android, and dive into the deep grounds of youtube, you may find a way, but why the hassle, just install a better linux distro or for the device, or windows.

If you mention contemprary mobile phones, running on android, your main problem won't be the android itself, rather their hardware. Since as M1 macs, they are also havin some type of ARM SoCs inside. Even inferior also, capability-wise M1's are just beasts comparing to what snapdragon offers for microsoft on their surface X, which is their pumped up version of best mobile chipset. Also M1 has a translation layer built into them, making x86 translation much faster.

But still, an ARM version of the Steam Client is a must have in 2021. Not for Macs only, for windows and linux devices which are gonna use ARM SoCs.

Why can't I just play the game I PAID FOR?! Even if that version (compatible with m1) is already developed and sold in different platforms(Microsoft and Apple Mac Stores)?

I just feel sad as a once-hardcore-fan of their games and approach, to see what they evolved into. A big, fat, stale company.

Maybe I should buy some Valve stocks, if avaliable to pull a GME around in 2025, since they're gonna be waaay useless and behind of the competition.

[YBYB]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

I mean what 'plan' do you want. feel free to go scream at apple for screwing over all the Mac gaming users. APple won't allow steam on the new M1 Macs because everything on the M1 is sandboxed. Apple wont even allow xcloud on iOS devices. Meaning apple has officially killed gaming on Macs

No steam games are compiled in ARM. Meaning its moot ot 'update' the client because 0% of your games will work natively

Oh and in 2-3 years all of them will stop working outright once Rosetta is killed

Why 'fix' it knowing that the platform as a whole is gonna be dead in 2 years

I think there is huge potential with these Macs, there are tons of people buying them and it has the same performance as a 1050ti on a laptop with no fans.

[skytanks]

Valve needs to get on this update out right away. I know that the Steam engineers are busy with Proton and updating SteamOS, but it's been 8 months! Steam uses x86_64 code as a launcher for Steam games effectively blocking developers from releasing native ARM64 applications. In order for developers to bypass this they have to create an additional launcher for their software or wait for Steam to update. It's just ridiculous! It's hurting the already struggling MacOS gaming ecosystem.
The only excuse would be if they are close to releasing the MoltenVK+Proton version of Steam Play. Detailed here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/1344#
But that's such a massive undertaking, it would be surprising if it was released by the end of the year.

[Wheeeil]

Here's the facts. Apple isn't keeping Valve from doing anything. In fact Valve and Apple have been working together to create M1 Mac compatible versions of anti cheating software and updated versions of Vulcan.

At the end of the day, Valve is just a very slow moving ship and at some point we'll very likely see an M1 native Steam client. It's just Apple may pull a stunt and release their own focused game store (not the Mac App Store) and beat Valve to the punch. I theorize that's what Apple working on since they are currently assisting Valve in updating software they had initially dropped support for way back when and a few other clues they've been hinting at recently.

Here's a few other interesting tidbits. Apple just dumped funding into Blender and are throwing their own engineers at it. They've also made two very interesting statements that they've never even eluded to in the past. First, the most recent release of the Apple TV, Apple explicitly stated that the new Apple TV is not a direct console competitor. Why did they feel the need to say that? Also, if it isn't, what product would they consider a console competitor?

According to a recent filing, apparently they consider their tablets, phones and new Macs direct competitors of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. Apple is extremely carful in how it presents itself and what it says. These two comments kinda says it all.

Apple now calls itself a gaming company fighting with Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/10/29/apple-now-calls-itself-a-gaming-company-fighting-with-microsoft-sony-nintendo?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=RSS

Anyway, I too am bummed I can't happily use Steam on my fancy ass expensive as hell new MBP M1ProMax to play games I bought 10 years ago but I also think that we're at a massive turning point where Apple is finally where it both wants to be and needed to be to get into the gaming arena.

My sincere hope is Valve recognizes Apple is fishing in their pond, gets off its bum and fixes their platform with gusto. I'm not holding my breath but I'm all for the healthy competition but if they wait too long Apple is gonna do what they do to everyone. Do it better.

[Jabrwock]

Homy님이 먼저 게시:

So do you have problem with the Steam client itself or do you have problem with only certain games? As I said Steam seems to work fine for many people on M1 Macs so if you have problem with some games you maybe should ask the developer of the game.

Some games use Steam for controller support. Some use Apple's API.

I'm not sure which ones are broken right now. Evoland Legendary(which is using a WINE bottle?) works great. Moonlighter does not, and they blame Apple for "not supporting" XBox controllers, but that's not true. From the Steam Library I can't tell which games will work with controllers and which won't.

There's a wiki for M1 game support, maybe we should start documenting which ones also support controllers.

[Woelkchen]

Makise Kurisu님이 먼저 게시:

Valve doesn't have a plan in all likelihood.

We now know that their plan is "get at Steam Deck".

WilFromTheFutr님이 먼저 게시:

Here's the facts. Apple isn't keeping Valve from doing anything. In fact Valve and Apple have been working together to create M1 Mac compatible versions of anti cheating software and updated versions of Vulcan.

Apple worked on Vulkan? Huh! Why is neither of the two proper developers of MoltenVK[github.com] employed by Apple? Why is it not part of iOS and macOS then? Why is MoltenVK only a wrapper for Metal? Nah, Apple doesn't care about those things. They deprecated OpenGL and decided to create a proprietary API, Metal, and when Vulkan became a thing not adopt it at least next to Metal.

[aiusepsi]

Valve's at least fixed / in the process of fixing the most egregious issues. The last Steamworks SDK release added arm64 Steamworks API binaries, so native arm64 games can use Steamworks now. And the latest Steam client beta added input and audio drivers for Apple Silicon, so those issues shouldn't be a problem.

Better late than never, I guess.

[aONe]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

I mean what 'plan' do you want. feel free to go scream at apple for screwing over all the Mac gaming users. APple won't allow steam on the new M1 Macs because everything on the M1 is sandboxed. Apple wont even allow xcloud on iOS devices. Meaning apple has officially killed gaming on Macs

No steam games are compiled in ARM. Meaning its moot ot 'update' the client because 0% of your games will work natively

Oh and in 2-3 years all of them will stop working outright once Rosetta is killed

Why 'fix' it knowing that the platform as a whole is gonna be dead in 2 years

This comment aged very well.

[Hоnеy]

So if developers are more willing and faster to adopt Apple Silicon why worry that Rosetta will be gone in 2-3 years, why would ”stuff” stop working and why Apple wouldn’t suddenly allow Steam on Macs? It’s more likely, with your own logic, that Steam would soon support M1 natively too. If not that’s Valve’s fault not Apple’s.

Btw Office and Photoshop also worked from day one back in 2006 via Rosetta. Microsoft dropped PowerPC support with Office 2011, at the same time as Apple, 5,5 years later. Adobe dropped PowerPC support in Aug 2008, about 2,5 years after the launch of Intel Macs but Apple kept supporting Rosetta for another 2,5 years.

So if anyone is going to drop the support for Intel Macs and Rosetta too soon it’s the developers, not Apple. Apple supported Rosetta 2-3 years after Adobe/Microsoft dropped their support.

Steam launched for Intel Macs in 2010, 4 years after Apple’s switch to Intel, but they updated the client to 64-bit ahead of macOS 10.14, one year before Apple dropped 32- bit support. Now it’s been only 4 months since the launch of M1 so Valve still has plenty of time to update Steam before Rosetta 2 is gone.

You can also as I said before keep your Mac with the last version of Rosetta 2 and macOS for games you want to keep playing so nothing will stop working, just as many people did during last transition from PowerPC to Intel.

So come back in 2-3 years when you have facts instead of speculations and spreading doomsday prophecies. Before that we could be dead by Covid or some accident so stop worrying and enjoy your games until then.

[Jota]

Satoru님이 먼저 게시:

I mean what 'plan' do you want. feel free to go scream at apple for screwing over all the Mac gaming users. APple won't allow steam on the new M1 Macs because everything on the M1 is sandboxed. Apple wont even allow xcloud on iOS devices. Meaning apple has officially killed gaming on Macs

No steam games are compiled in ARM. Meaning its moot ot 'update' the client because 0% of your games will work natively

Oh and in 2-3 years all of them will stop working outright once Rosetta is killed

Why 'fix' it knowing that the platform as a whole is gonna be dead in 2 years

This is the problem with modern internet. Any idiot can express his opinion to show "activity"in the forums. Steam is an electron App. It's just not true that Apple Silicon has to be sandboxed but Chromium, the base of Electron is anyways. So the only problem Valve has is that it doesn't want to compile to Apple Silicon. If we had the source code we could do it the same day.

Regarding the games there are tons of games, third party games, sold on steam that are indeed Apple Silicon Native. But to play them we need to install Rosetta just to install them and then Valve offers an Apple silicon only environment to run the games natively. So WHY not compile the client to Apple Silicon so we do not need Rosetta to install native games? Only Valve knows.