steam black screen on mac (pls help)

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zac Aug 29, 2022 @ 2:47pm

when I open my Steam the content is just a black screen. When I open "Big Picture Mode" it works! But when I open a game, it either gives me an error message or just quits out of steam. This is kinda frustrating cause all of my games are on this stupid app.

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Showing 1-15 of 21 comments

zac Aug 29, 2022 @ 4:54pm

please

thorK73 Aug 30, 2022 @ 2:50am

Hi zac, when did the black screen happen first? Did you upgrade your OS recently? Was there a time when Steam worked fine? Which type of Mac do you use? (Intel or M1)
I had a similar problem once in while, Steam loaded, but opened with a black screen. After about 30 seconds up to a minute everything started to show and I could always see the menu anyhow (STORE, LIBRARY, COMMUNITY). Since I upgraded to Monterey the problem vanished completely. As far as I understand your question your problem seems to be worse.

Have you tried resetting your PRAM? You do so by simultaneously pressing the keys Command + Option + P + R when starting your Mac. Keep those 4 keys pressed till you hear the start up sound a second time. This helped me in the past.

zac Aug 30, 2022 @ 8:42am

Originally posted by thorK73:
Hi zac, when did the black screen happen first? Did you upgrade your OS recently? Was there a time when Steam worked fine? Which type of Mac do you use? (Intel or M1)
I had a similar problem once in while, Steam loaded, but opened with a black screen. After about 30 seconds up to a minute everything started to show and I could always see the menu anyhow (STORE, LIBRARY, COMMUNITY). Since I upgraded to Monterey the problem vanished completely. As far as I understand your question your problem seems to be worse.

Have you tried resetting your PRAM? You do so by simultaneously pressing the keys Command + Option + P + R when starting your Mac. Keep those 4 keys pressed till you hear the start up sound a second time. This helped me in the past.

It started happening like 3-4 days ago 2. I'm on the Beta for Ventura, I have been on it forever with no problem, I did just recently upgrade it to the newest beta but it was more like 7 days ago. I'm on a M1 Mac. What does restarting the PRAM do? Will it change any settings or stuff like that because that what it seems like. Would it work even though I'm on the Beta?

zac Aug 30, 2022 @ 8:43am

Originally posted by thorK73:
Hi zac, when did the black screen happen first? Did you upgrade your OS recently? Was there a time when Steam worked fine? Which type of Mac do you use? (Intel or M1)
I had a similar problem once in while, Steam loaded, but opened with a black screen. After about 30 seconds up to a minute everything started to show and I could always see the menu anyhow (STORE, LIBRARY, COMMUNITY). Since I upgraded to Monterey the problem vanished completely. As far as I understand your question your problem seems to be worse.

Have you tried resetting your PRAM? You do so by simultaneously pressing the keys Command + Option + P + R when starting your Mac. Keep those 4 keys pressed till you hear the start up sound a second time. This helped me in the past.

Looked it up and it said "Note that modern Macs no longer use PRAM, instead they use something called NVRAM (non-volatile RAM)" does this change the steps of what i need to do?

zac Aug 30, 2022 @ 9:16am

Originally posted by thorK73:
Hi zac, when did the black screen happen first? Did you upgrade your OS recently? Was there a time when Steam worked fine? Which type of Mac do you use? (Intel or M1)
I had a similar problem once in while, Steam loaded, but opened with a black screen. After about 30 seconds up to a minute everything started to show and I could always see the menu anyhow (STORE, LIBRARY, COMMUNITY). Since I upgraded to Monterey the problem vanished completely. As far as I understand your question your problem seems to be worse.

Have you tried resetting your PRAM? You do so by simultaneously pressing the keys Command + Option + P + R when starting your Mac. Keep those 4 keys pressed till you hear the start up sound a second time. This helped me in the past.

Okay, so I figured out how to launch games but steam still isn't fixed

thorK73 Aug 30, 2022 @ 9:30am

Good to know that the new M1 iMacs no longer use PRAM. I am sorry to say that my knowledge of Macintosh computers is limited to the old Intel machines.

zac Aug 30, 2022 @ 9:47am

Originally posted by thorK73:
Good to know that the new M1 iMacs no longer use PRAM. I am sorry to say that my knowledge of Macintosh computers is limited to the old Intel machines.

Okay, thank you though.

ronmount Aug 30, 2022 @ 1:29pm

Having same issue for about 24 hours and its very annoying. I have MBP M1Pro on macos 12.4 and I think that only way to fix it is full SSD wipe. I tried all guides from first five google pages and its still black.

4 LVL piz Aug 30, 2022 @ 1:43pm

Ххзахахааха

zac Aug 31, 2022 @ 9:03am

Originally posted by Bakka:
Having same issue for about 24 hours and its very annoying. I have MBP M1Pro on macos 12.4 and I think that only way to fix it is full SSD wipe. I tried all guides from first five google pages and its still black.

Same here, MBP M1pro, SSD wipe shouldn't help at all, I'm on 13.0 Beta. I'm pretty sure it started happening soon after the newest steam update (after running a game then closing it) that could be something to do with it. And also there seems to be A LOT of cases so we can safely assume this is on Steam's part.

Last edited by zac; Aug 31, 2022 @ 9:03am

#10

R.Kell Sep 2, 2022 @ 3:41am

#11

kungfu Sep 2, 2022 @ 4:38am

Same, I've literally tried everything. Running from terminal. -autoconfig -safe -high Killing background processes. My logs aren't showing any errors the only thing is

"failed to dlopen /Users/Master/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/game/bin/osx64/dota2.app/Contents/MacOS/libcairo.dylib error=dlopen(/Users/Master/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/game/bin/osx64/dota2.app/Contents/MacOS/libcairo.dylib, 0x0009): tried: '/Users/Master/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/game/bin/osx64/libcairo.dylib' (no such file), '/libcairo.dylib' (no such file), '/Users/Master/Library/Application Support/Steam/steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/game/bin/osx64/dota2.app/Contents/MacOS/libcairo.dylib' (no such file)"

#12

kungfu Sep 2, 2022 @ 5:02am

It looks like there is a missing package that can't be loaded "LibCairo.dylib" my console reads 2 unsuccessful attempts at loading this and then says "Loaded LibCairo.dylib got 0x0" which tells me it didn't load correctly.

Unfortunately, we have to wait for valve to fix it unless someone has a work around...

#13