I just found this community, and in case anyone here has a game they really like and really want to play, but sadly doesn’t have a macOS port and is just Windows only, this might help.
The best option you have is wine-crossover. While the Wine website currently doesn’t offer a macOS build, the main macOS Wine maintainer has published the Open Source version wine-crossover, which works amazingly well and can even translate Direct X, meaning that video games work with it.
Just use brew install --cask --no-quarantine gcenx/wine/wine-crossover to download it. It will then just be a regular program in your programs folder called Wine. And if you double-click on any .exe-files, it will open them with Wine, translate them in realtime and execute them.
Then you just need to download the Windows version of Steam, just open it (with Wine), download the Windows game, and voila, you can easily play it :D
This is e.g. how I played Will You Snail (which is a really great game, but sadly only available for Windows) on macOS without any problems.
This works with most games, and as I said, I personally often use Wine to play Windows only games (or even games whose macOS versions are 32bit, which my computer can’t run anymore).
However, if a game has too high graphic requirements for your computer to run, or does not work with Wine (which can happen with e.g. some games that use custom DRMs), then another alternative I know is Nvidia GeForce Now, a could streaming service which allows you to use your own bought games (e.g. on Steam) and play it on a remote computer. It is free to try, although you can only play an hour at a time with the free tier.
I’ve used the free tier for years (I mostly played in the middle of the night, so there were no waiting queues), and I even often played games that had a macOS build (like Planet Coaster), but which were too large to fit on my disk space. So this is definitely something I can also recommend and it’s a good way to play even the most demanding games without any graphical problems.
The downsides are the limitations of the free tier (although the paid tier without queues or the one hour limit is also worth it you really use the service), and that you need at least a medium-well internet connection for it. Also, they sadly don’t have the full Steam catalogue but just a very big selection of games.
So yeah, those are the tools I usually use to play games that don’t have a macOS build on my macOS computer. I’m glad if this helps anybody else and have fun playing! :D
Thanks for the great post. It’s really useful! Sold my Windows PC a few weeks ago and this is great alternative. I think the most easy way to play a lot of games is GeForce Now so that’s what I would recommend most people.
You’re welcome :)
I’m glad if you like it; I thought it could be helpful for people who just have this problem but don’t want to look into it so much.And yeah, I get what you mean; it’s also just easy not having to download the game and good because you can play even the most graphics intense games without needing your own great hardware (and I’m always low on disk space, so especially with some 30GB+ games, I’m glad I can always play them without having to worry about my space).
Although my first choice is always wine-crossover. The installation is just one command (two if you don’t have homebrew), and then you can just click on every .exe file like you’d click on an .app program and it directly opens as if it was a macOS app.
So even if someone’s not a gamer, this is so convenient that I would recommend almost every macOS user to download it, and you can just open every Windows program, be it Microsoft Excel or some game.
And well, with Steam for Windows you can just download every game you want and play it locally, also if the internet is gone and without any lags or framedrops.
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Oh yeah, that’s actually true. Although Game Porting Toolkit is a modified version of Wine combined with own apple code, and is a much much bigger hassle to install and use, so I’d rather recommend just trying the normal
wine-crossoverlike I described. And it’s only available on macOS Sonoma while Wine can be used on much older systems.But still, a good call, thanks for the comment! And since it’s modified, there can def. be advantages to Wine for specific games.
For anyone interested: Here is a wiki entry with a step by step explanation of how to use it.
