“Apple has created a new Game Porting Toolkit that’s similar to the work Valve has done with Proton and the Steam Deck. It’s powered by source code from CrossOver, a Wine-based solution for running Windows games on macOS. Apple’s tool will instantly translate Windows games to run on macOS, allowing developers to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.”
The new software will allow Mac users* (see edit) to play ‘Windows games’ on their Apple silicon (M1/M2) devices. With development, this has the potential to bring gaming to Apple.
*EDIT: The Game Porting Toolkit is designed for developers to see how their game performs on Apple silicone to entice devs to create native ports. Thanks to commenters for pointing out this distinction. The CrossOver project on which it is built, I believe, is designed for end-users to run software on their Mac clients.
If that’s what they want, Steam’s existence on macOS as well as games being available for purchase through both the App Store and Steam aren’t working in their favor in that regard. But between the App Store and those previous attempts to block out Game Pass, hopefully Apple will see an opportunity to ensnare more users to the ecosystem.
How many folks out there have iPhones but don’t have Macs because of weird hangups like “no games”? They’ll target this group eventually.
I’m personally about to exactly be in this category. I am moving from Android to iPhone, and will not be getting a MacOS device for my primary computing until MacOS gets good Gaming Support.
Namely Guild Wars 2 and Warframe. But, other games would be really nice.