Hello. I'm enlisting fellow Mac gamers with Steam accounts who might be able to help me out with my final project to get an IT degree. I built a web site I call Mac Game Compatibility Database (this name is horrible but nothing better has come to me yet) which contains all Steam games, segregated by those that support Mac as well as those that also support Catalina and later (64-bit) - but since this information is often wrong, it also lets game owners submit a vote as to whether the Catalina information is correct.
The project comes from a few points of contention I have with the standard Steam interface as a Mac gamer:
That said, please don't expect too much yet. It's enough to get that degree (hopefully), but it's still missing big chunks of functionality I'd like to see; featured games, games on sale, and genres/categories/tags are all obvious ones. Also, the whole Silicon issue isn't addressed yet. If enough other people find this idea useful, though (and especially if I can find a way to monetize this…), I'll keep poking at it after graduation, though. (Might rewrite it in something other than Java, though. Oof.)
If this looks interesting, please give it a look at https://albright.pro/mgcdb . I'm especially interested in any bugs you find at this point, but I'll take feedback of any sort. Leave a response in this thread or email me directly at contact@albright.pro . If you're familiar with Java, I'd also appreciate it if you could give the source code a look and let me know if you spot anything especially egregious: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/MGCDB
(The worst bug that I'm already aware of is that there's some sort of text encoding issue going on and non-ASCII characters are appearing as question marks. I haven't been able to figure this out yet as I can't replicate this on my Mac; it's only happening on my web server. Argh.)
If you're concerned that this is just some sort of high-effort attempt to steal your Steam account, note that the site uses Steam's standard OpenID authentication system, so you give your Steam credentials to Steam (if you're not logged in already), not to MGCDB itself; I have no access to your password, email address, real name or billing information, nor do I want it.
Thank you for your help!
The project comes from a few points of contention I have with the standard Steam interface as a Mac gamer:
- Even if you have Steam configured to only show Mac games, it will do this for some game lists, but still show featured games and such that are not Mac compatible.
- Many games which profess Mac compatibility will have the "This game won't work on Catalina" message on the store page, but you have to click through to that page to see it - there's no way to tell if a Mac game is Catalina-compatible from game lists.
- The "This game won't work on Catalina" message is sometimes a damned liar. Two games I've found so far which claim to not be Catalina-compatible but actually work just fine are fighting game Skullgirls and meme-inspiring freeware puzzle game Helltaker, but I'm sure there's many more, as well as cases of games which claim to be Catalina-compatible but actually aren't.
- All these troubles with Catalina compatibility are sure to also occur for Apple Silicon Macs.
That said, please don't expect too much yet. It's enough to get that degree (hopefully), but it's still missing big chunks of functionality I'd like to see; featured games, games on sale, and genres/categories/tags are all obvious ones. Also, the whole Silicon issue isn't addressed yet. If enough other people find this idea useful, though (and especially if I can find a way to monetize this…), I'll keep poking at it after graduation, though. (Might rewrite it in something other than Java, though. Oof.)
If this looks interesting, please give it a look at https://albright.pro/mgcdb . I'm especially interested in any bugs you find at this point, but I'll take feedback of any sort. Leave a response in this thread or email me directly at contact@albright.pro . If you're familiar with Java, I'd also appreciate it if you could give the source code a look and let me know if you spot anything especially egregious: https://github.com/GarrettAlbright/MGCDB
(The worst bug that I'm already aware of is that there's some sort of text encoding issue going on and non-ASCII characters are appearing as question marks. I haven't been able to figure this out yet as I can't replicate this on my Mac; it's only happening on my web server. Argh.)
If you're concerned that this is just some sort of high-effort attempt to steal your Steam account, note that the site uses Steam's standard OpenID authentication system, so you give your Steam credentials to Steam (if you're not logged in already), not to MGCDB itself; I have no access to your password, email address, real name or billing information, nor do I want it.
Thank you for your help!