Bad analogy. In this case the car doesn’t need maintenance, the automaker has decided to break your car.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Steam Dropping Support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite and Earlier
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Opt OUT of the 'steam beta' in preferences.
The client will restart and download the 64bit version.
Theres not much chance of steam stopping working entirely on windows and they’ve promised that in the unlikely occurrence of that happening they’d free up the games to work without any online requirements, etc. That would have to be something totally cataclysmic in the industry to cause that though, haha.
It’d take some really weird stuff to stop windows from running older steam clients too, I’m not even sure that’s possible. So if you’ve archived your games and you can install the same old steam client you archived it with, it’s fine. Can run it in offline mode.
And in decades when steam may finally be dead this will all be abandonware, cheap or aquireable one way or another anyway, like so many ancient games are now..
And physical only console games barely exist anymore outside of Nintendo, we have day one patches and other assorted downloads. It’s still going to go to crap once PSN/XBL move a couple of hardware generations forwards. (Many games don’t even last that long)
Im all for supporting small devs on whatever platform they use, steam, itch.io, etc. Also got to help emulator devs, they’re one of the only hopes for game preservation.
Win95 in DosBox should work for anything seriously old. And then 98SE in VirtualBox. That's my retro stack working pretty damn well on MacOS
With all this talk about Electron apps and Marzipan I think its strange how no one is bothering to mention Steam with the likes of Google Chrome in the list of terrible Mac apps that are so rightfully pilloried. Steam is a terrible Mac app. If you have a Mac, you do not want Steam. What you really need to do is shove Steam into some burner Windows partition and play all your games from there. Also, as a bonus, your games will actually utilize your hardware and not perform like complete ass—as for some reason Apple doesn’t find graphics performance to actually matter outside of Final Cut
This is about older Macs that can’t keep up with the latest OS. A lot of gamers are probably young and / or simply can’t afford anything better.
Last time I booted Windows on a 2013 MacBook Pro, the fans went up all the way just from idling Windows. It’s the 16 GB / retina / discrete graphics card version so I imagine the 8 GB version will do worse.
The problem is not so much with the underlying emulators/technologies, but with these specific implementations. DosBox already has a 64-bit version (0.74-2) and Codeweavers already made good progress on a 64-bit implementation of Wine for Mac.
But as I said: Boxer has not been updated for three years, and the developer of WineSkin does not even offer any Wine versions after 2.22 as engines, which is also more than a year old by now. So neither Wine 3.x nor the upcoming 4.x are supported with WineSkin.
Yeah the resource thing is such a joke with today's modern CPUs. iOS11 actually got slower across the board too. They just dont want to support so many things.
Yet their product lineup is a mess. There's just so much redundancy
The fans going up doesnt mean windows is harder to idle necessarily definitely sounds like a bug that could be easily fixed with macs fan control. But it is a fact that that games for DirectX in Windows run worlds better than OpenGL or Metal do. I dont think being uninformed is necessarily a good point and I think those who game on a mac probably know what Bootcamp is. Also, you dont really have to buy Windows to play games on a windows partition. I just downloaded a windows.iso file from Microsoft
Nothing new, for Windows users either.
If you want to rely on 3rd software DRMed or not, that's what you get.
Stick with DRM free and client free ways of getting your games if you want better chance of having them in the future.
That includes the rare chance you will find a physical release, and releases such as on GOG (but not using the client just the offline downloads) and you will be more lucky with any such ending of support.
Steam did this before too, with stopping support for Windows 98. Sooner or later (if they haven't announced it yet) they will stop support for Windows XP. ETC.
Sucks even more when newer versions of software required to run say Steam, is at the same time what makes older games not run in the first place.
Or when they shut down.
Recently dotemu PC store closed, you were notified about it about a month before and good luck with life. Thankfully it was DRM-free so all you have to do is download your games (as I did). If it was Steam or other DRMed store, you were screwed.
If you want to rely on 3rd software DRMed or not, that's what you get.
Stick with DRM free and client free ways of getting your games if you want better chance of having them in the future.
That includes the rare chance you will find a physical release, and releases such as on GOG (but not using the client just the offline downloads) and you will be more lucky with any such ending of support.
Steam did this before too, with stopping support for Windows 98. Sooner or later (if they haven't announced it yet) they will stop support for Windows XP. ETC.
Sucks even more when newer versions of software required to run say Steam, is at the same time what makes older games not run in the first place.
Or when they shut down.
Recently dotemu PC store closed, you were notified about it about a month before and good luck with life. Thankfully it was DRM-free so all you have to do is download your games (as I did). If it was Steam or other DRMed store, you were screwed.
I'm a little amused at some of the responses here. First, what machines are you running Yosemite on? Are people buying 2018 MBPs and reverting back to Yosemite? My guess is no, people are playing on old machines.
Macs are already barely usable for gaming, unless you are playing candy crush, or turning your graphics way down to get them to an acceptable frame rate. So, if you are running games on an old Mac you can't be having that good of an experience.
Someone needs to put the number of Mac users on Steam into perspective. I'll bet the number of people on Macs is a small fraction and the number on Yosemite and older must be a tiny fraction.
Developers go where the money is. I use Macs for everything except gaming, because I'm serious about gaming (I have more than 300 games in my steam library not to mention GOG and other sources).
If you were serious about gaming, you would buy a cheap (compared to Macs) but powerful PC and use it for gaming (or at least run Boot Camp on a Mac Pro with a real video card) and then spend lots of money on games. If you are still limping along on your 2010 MacBook Pro, you probably can't afford a $60 AAA game.
EDIT: I looked up the stats on the Steam Hardware Survey. 3.2% of Steam Users are using MacOS.
8.5% of those are using something older than High Sierra. So, .085 of .032 or .03% of Steam users.
Macs are already barely usable for gaming, unless you are playing candy crush, or turning your graphics way down to get them to an acceptable frame rate. So, if you are running games on an old Mac you can't be having that good of an experience.
Someone needs to put the number of Mac users on Steam into perspective. I'll bet the number of people on Macs is a small fraction and the number on Yosemite and older must be a tiny fraction.
Developers go where the money is. I use Macs for everything except gaming, because I'm serious about gaming (I have more than 300 games in my steam library not to mention GOG and other sources).
If you were serious about gaming, you would buy a cheap (compared to Macs) but powerful PC and use it for gaming (or at least run Boot Camp on a Mac Pro with a real video card) and then spend lots of money on games. If you are still limping along on your 2010 MacBook Pro, you probably can't afford a $60 AAA game.
EDIT: I looked up the stats on the Steam Hardware Survey. 3.2% of Steam Users are using MacOS.
8.5% of those are using something older than High Sierra. So, .085 of .032 or .03% of Steam users.
Last edited:
Yikes. I'm afraid this is where the discussion with you ends, as I'm not sure it's worth the effort talking to someone who thinks that hyperbole is a made up word...
I understood - I was more referring to the fact that since the underlying technologies have already or will update then either those implementations will be updated by the community or new ones will come out. I've seen professional organizations that sell their ports use both Boxer and WineSkin. So for something as major as dropping 32-bit support, those organizations will either need to update the old ones or develop new tools (hopefully just as nice as those). Of course those new implementations may not be free if developed by a company, but ... I'm an optimist and eventually I think we'll get nice, user friendly implementations again.
Last edited:
Try toggling the beta on and off.
All it took for me was to turn it off (as I already had it on).
Mac gaming is a bag of hurt. It is extremely common for games to only work on a subset of MacOS versions, only with certain GPUs, etc.
To be clear, I'm not defending this move by Steam. I'm just saying that there is an entire ocean of compatibility problems, and this is just one of them.
To be clear, I'm not defending this move by Steam. I'm just saying that there is an entire ocean of compatibility problems, and this is just one of them.
While I somewhat agree with you, I think the real benefit to removing 32-bit support lies in Apple's custom SOC. Removing 32-bit support frees up space on the chip that can be used to push performance even higher within the same transistor budget.
Along those lines, removing 32-bit support from macOS allows Apple to 1) focus on only supporting 64-bit iOS apps on macOS, and perhaps most importantly, 2) set up a future where Apple ships macOS on a custom ARM SOC that is 64-bit only.
So basically, removing 32-bit software support is primarily about the hardware strategy driving the software strategy.
Still not working. The Steam helper apps are showing 64-bit but the main client is still 32-bit. I guess I'll worry about it when the time comes.
I'm a little amused at someone who doesn't game on their Mac telling people who do that we can't POSSIBLY be enjoying ourselves.
Some of your assumptions are faulty. Maybe if you listened more and judged less you could figure out which ones.
[doublepost=1545164391][/doublepost]I agree that the long-term response to this is to try to avoid Steam in future. Not always easy though. For example, if i buy a digital copy of a game on Feral's store, I'm actually getting a Steam key. For games they published, mind you.
If Valve just gave us a way to launch games on old Macs, all would be well. Let us run the old client on old hardware. Or give us some kind of minimal client that just does the DRM check. Either way, it's something they could use to drop full support for older versions of Windows too.
Between Valve requiring upgrades, and Apple sunsetting parts of their platform with each upgrade, Mac users sure don't have long to enjoy the games they paid for.
ditto that.
it’s also why I won't be “upgrading” my macOS-X anymore. i have 32 bit programs that likely will never be updated to 64, so this version is end of the road for me with apple. ‘Twill soon be time to install GNU/Linux on my mac and wave buh-bye to Apple.
Steam barely even supports Mojave. It is by far the buggiest and ********* app on my Mac. I regularly have steam windows maximizing onto screens that are no longer plugged in and I can’t click on them in order to drag them back. Also after being open for about an hour I will have about a dozen steam “Friends” windows open when I use the show all open apps gesture. I have to close and relaunch the app once an hour at least.
The UI makes it apparent that it is just a terrible port. Why would I want my mac to look like it has windows on it? On windows the steam UI doesnt quite match either so wtf were they even going for?
The UI makes it apparent that it is just a terrible port. Why would I want my mac to look like it has windows on it? On windows the steam UI doesnt quite match either so wtf were they even going for?
People running Yosemite are probably not running it because of games... Same with 10.9, 10.8 and 10.7.
Relatively painless drop of support...
Relatively painless drop of support...