Can You Play Your Windows Steam Games On Mac

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Macs don’t come with Windows, but you can install Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp and reboot into Windows whenever you want to play these games. This allows you to run Windows games at the same speeds they’d run at on a Windows PC laptop with the same hardware. UPDATE: It seems Apple has killed off support for 32 bit applications from running on MacOS Catalina. I would advise NOT updating until the Wine team is able.

Play Pc Game On Mac

One of the first things a lot of people look for, once they get over the ‘newness’ of unboxing a new MacBook and switching on OS X for the first time, is how they can play their favorite games on Mac. We’ll help you figure out how to do it.

Traditionally, Macs were not known for their gaming prowess. It wasn’t uncommon for Mac owners to own a Windows-powered PC explicitly for gaming – you’d use your MacBook (or PowerBook!) for work and relaxation, then boot up your Windows PC when you wanted to sit down and shoot things. For the most part, it worked really well. A few games were ported over, but never very many. That all began to change when Apple switched the processors found inside of Mac computers. Not only could Windows be installed, but major game studios brought some of their titles over. World of Warcraft became a huge seller on the Mac.

The Best Way to Get Games for Mac? Steam.

A few years ago, Valve sent waves through the Mac world when they announced that they were planning to port their Steam video game store / distribution channel / social network to OS X. Valve pushed devs to port titles over to the Apple platform, and now there are hundred or even thousands of games running in the Mac version of Steam (of the 315 games in my Steam account, 176 of them are Mac compatible).

The easiest way to get started with a few games for Mac is to use Steam. If you’re a PC gamer, chances are you’ve bought more than a few Steam titles – and it’s likely some of those support the Mac at the same time; Valve doesn’t charge extra for non-Windows versions of their games.

But for Mac gamers, Steam is more than just a way to find Mac-compatible games. It’s also a way to play any game in your entire library, even if it’s Windows-only. It’s thanks to a newer technology from Valve known as In-Home Streaming.

Here’s the bad news, upfront: you still need a Windows PC for this to work. Preferably a good one, but any recent computer will do. In-Home Streaming works by actually running the game on your Windows PC, then routing the video over the network to your Mac.

Setting it up is actually pretty simple. Make sure your gaming desktop is attached to your network via an Ethernet cable. You want it to be plugged directly in rather than relying on wireless access. Next, download and install Steam on your Windows computer, and make sure the games you want to play are installed, configured, and have been launched at least once. Sometimes running a game for the first time causes issues when you’re trying to stream it elsewhere in the house.

Next, go to your Mac and download and install a copy of Steam there, too, if you haven’t already. Like with the gaming PC, your Mac will stream games better if it’s hardwired into your network. If that’s not possible, you can use your wireless network – but you should be running an 802.11ac network, and you should make sure you have a strong signal (even then, you might find some issues with playing really fast twitch shooters).

Log in with your Steam account credentials on both computers, and you should be good to go – if you don’t see all of your Windows games (at least, the ones that are installed on your gaming PC) available on your Mac, check the Steam settings on both computers and make sure that the ‘Enable streaming’ box is checked.

Steam’s implementation of game streaming works extremely well on most titles. First person shooters, especially if you’re into multiplayer, may prove problematic thanks to increases in latency.

Not every Mac game is available on Steam.

A number of high-profile publishers have gotten uncomfortable with the amount of power Steam was building up and decided to roll with their own game distribution services. Fortunately, many of them have their own Mac ports.

Can You Play Your Windows Steam Games On Mac

Games you won’t find on Steam, but can run on your Mac include Blizzard titles like World of Warcraft, Starcraft II, and Diablo III. Games you won’t find on Steam and are also Windows-only include most of the EA stable, with Mass Effect 3, Mass Effect: Andromeda (likely), Mirror’s Edge, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and more.

For this latter category, Steam may yet be able to help you out. For any games distributed via EA’s Origin service, you’ll need to download and have the Origin client installed and running – but you can still add them to your Steam library. Steam lets gamers add these non-Steam titles to their library for a couple of reasons: it gives them access to the Steam overlay and web browser in full-screen mode, and it lets your friends see what games you’re playing.

Can You Play Your Windows Steam Games On Mac Free

In-Home Streaming isn’t officially supported on non-Steam titles that you add to your library, but some games will work fine; you’ll need to experiment and see. To add some of these non-Steam, non-Mac titles, go up to the ‘Games’ menu on your gaming PC, and select ‘Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library’. A window will pop up listing a bunch of programs from your computer; scroll through to find the one you want, click on it to highlight, then click OK.

Depending on which Apple computer you’re using, you might wish to add non-Steam games to your Steam library and try to stream them even if they have native Mac clients; your gaming PC is likely going to play them at a much higher quality.

Don’t forget: Your Mac is an excellent Windows PC.

A common refrain you’ll find among tech sites is that an Apple MacBook or iMac will often be one of the best Windows computers you can buy. Thanks to Apple’s Boot Camp assistant, it’s actually pretty easy to install Windows on your Mac, and use either Windows or OS X, depending on what it is you want to do.

It’s a great way to run software that is Windows-only and can’t be virtualized, which is an apt way to describe many modern games. It might be a good idea to try even if you want to play an app that has a Mac client: some tests have shown a substantial frame rate increase by running the Windows version of a game over the Mac version – even on the exact same computer.

The company has a great support page (here) detailing how to go about installing Windows 10 on your MacBook or iMac. It boils down to updating your Mac software, installing Windows, and then updating drivers – pretty simple, in all.

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After a few months of closed testing, Valve has released a public beta version of Steam with In-Home Streaming enabled. In-Home Streaming allows you to stream any game from a host PC to a client (a Mac laptop or wimpy Windows netbook, for example). This will eventually be a key feature that allows for cheap, low-power Steam Machines that can stream games from a more powerful gaming PC. We’ve been playing around with In-Home Streaming for the last few days, and for a beta it’s surprisingly stable and easy to use. Read on for our hands-on impressions, and a video demo of me streaming Dark Souls 2 to my laptop while sitting on the toilet.

Setting up In-Home Streaming

Thankfully, setting up Steam’s In-Home Streaming is easy. Just install Steam on the host and client computers, log into the same Steam account… and that’s it. As long as your two computers are on the same network (the same subnet, off the same router) they will automatically detect each other. A pop-up will appear to say that your devices are connected. (If you have a more complex network setup it won’t work, and Steam doesn’t currently reveal any network config options to make it work.)

[NB: At the time of publishing, In-Home Streaming requires you to opt into the Steam Beta Update, which can be found in the Account tab, under “Beta participation.”]

Steam In-Home Streaming, server/host setup (Windows)

I had no problem at all with the default settings, but the client does have the option of limiting the stream’s resolution or bandwidth if you run into problems. Presumably if you’re using a wimpy netbook as the client, you won’t be able to enjoy full 1080p streaming. Obviously my setup — a Core i7-4770K host, streaming to a new MacBook Pro with Retina display — is going to be absolutely fine with the highest settings.

Playing games with In-Home Streaming

To play a game over Steam’s In-Home Streaming, just load up the game library on the client, click the game you want to stream, and then select “Stream” from the little drop down menu (see right). If your client is a Mac, you may have to select “All Games” to see the game you want to stream rather than the default selector of “Mac” (which hides all the Windows games, of course, even if you can stream them — probably a bug that will be fixed).

Once you click Stream, it’s basically like you’re playing the actual game. The host computer will display the game, and the mouse and keyboard will remain active, but sound will be disabled.

I had absolutely no issues streaming a range of games to my MacBook Pro. Valve recommends a wired network, for latency and bandwidth reasons, but my 802.11ac network was more than up to the task. I had no problems moving around the house — playing games from bed, the bathroom, or even outside. Out of curiosity, I did try out a slower 802.11g network, and it wasn’t really workable at all.

Run Steam Windows Games On Mac

Other bits and bobs

Steam In-Home Streaming, ultimately, just streams whatever is currently on your primary display. This is usually whatever game you load up from Steam — but then, if you alt-tab on the host PC, it continues to stream whatever’s on your display. I used this “feature” to stream a non-Steam game and to use Photoshop. Being able to play non-Mac games on my Mac is pretty cool.

While Valve is only targeting in-home streaming, it should also be theoretically possible to stream over the internet to a remote device, like PS4’s Remote Play feature. I haven’t tried it yet, but it should be fairly simple to trick Steam into thinking that the remote device is on the local network (using something like Hamachi). Latency would be too high over 3G, but LTE and coffee shop WiFi should be fine for non-twitch games.

Can You Play Your Windows Steam Games On Macbook

Ultimately, the main use for In-Home Streaming is if you have a low-power laptop or netbook with integrated graphics and want to play games from the couch/bathroom/bedroom. I can’t imagine there are a lot of people out there who are looking for such functionality, but once Valve’s Steam Machines hit the market later in the year, that could change.