Valve kills CS:GO on macOS, won't launch Mac Counter-Strike 2 either

AppleInsider

Valve's "Counter-Strike 2" won't be coming to Mac in the future, and at the same time, the company has killed "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive" on Mac.

Counter-Strike 2 [Valve/Steam]

Counter-Strike 2

launched on September 27 as an upgrade to Valve's long-standing team-based first-person shooter, as a continuation of the long-running CS:GO. However, players waiting for a macOS version will be missing out, as a version for Apple's hardware isn't on the way.

In a Monday note to Steam Support for the legacy CS:GO version, Valve writes that it has "made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware," which included DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. It added "Similarly, we will no longer support macOS."

The reasoning is all down to player numbers, as Valve explains "Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players."

From now on, Counter-Strike 2 will "exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux."

At the launch of Counter-Strike 2, players of CS:GO had to download a large update for the new game. However, the update broke the game for Mac players due to a lack of support, and at the time didn't include any workarounds or way to roll back the change.

The support page mentions that a legacy version of CS:GO is available to play, as a frozen build of the game. "It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking," Valve states.

Players on macOS can receive a refund for their Prime Status Upgrade until December 1, if most of their play on CS:GO was on macOS, and that they played the game on a Mac between the March 22 Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test announcement and the game's launch. CD keys, gifts, and accounts with bans "are not eligible for a refund."

Read on AppleInsider

Marvin

AppleInsider said:

From now on, Counter-Strike 2 will "exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux."

At the launch of Counter-Strike 2, players of CS:GO had to download a large update for the new game. However, the update broke the game for Mac players due to a lack of support, and at the time didn't include any workarounds or way to roll back the change.

The support page mentions that a legacy version of CS:GO is available to play, as a frozen build of the game. "It has all of the features of CS:GO except for official matchmaking," Valve states.

Players on macOS can receive a refund for their Prime Status Upgrade until December 1, if most of their play on CS:GO was on macOS, and that they played the game on a Mac between the March 22 Counter-Strike 2 Limited Test announcement and the game's launch. CD keys, gifts, and accounts with bans "are not eligible for a refund."

It looks like it runs ok via Crossover, probably ok via Parallels too:



Crossover is a good option for games and Apple updated the terms for their porting toolkit with version 1.0.4 so it can be embedded in 3rd party apps. Crossover 23.5 can handle DX12 games using it. The following channel has tested a lot of games:

https://www.youtube.com/@macprotips/videos

No matter if game devs cut native support for games here and there, it should be possible to get them running again.

Valve uses their own engine Source 2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2 ) for games like this and Half-Life:Alyx (VR). They won't have added Metal support, just DirectX and Vulkan.

dope_ahmine

It’s amazing how much extra work some application developers still need to do in order to release updates on multiple platforms. Why not just do it right and intelligently, and stop making cowboy spaghetti hax?

Honkers

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

StrangeDays

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

Honkers

StrangeDays said:

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

There's a difference between an individual game requiring a modern machine to play, and an OS cutting off all software older than a few years.

Also,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265033/proportion-of-operating-systems-used-on-the-online-gaming-platform-steam/

The SteamDeck is built on Linux, so I wouldn't count it out.

Marvin

dope_ahmine said:

It’s amazing how much extra work some application developers still need to do in order to release updates on multiple platforms. Why not just do it right and intelligently, and stop making cowboy spaghetti hax?

It's due to the platforms using their own APIs - Microsoft/Windows uses DirectX, Linux uses Vulkan, Mac uses Metal. Cross-platform engines like Unreal and unity take care of each one. Companies that have their own engines have to maintain all these separately. Apple has been helping some of them directly with Metal. It used to be possible to do a single build with OpenGL, now it needs 3 separate rendering implementations.

It would be nice to have an abstracted rendering layer above the platform-specific ones similar to what WebGPU will do where there's an adapter layer for each native implementation:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebGPU_API

Indie developers would be much better off building games against an abstraction layer, even if there was a small overhead like 20%.

StrangeDays said:

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

Valve has to support their first-party hardware like Steam Deck, which run on Linux. Gabe Newell said he uses Debian Linux too:

https://www.pcgamer.com/gabe-newell-linux-and-open-source-are-the-future-of-gaming/
https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTYyMTc

thadec

StrangeDays said:

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

Yes, but only because the macOS gaming market potential is 0. It is 100% people who buy Macs for other purposes but also use it to play games. Absolutely - and I mean absolutely - no one buys a Mac to play games, not even partially. Anyone who is even partially motivated to buy a computer to play games is going to consider A. the widest possible selection of playable games and B. the best possible gaming performance for the money. Macs come up way short in both. Put another way: when listing the reasons to buy a Mac to game ... all of them on that list will be reasons to buy a Mac. They are extremely important to Mac fans but irrelevant to gaming and to gamers. 

Nothing Apple can do about this either. The 3 year old entry level MacBook Air will buy an Nvidia RTX 4050 system with 16 GB RAM and a recent Intel Core i5. The latest 16" M2 Max MacBook Pro costs the same as an Nvidia RTX 4090 machine with the latest AMD Ryzen 9. Yes, those machines will be very thick, extremely heavy, have noisy fans, plastic frames, unreliable trackpads, terrible webcams, outdated Wi-Fi and bluetooth radios and be absolute eyesores. Guess what? No one who buys them will care. They have machines that will max out their resolution/FPS ratio and so long as the screen is fine and the oversized keyboard is responsive they're thrilled. 

The gamer crowd and the Mac crowd are apples and oranges, cats and dogs, Lakers and Celtics. Nothing in common. Apple will continue to pay lip service here but don't expect them to actually do a whole lot.

lowededwookie

thadec said:

Yes, but only because the macOS gaming market potential is 0.

What a bunch of crap.

There is a market but lazy as developers refuse to develop for it because they think they won’t make money.

Macs have proven that a 100% native version of a game outperforms a better specced PC. version and Metal 3 makes that even more the case. But developers still insist of cider wrapped ports of their games rather than getting off their lazy butts and having a team specifically for Metal development.

There is a HUGE market for Mac gaming but no one chooses to fill it.

Honkers

lowededwookie said:

Macs have proven that a 100% native version of a game outperforms a better specced PC. version and Metal 3 makes that even more the case.

Really?  Where have they proven that?

lowededwookie

Honkers said:

lowededwookie said:

Macs have proven that a 100% native version of a game outperforms a better specced PC. version and Metal 3 makes that even more the case.

Really?  Where have they proven that?

Back in the day when Blizzard made OpenGL versions of their games like World of Warcraft etc, they did performance tests and proved that the Mac played consistently better than the PC with DirectX. Those tests were done by Blizzard themselves and independently verified.

More recently they did tests of Metal vs DirectX and found that Metal could out perform DX in many tasks. Not all but a hell of a lot.

A good proof that it comes down to the developers is Eve Online. Eve has always sucked on the Mac because it was always a Cider wrapped DirectX game (think CrossOver but more dedicated to one game). There was always a massive performance hit and the game performed slower than a snail in molasses. Now however it is a native Metal app, largely down to Apple Silicon, and it performs like a hot knife through butter even on a 2014 MacBook Air.

The lazy Cider approach means they can port to other platforms quicker but then those platforms get massive performance hits and people claim the Mac is crap for games. It’s NOT the platform that is crap, it’s lazy developers not making native versions of games.

22july2013

thadec said:

StrangeDays said:

Honkers said:

Can hardly blame them, after Apple pulled OS support for 32 bits apps, rendering a massive chunk of Steam's library obsolete on Mac.  Apple are a flighty partner when it comes to other parties' interests; best to stay away if you can.

And yet, Valve specifically cited CS2 is 64-bit only, because that’s the right direction. 

I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.

Absolutely - and I mean absolutely - no one buys a Mac to play games, not even partially. 

You almost persuaded me there that I don't exist. But I just pinched myself, and yes I do think I exist.

thadec

lowededwookie said:

Honkers said:

lowededwookie said:

Macs have proven that a 100% native version of a game outperforms a better specced PC. version and Metal 3 makes that even more the case.

Really?  Where have they proven that?

Back in the day when Blizzard made OpenGL versions of their games like World of Warcraft etc, they did performance tests and proved that the Mac played consistently better than the PC with DirectX. Those tests were done by Blizzard themselves and independently verified.

More recently they did tests of Metal vs DirectX and found that Metal could out perform DX in many tasks. Not all but a hell of a lot.

A good proof that it comes down to the developers is Eve Online. Eve has always sucked on the Mac because it was always a Cider wrapped DirectX game (think CrossOver but more dedicated to one game). There was always a massive performance hit and the game performed slower than a snail in molasses. Now however it is a native Metal app, largely down to Apple Silicon, and it performs like a hot knife through butter even on a 2014 MacBook Air.

The lazy Cider approach means they can port to other platforms quicker but then those platforms get massive performance hits and people claim the Mac is crap for games. It’s NOT the platform that is crap, it’s lazy developers not making native versions of games.

Yeah ... back in the day doesn't mean Apple Silicon, does it? Fascinating that you would leave that out. We aren't talking about ARM PCs that are limited to integrated graphics. This very website has acknowledged multiple times that - again M2 Ultra aside - the integrated graphics only perform at about the level of a midrange discrete GPU. Apple Silicon's graphics are world class among integrated graphics. They are even better for photo and video editing because of the built-in codecs. But they can't compete with dedicated graphics cards. That is why I made the comparisons that I did.

The 3 year old MacBook Air costs $1000. That will buy you a gaming laptop with a lower midrange graphics card like the AMD Radeon RX 7600S that will crush that Air's 7 core GPU. The 16" MacBook Pro costs $3300. That will get you a gaming laptop with an RTX 4080 whose graphics outperform the 76 core M2 Ultra. And the cheapest M2 Ultra device is $5000 and totally isn't a laptop! We aren't even going to talk about comparing the M2 Ultra to a $5000 gaming rig that has the desktop version of the AMD Ryzen 9 (16 cores and 32 threads) and the desktop NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090.

Video game studios aren't lazy. They aren't going to build games for a platform that gets 7% market share in a good year with the vast majority of that 7% being multimedia pros and blue bubble life poseurs. And bottom line, you flat out weren't telling the truth when you claimed that modern Macs beat modern PCs with discrete GPUs in gaming performance. They don't and they never will. At least with an Intel-based Mac you could get an eGPU. That set up would cost twice as much as a PC with the same GPU included, but at least you would get the same performance. Now? No dice even if the game runs natively.

jrg_uk

There’s a sentiment in transport, “Why build a bridge? No one is swimming across the gap”, that seems quite appropriate here.

Marvin

It turns out they made the native Mac port but just stopped working on it:



They made it using MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan to Metal and was made as an Intel binary so on Apple Silicon runs under Rosetta.

If it was a one-off port, they probably would have released it but this is the most popular live service game and would need regular updates:

https://steamcharts.com
https://steamdb.info/app/730/patchnotes/

It gets patches all the time and as the video above says, if Apple one day decided to discontinue Rosetta like they did in the old version after 5 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software) ) i.e around 2025 or maybe 5 years after the last Intel Mac, 2028, the game would stop working on new systems unless they made an Apple Silicon build.

tht

Like a broken record here. I don't think Apple has any recourse but to buy a few popular games publishers & studios to ensure that there is a minimum viable set of native games on macOS, and to take ownership of a significant set Crossover games that aren't native.

This is basically a "the chicken or the egg" situation, except that developers will never come even if the right hardware and software platform is there. Ie, the platform owner always has to provide the software and hardware to develop a market of paying customers. They have to establish a market of paying customers. Once studios and publishers see a paying market, they'll come, but not before. This is true of basically every single niche market, especially entrenched ones.

(Yes, the "which came first, chicken (platform) or the egg (apps) situation" type conundrum isn't one at all. There is only one way it goes. The platform becomes popular on its own, than developers will come. How the platform becomes popular must be done by the platform owner.)

macOS doesn't have a lot of professional engineering software. There are ton of Macs in engineers' hands, making due with Unix CLI software while taking advantage of Office for Mac. This situation doesn't change unless Apple buys Matlab or PTC or whatnot. They have to take ownership of a killer app or game to vector their way into the market.