Valve kills CS:GO on macOS, won't launch Mac Counter-Strike 2 either
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]](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/56732-115364-cs2header-xl.jpg)
Counter-Strike 2 [Valve/Steam]
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."
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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.
I find it hard to believe the Linux market has greater potential than the macOS market.
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.
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%.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.