Apple's 2025 Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC,is just a couple weeks away. Like every year previous, it sounds like Apple is going to squeeze gaming into its software announcements.
According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is planning to unveil a "dedicated gaming app" that "will serve as a launcher for titles and centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity."
That sounds a lot like Steam, only this app will feature games from the App Store and, of course, the Apple Arcade subscription service. However, Gurman also mentioned that the Mac version "can tap into games downloaded outside of the App Store," so maybe it will connect to your Steam or Epic Games library somehow.
Apple also recently purchased RAC7, the studio behind Sneaky Sasquatch, which might hint that they're planning to do some in-house game development.
The past few years have also seen a handful of prominent games get ported to Apple's platforms, like Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4, and Netflix Gaming has made some admirable progress bringing over indie games like Hades and Death's Door.
While all of that is a step in the right direction, most gamers are still opting for a Windows PC or a console to play anything beyond mobile games. A new game launcher for Apple devices will probably make it more convenient finding and managing games on your Mac or iPhone, but it doesn't address the underlying issue of game compatibility.
Unfortunately for Apple, right now gaming on Linux is a better experience than gaming on Mac, which is really saying something. One has to wonder why Apple doesn't take a page from Valve's book and develop a compatibility layer for macOS like Valve's Proton platform, which has brought hundreds of Windows games to Linux.
A compatibility layer would reduce the hassle for developers to bring their games to Apple devices, or at least to macOS, and create a path to quickly grow the player base on macOS.
Right now, Apple has to work against the Catch-22 of no players vs no game developers: game devs aren't creating games for Mac because gamers are overwhelmingly playing on Windows, and that won't change until there are more games on Mac.
Ironically, MacBooks have gotten a lot better for gaming since Apple launched its M-series chips. The issue is that there aren't very many games compatible with macOS to really take advantage of that hardware.
Some sort of Proton-like compatibility layer, which could be built into Apple's new launcher, seems like the perfect way to bridge that gap and show how good gaming on macOS can be, potentially leading more devs to offer native Mac support.
