Apple announced a new toolkit that promises to make it easier for game developers to bring Windows titles onto MacOS.
Apple's new Game Porting Toolkit aims to streamline the process of porting Windows games onto Mac computers. "First, you can evaluate just how well your existing Windows game could run on Mac using the provided emulation environment," said Apple director Brandon Corey. "This lets you analyze your game's potential performance immediately, eliminating months of upfront work."
The toolkit sounds like Proton, Valve's compatibility layer that makes it possible for Windows games to run on Linux-based operating systems (you know, like SteamOS). More interestingly, during a different session, we saw that Apple's new Game Porting Toolkit can allow developers to run DirectX 12 Windows games on MacOS instantly, as seen in the screenshot below.
Since the release, some MacOS users have reported PC games it managed to get running on Apple Silicon-based Macs, such as Redditor isaa6, who ran Cyberpunk 2077 on an M1 MacBook thanks to the toolkit or Redditor just-reload_it, who uploaded a video of Diablo 4 running on a Mac with the M2 Max chip and using MacOS Sonoma (aka MacOS 14) plus the Game Porting Toolkit.
Although in recent years, Apple has made strides in making solid MacOS ports for games, such as No Man's Sky and Resident Evil Village, Microsoft's Windows platform remains the top dog when it comes to playing games on PC.
But as we saw at this year's WWDC keynote, Apple looks to be making bigger strides in the space. With the toolkit's release, a new "Game Mode" feature coming to MacOS Sonoma in addition to game industry legend Hideo Kojima promising to bring his future titles to Apple platforms, Apple is certainly putting its best foot forward by taking gaming more seriously beyond Apple Arcade.
Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.