News Steam will no longer be supported on macOS Mojave (the last version to support 32-bit apps) starting February 15th, 2024

[Krvavi Abadas]

As of February 15th, 2024, Steam will officially stop supporting the macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave) operating systems. After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.

for the record, this isn't entirely Valve's fault. considering the removal of 32-bit support was pushed by Apple. but it's still damning to see this show up in the description.

Unfortunately, macOS 10.14 was the last version to support running 32-bit games on macOS. Apple chose to drop support for 32-bit applications in macOS 10.15 (released 2019), and since many developers have not updated their games to support 64-bit executables, some games will effectively stop functioning on macOS. The Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023. 98%+ of Steam customers on Mac are already running macOS 10.15 or newer. This means 32-bit only games and applications no longer run on your current operating system.

In order to ensure continued operation of Steam and new 64-bit games purchased through Steam, users on these older versions should update to a more recent version of macOS. We expect the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time. After February 15th, 2024, we will no longer support macOS 10.14 or earlier and we are unable to guarantee continued functionality of 32-bit macOS games after that date.

needless to say, this is going to kill off a ton of games on the platform. far more damaging than the discontinuation of Windows 7 support.
a possible solution would be to fully integrate Proton and load the 32-bit Windows versions of games that way, but support for that feature is still currently locked to Linux.

 

[Tangerine_Cookie]

a possible solution would be to fully integrate Proton and load the 32-bit Windows versions of games that way, but support for that feature is still currently locked to Linux.

Surprised they haven't actually done anything like that yet, huh. Though I guess we'd have to see how many players in MacOS vs Linux they have to warrant the dev effort.

 

[Pillydillsy]

Friend of mine only has a mac and loves steam, so this sucks. Not that steam even worked for the vast majority of games to begin with, but still

 

[Yamanoi]

For a second I thought this was macOS support in general and got worried. We've had 5 major versions since Mojave iirc.

 

[IsisStormDragon]

I'm a Mac gamer and this news absolutely fucking sucks. Inevitable? Yeah, pretty much, but. Damn.

 

[Toad King]

a possible solution would be to fully integrate Proton and load the 32-bit Windows versions of games that way, but support for that feature is still currently locked to Linux.

I'm not super familiar with how Mac does it but on Linux you currently need 32-bit Linux libraries to actually run 32-bit Windows applications. There is work ongoing to no longer require this but that isn't done yet, and I don't know if that alone will be enough to run 32-bit apps.

 

[Smash Kirby]

Surprised they haven't actually done anything like that yet, huh. Though I guess we'd have to see how many players in MacOS vs Linux they have to warrant the dev effort.

The lack of audience but also how often at the time Apple was changing their Graphics API support, and trying to move stuff to be interpreted to Metal was a pain from what I heard. Vulkan at the time wasn't supported by the OS natively and Apple had no desire to support it when they were still on Intel.

 

[Pokemaniac]

a possible solution would be to fully integrate Proton and load the 32-bit Windows versions of games that way, but support for that feature is still currently locked to Linux.

It's not that simple. Wine can't help you run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit only OS. They'd need to combine it with an emulator, which is something they should probably be working on anyway as part of an overall effort to make aarch64 something that Steam can natively deal with.