the best way to play pc/ steam games on Mac system?

By ming, 1 November, 2025

Forum
Other Apple Chat

any good idea to play the mojority pc/ steam gameson Mac system?
especially on M4 , M5 Mac book, Mac Mini and I mac

Options

Comments

By Oliver on Saturday, November 1, 2025 - 13:47

Regarding steam, steam is merely a store front. It doesn't change compatibility. The game itself has to be mac compatible of which there are very few on the steam store. If you want to play PC games you either need to install with wine/cross over or run a VM such as parallels and play it in there. There are limitations on gaming in a VM though so watch out for those.

TLDR: If it's a steam game for PC, you need to run it on a PC or a PC VM.

By Khomus on Saturday, November 1, 2025 - 15:59

Some games work, Blind Drive for example. That's if you install Steam on the Mac. But Slay the Spire doesn't work, or at least, I haven't found a mod that works. I forget what games I have, not a ton, but most of them just show up as for Windows.

By Tayo on Saturday, November 1, 2025 - 17:49

There aren't a lot of accessible ones. Hellhunter, if you have it, is on Steam. So is Stardew Valley, although getting the mods set up for Mac can become a bit tedious. THe mod that theoreticaly should make Slay the Spire work on Mac doesn't work, and the Say the Spire mod is Windows only, as far as I can tell. there was a post on the audiogames forum about accessing the accessible chromium layer of steam, which works though it's not the best experience.

By Oliver on Sunday, November 2, 2025 - 07:53

You're not going to be running any AAA games on the mac with accessibility, so games like The Last Of Us are out as is Forza Motorsport or Diablo IV. I did get Diablo IV working through Crossover but it didn't have access to windows speech libraries so the accessibility wasn't voiced.

Tempering expectations, you'll be able to play older games and audio games. If you want to play the latest and greatest you have a couple of options, all of which are quite expensive.

the cheapest option is XBox through the cloud where you can play a selection of games, but not all of the XBox catalogue.

You can get either a playstation or XBox and play it remotely through the mac using apps such as PS Remote Play or OneCast.

You buy a PC.

I know you keep asking the same question, what's best... But unfortunately, for now, unless you give more specifics about the game you want to play, I don't think we can help. The Mac, though a capible machine in many ways,is not good for gaming and, even when it is, accessibility of said games is hit and miss like the example of using Crossover I mentioned earlier.

Really, you should try it yourself. I believe Crossover has a trial, Parallels certainly does, but I think the sort of gaming you're looking for will require other hardware outside the Mac.

Even then, there is no one solution to rule them all. Steam through windows does have a good selection but the AAA games won't run on mac because Parallels doesn't support Direct X 12 and probably won't. Crossover is limited even if it can run Direct X 12 because of the way it runs meaning that, even if the game has accessibility built in, it can't access libraries.

TLDR: If you want to play the big games with accessibility either buy a PS5 or a gaming PC.

By Igna Triay on Sunday, November 2, 2025 - 08:57

Haven't tried it myself, but shadow pc is another option, I think some here have said it works if memory serves, might have been in the audiogames forum but, I don't remember wher I heard it but some blind people I think have used it.
As far as games; depends; lightweight games like say, hearthstone etc will run fine, but triple a games, no.
I'm wundering though, for crossover, isn't there a way to install say the sapi or screenreader into the bottle along with the app? Or that's not a thing at all?

By Oliver on Sunday, November 2, 2025 - 14:30

As far as I could understand it, no. Though you can include them, I think most of the AAA games rely on other frameworks baked into windows.

Regarding Shadow PC, I wasn't very impressed with their customer service when I had issues. The interface is very messy and wasn't very easy to navigate. I was hoping I could use the Windows App, the new remote app to access a PC, but they don't allow 3rd party remote control and, it's really expensive.

Saying all that, it does kinda work. It's got the same issue with any remote service of latency, you have to upgrade from the base configuration for anything worth while and, by the time you've spent a few months on there, it might be better to simply buy a mini PC to put on a shelf and access from your mac with the windows App. That's personal choice though, of course.