Steam finally has a native app for Apple Silicon Macs

About half a decade ago, Apple released the first Apple Silicon-based Macs with ARM processors, kicking off its chip revolution and severing ties with Intel. These chips were received to critical acclaim, and many developers optimized their apps for ARM relatively quickly—not Valve, though.

Valve is only now getting ready to ship a native Steam client for macOS. The latest Steam Beta update is finally optimized for Apple Silicon, which means the app no longer relies on Rosetta 2, Apple's translation layer that emulates x86 applications on ARM-based chips.

It is hardly surprising that it took Valve so long to optimize its client for Apple Silicon, considering Apple's low market share on Steam. Valve's monthly Hardware and Software Survey (check out the latest data here) shows that macOS has only 1.85% of all users, which is hardly what you call a priority. The survey's page itself makes it clear that the results help developers decide where to invest their time and effort.

In recent years, Apple Silicon has made big strides in terms of graphical performance, which has made Mac a better gaming platform than before. Apple is also not giving up on its ongoing effort to make gaming on Mac more attractive. Every macOS release introduces new tools for developers and gamers (the recently announced iOS/iPadOS/macOS 26 received a new "Gaming" hub). Unfortunately for Apple, Macs still aren't popular for gaming, and the fact that it took Valve five years to optimize Steam for Apple Silicon just shows how difficult it is to convince everyone that Mac can game, too.

In addition to native Apple Silicon support, the latest Steam Client Beta introduced improvements for Steam Chat, In-Game Overlay, and SteamOS. The complete changelog is available on the official Steam Community page.

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