Valve’s Steam gaming store will drop support for macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave early next year, effectively ending support for the last versions of macOS that could run 32-bit games.
After the change comes into effect on February 15, 2024, Valve said existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind from Steam, including security updates, and technical support for issues related to macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave) will not be offered.
Valve announced the change in a Steam support post:
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.
As a result, Valve said the Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023.
On the plus side, the change won’t affect the majority of Mac users, since 98%+ of Steam customers on Mac are already running macOS 10.15 or newer. As Valve points out, “this means 32-bit only games and applications no longer run on your current operating system.”
Valve’s decision to end support was not independent. As ArsTechnica notes, it is in fact related to Google’s ending of macOS 10.13 and 10.14 support in Chrome, several parts of which the Steam UI relies on.
Apple ended security updates and technical support for macOS 10.13 in December 2020 and for macOS 10.14 in October 2021. Future versions of Steam will require macOS features and security updates only present in macOS 10.15 and above. Despite this, however, Valve says it says it still expects “the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time.”
This article, "Steam to End Support for macOS Mojave and 32-Bit Games" first appeared on MacRumors.com
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