There was a time, when I was a wee lad, that I didn’t own a gaming PC. Instead, I owned a MacBook that I primarily used to study, and did some light gaming on it when I wasn’t in class. It worked just fine, though I knew I was missing out on a large swath of the games that are available on Steam, and I knew that most game developers weren’t targeting the platform, and that Apple wasn’t really interested in tempting them to the platform.
Things are starting to change, though. It’s been clear for a while that Apple has been targeting iOS devices as its flagship gaming devices, with deals with publishers like Capcom bringing a bunch of its modern, beautiful Resident Evil games to both iPhone and iPad.
Now, though, with the impressive power of Apple’s recently announced Mac Mini, Apple seems to be targeting desktop and couch gaming.
If you followed the announcements within Apple’s recent Week of Mac, you’d have noticed one image that caused a bit of a stir within the gaming community: a Mac Mini with a PlayStation 5 controller sitting right next to it.
It was enough to pique some interest in many people, myself included, wondering, ‘just how would this thing fare as a tiny, powerful gaming console?’ Pretty well, as it turns out. A bunch of gaming content creators have tested the M4 Mac Mini’s performance and found that it’s an impressive little piece of kit. ETA Prime, a favourite of mine, found that the Mac-native port of Resident Evil 7 could run at Ultra settings, at 1440p, while also delivering 144 frames per second.
That’s pretty impressive, but that’s a game made specifically to run well on Apple’s custom M-series chips. What does it look like when running a game optimised for Windows through a program like Crossover? Well, it still looks great, with everything ETA Prime tested sitting comfortably above 60fps, with the right settings.
The thing is that more and more games are actually getting Native Mac ports, and, even beyond that, more gaming peripheral companies are starting to notice that mac gaming is becoming a thing.
Case and point: Corsair recently announced the first Mac-specific gaming keyboard and mouse. The K65 Plus Wireless keyboard and the K75 Wireless mouse come in multiple colours (that happen to match some of the new iMac’s colour ways), and are made specifically to function on the Mac. They’re currently only available in the US, though will likely get a broader rollout in the coming weeks, and can be purchased exclusively through the Apple store, signalling a partnership between Corsair and Apple to level up Mac gamers’ kits.
Cool, so you can play games with flashy equipment now, but are there even games on the platform? Yeah, there are, and there’s more to come.
Related: Apple MacBook Pro M4 Review: Is the Base Model Worth It?
Given Capcom’s impressive ports of Resident Evil 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 to the Apple ecosystem, I’d be shocked if we didn’t see some of its other franchises brought over as well – Monster Hunter World, Rise, and the upcoming Wilds, as well as Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma being key opportunities there. It’s worth noting that all of those games are made on the same engine, Capcom’s proprietary RE Engine, and they already know the engine runs well on Apple Silicon. It’s more a matter of optimising each game to run well.
Elsewhere, Ubisoft has already committed it’s next-gen Assassin’s Creed Shadows to launch on iOS and Mac on day one, while the previous entry, Mirage, is already available on iOS. Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding is available across Apple’s ecosystem, while Remedy Entertainment’s fantastic Control is coming later this year: signalling a chance that the incredibly well-received Alan Wake II will also launch on Mac once its exclusivity to Epic Games is up, as well as the upcoming Max Payne remake.
There’s a lot to look forward to, but also a lot that isn’t coming to the platform any time soon. Programs like Crossover, that allow Windows programs to run in an emulated environment, bridge some of the gap, but don’t make up for a smaller pool of natively-ported games. Not only that, but there are far fewer indie games coming to Mac compared to Windows, simply because Windows still has the biggest user base. If Mac gaming picks up in the way Linux has, though, there’s a chance more developers will target Mac as a potential alternate platform.
For now, it’s clear Apple’s eye is on gaming as an untapped revenue stream, and I’m betting there’ll be a lot more Mac gaming news in 2025.
The question still remains whether you should buy a Mac specifically for gaming? At this point, I’d say no, but with the caveat that we really don’t know what the gaming ecosystem will look like on Mac this time next year. For all we know, there are more boardroom deals happening and more big games coming to the platform as soon as possible.
