Computers Macwhich pre-installs the operating system Mac Operating System, have never been particularly focused on video games, and despite this, they continue to occupy second place in the sector, far behind the ubiquitous Windows. However, the situation could change in the near future if we see any announcements that have happened in the last few days.

First, Hideo Kojima himself was seen at WWDC 2023 to announce it Death Stranding Director’s Cut is coming to macOS and left the door open for future iterations of the franchise to reach said operating system. It is not clear whether it is oa port native or if a translation layer will be used to run the game, but all indications are that they will be the first to see whatever Apple has revealed in this regard.

Apple’s new game porting toolset is fantastic. Here’s Cyperbunk 2077 running on Ultra on an M1 MacBook Pro 16GB! pic.twitter.com/hylzMU6U46

—Isaac (@isaacmarovitz) June 6, 2023

In fact, it was announced by Apple itself on the same day A toolkit for porting gamesa set of tools designed to allow Windows game developers to determine how easily and quickly a game runs on macOS in order to potentially port it to that system.

Some details about the Game Porting Toolkit were published on the official blog of CodeWeavers, the company behind the well-known commercial implementation of Wine, CrossOver, but the real developer of the toolkit is Apple, while CodeWeavers, which at least at the moment is not involved in its development, praised the apple giant for using CrossOver to create a Game Porting Toolkit.

Diablo IV on M2 Max using macOS Sonoma and Game Porting Toolkit
by u/just_reload_it at macgaming

A toolkit for porting games consists basically in a patch of about 20,000 lines of code for Wine that makes it easier to run Windows triple-A games on macOS. This approach is very similar to that used by Valve when developing Proton, a compatibility layer for Linux based on the same Wine and created with the same goal.

While all the translation processes are in Proton, with the Game Porting Toolkit you add architecture emulation by running software compiled for x86 on ARM. The toolkit includes Metal Shader Converter, which takes care of automatic conversion shaders HLSL to Metal, Apple’s own graphics API.

Hogwarts Legacy on M2 Max
by u/just_reload_it at macgaming

The Game Porting Toolkit will not perform the same function as Proton or what is equivalent, its purpose is not to become the standard way to play games on macOS, but rather as a first step to test the feasibility or simplicity and then begin the process of porting the game to Apple’s desktop operating system..

The stage the Game Porting Toolkit would take in developing a macOS port of a video game made for Windows.

It remains to be seen how far the Game Porting Toolkit will go, but some are already speculating that Valve will adopt it as a means of running Windows games on macOS without having to port native. This possibility is not unreasonable when you consider that the Proton build for the Mac was discontinued years ago.

If anything was clear at WWDC 2023, it’s that the Mac device leader is determined to take the triple-A gaming scene seriously after launching Apple Arcade in 2019.