Steam has quietly announced that it has dropped Mac VR gaming support from the platform.
Although there were no VR games on Steam that supported VR on Mac, until now Steam did allow developers to publish Mac compatible VR games if they wanted to.
The decision will also come as a disappointment to content developers that use Steam as a vehicle to view things like 360 degree video content such as in some Adobe programs.
It will also be a loss to those users that were using VR Chat on Mac which now no longer works without installing Windows on macOS.
VR gaming is still very much in its infancy on Mac and unless you’ve got one of the latest Mac Pros, you need an eGPU for your Mac to use VR apps and games on macOS.
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However, although Mac users can use AMD graphics cards in an eGPU connected to their Mac, NVIDIA graphics cards – which are very popular for gaming and VR – are not supported by macOS
This is partly due to rivalry between NVIDIA and Apple as NVIDIA is trying to promote its own gaming platform GeForce Now on Mac.
It also hasn’t helped that Apple dropped support for 32-bit games on Steam with the release of macOS Catalina and has not subscribed to standards such as OpenGL and Vulkan for gaming.
Valve’s decision to drop SteamVR gaming support on Mac is not a huge surprise considering the lack of VR games published for Mac and the fact that Mac users only comprise around less than 5% of Steam’s users.
Steam will continue to support VR gaming on Windows and Linux however.
As eGPUs come down in price and as new Macs are released over the next few years that can handle VR technology out of the box, it’s possible that Steam will once again support VR games for Macs.
It’s also very likely that Apple will eventually launch it’s own VR gaming platform possibly as part of Apple Arcade or the Mac App Store.
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