{"id":28939,"date":"2020-05-14T15:08:57","date_gmt":"2020-05-14T19:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=28939"},"modified":"2020-05-14T15:08:57","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T19:08:57","slug":"valve-drops-mac-support-for-steamvr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/05\/14\/valve-drops-mac-support-for-steamvr\/","title":{"rendered":"Valve Drops Mac Support for SteamVR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valve<\/a> (via Rene Ritchie<\/a>, MacRumors<\/a>, tweet<\/a>, Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

SteamVR has ended macOS support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Mark Hughes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Now, that’s just their VR headset, which is an extremely low-volume, 1% of the market gadget; VR’s kind of awful in practice, but it keeps being “useful next year” for the last 40 years, and someday it’ll be right. Steam as it is, >50% of the games I look at have a Mac version; it’s not dead yet, but it definitely smells bad.<\/p>

I blame Apple and their terrible support for gaming, in fact overtly hostile attitude.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

The suggestion to use Windows Boot Camp is just a giant middle finger, but what else are you gonna do?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Quinn Nelson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I don’t know what else Valve was supposed to do? They ported Steam, they supported SteamVR, and they ported their entire software catalog to Mac. This whole thing just makes me laugh cause Gabe Newell said this about Apple in 2007 and it seems much hasn’t changed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Oskar Groth<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I called this last year<\/a>… Which is when Valve effectively ended further development of the Mac port. From my perspective, cooperation with Apple seemed great. It was Valve execs decision to axe the project to focus on PC.<\/p>

Was that decision a result of poor Mac GPU performance? Sure, the Nvidia-Apple fallout contributed negatively. But it’s not like Valve didn’t know from the beginning that Mac VR was going to be an eGPU venture for the foreseeable future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I don’t blame Steam one bit. If anything, it’s surprising Steam “supported” the Mac for VR up until now. No Macs ship with a video card that supports VR gaming, and MacOS doesn’t support the Vulkan<\/a> or OpenXR<\/a> APIs that popular VR games are built on. It doesn’t help (to put it mildly) that Nvidia and Apple remain at odds. Apple is doing its own thing with Metal and ARKit — which are both excellent, but not part of the VR gaming world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n