Steam’s road on some Macs is almost over. After announcing plans to end support for Steam on Windows 7 and 8, Valve announced today that it will end support for Macs running macOS 10.11 El Capitan and 10.12 Sierra. The company announced it in 2018. short blog post on its support site.
Older versions of Windows will retire in January 2024, while older versions of macOS will launch in September 2023. After September 1, 2023, the Steam client will no longer run and will need to be updated. To play games that run through Steam on Mac, upgrade to macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
Valve is ending support for macOS El Capitan and Sierra for the same reason it is ending support for Windows 7 and 8. This is because Steam’s “core functionality” uses an embedded version of Chrome that does not work on these older operating systems.
“Furthermore, future versions of Steam will require macOS feature and security updates only present on macOS 10.13 and above,” the unsigned blog post reads. .
PC gaming isn’t as popular as Mac, so this change will probably affect far fewer users than the Windows announcement. in March 2023 Steam Hardware Survey, macOS and OS X made up just 1.41% of systems running Steam. Most of these Macs were already running the latest version, macOS 13.2.1 Ventura. In fact, the oldest version captured in the survey was Catalina’s update, macOS 10.15.7, which made up less than 1% (out of his 1.41% of macOS/OS X users). So yeah — very few people these changes could affect.
Of the Macs in that study, 54.88% were running systems powered by Apple Silicon, while the remaining 45.08% were still using Intel. El Capitan was released in 2015 and Sierra was released in 2016. Security updates for these OS versions ended in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
With free updates every year, Mac owners have little reason to upgrade. no Please upgrade as long as your system is still supported. Apple he stopped supporting 32-bit applications with macOS 10.13 High Sierra in 2017. This made a large number of Steam games incompatible with macOS.
However, I think that there are some people who will be affected by this announcement. But even with this relatively minor platform, Valve seems ready to modernize.
