Valve Puts a Challenge Ahead of Apple Which Currently Seeks to Flourish in the Gaming Industry

Apple’s outgrowing interest to cater to the gaming community hasn’t been a secret to anyone. With the release of the iPhone 15, Apple made a strong case in the mobile gaming industry. Apparently, the features that the company offers with iPhone 15 make it ‘an ideal gaming device’. But Valve isn’t ready to join the gaming evolution of the iOS developers? Well, a recent decision made by the CS2 developers has left the fans speculating the same. 

The highly-awaited sequel to FPS giant CS: GO finally marked its release in September. As expected, the Valve-developed classic started dominating the gaming trends in no time. However, its launch on macOS remained a mystery, until now. Following the underwhelming response of CS: GO on the Apple software, Valve has announced a condition. Here’s what Valve has to say on CS2’s speculated release on macOS. 

Apple or Valve: Who’s to blame for CS2 not coming on macOS

A macOS version of the recently launched game Counter-Strike 2 is not planned, according to Valve. The game’s foundational Vulkan API is not supported by Apple, which is a more glaring reason. Moreover, the developers highlighted another big reason that resulted in the decision made. If you have followed the legacy of Valve’s FPS classic, you might have already guessed what are the major concerns with CS on macOS. 

The Counter-Strike franchise has been among the top tier of FPS gaming creations to date. The 2012 CS: GO remains the most actively played tactical shooter to date. However, this hasn’t been the case for Apple users. Recently, Valve stated, “As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS: GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux.” 

Read More: CS2 Everything You Need to Know About the Release Notes for October 2nd

According to the analytics, the brand users do not even make up for one perfect of the current players accessing CS: GO. Considering the numbers that account for the overall active player base, this becomes a highly underwhelming number. 

Are the developers not willing to give macOS an exclusive treatment? 

In order to replace OpenGL and address some of its issues, Vulkan was created. Although Apple’s Metal graphics API is used to implement Vulkan, MoltenVK is an open-source library that does so without some of the more sophisticated Vulkan features. Not only Counter-Strike but other video games also behave in a similar manner. Developers won’t create desktop-class games for a single platform based on an API. Blizzard just stopped supporting macOS in their newest games.

However, Valve hasn’t clearly decided to abandon Mac. Besides CS, Dota 2 also witnessed some decent response from the macOS ports of Valve. But this latest update has certainly made the Apple users looking forward to the company’s big expansion in gaming a bummer speed bump. It will be interesting to see how the company responds to the decision further. 

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