But while we are yet to see what is Apple hiding up its sleeve, Steam has already jumped on the opportunity to make it work. Suddenly, gaming on Macs became viable - in an effort to reinvent the industry Apple is releasing Arcade this fall, its gaming subscription service for all the Apple devices.
Thankfully, Macs shifted away from their own hardware to common X86 platforms used by Windows PCs, which included Intel chips and leading video card brands like AMD and Nvidia. As gaming became more popular, the company struggled to enter the market through their own App Store, as competing products had already captured market share. In the early 2000s, Apple was more concerned with their suite of creative applications and music software rather than games. The lack of games on Mac wasn’t only due to hardware and software, but also the business model as a whole. Additionally, Windows made it easier for game developers to interface with their hardware using widely supported API tools such as DirectX. Macs generally didn’t have the same gaming-oriented hardware that Windows PC users enjoyed, such as high-performance CPU chips and video cards. The main reason for Steam not initially supporting Macs was them containing proprietary hardware that game developers struggled to cater for.
