I upgraded from my 15 year old PC to one of the new Mac Minis at Xmas last year, thinking that I would be fine for gaming with my Xbox / Game Pass, and I would “skip a generation” on PC hardware. I have a small Steam / Epic library, but everything that didn’t work on MacOS, I had a Game Pass version of.
Fast forward a year. Xbox shit itself, RAM and GPU prices / 2026 outlook are dismal, etc etc
What’s my best option going forward for gaming? The only option I see right now is cloud gaming like GeForceNOW, but it seems like such a ripoff.
Any advice?
Edit- a lot of people are fixating on GamePass. I canceled my GamePass sub when the price went up. I no longer have it.
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Maybe look into a BC-250 build. Basically a binned PS5 chip but you can overclock it to make back some of the performance.
https://elektricm.github.io/amd-bc250-docs/
That or i got a fairly recent office PC that had an AMD 8700G and 32 GB of DDR5 on ebay for 400 bucks. Slapped in a 9060xt and its a sub 800 dollar build. Didn’t do enough research though and found out the 8700 only has 8 PCIE lanes even though bios and specs list x16. Oh well, it performs well enough for now.
Some friends at work started up a patient-gamer-style Pokémon book club. It’s been four months and we’re almost done Pokémon Black/White (which may sound impressive except that we started with Pokémon Black/White)
My point is: there’s basically an unlimited number of good games that run on old hardware. Not that retro Nintendo hardware is cheap these days, but if you’ve got some lying around…Not an unreasonable suggestion, the list of Mac compatible emulators is really impressive. Pretty much everything supports M1 Macs, even cutting edge emulators like ShadPS4 and Ryubing (PS4 + Switch emulators)
As you already have a Mac, have you looked into Crossover?
So far as I understand, the work that CodeWeavers do with it is the basis for what Valve have done with Proton, so it’s the closest you’ll get to Proton on macOS. I’ve seen people running RDR2 on Macs with it. It’s a reasonable outlay, but it could be a useful tool for running a whole bunch of Windows-only titles via Steam.
There is also Whisky, which is to all intents and purposes, a free version of Crossover, albeit (intentionally) a couple of Wine versions behind so as to not detract from what Crossover does. I’ve used Whisky a bunch to play Windows games on my M2 Macbook, and while it’s not been perfect, and will likely struggle with brand new, AAA games, older titles should work nicely.
Ultimately, I don’t really use my Mac for gaming these days because it’s a bit of a headache compared to just firing up my wife’s old PC that I’ve put Linux on. But I recognise I’m lucky enough to have that option.
Maybe try find some games that work on the mac?
There’s also this project trying to get linux in a vm to run games on a mac(and also trying to install Linux on a mac, but I assume it might break macOS since bootcamp isn’t a thing anymore, so the vm route is probably the better option):
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/muvm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BbJMPfXTbbE
(I haven’t tried it since I don’t own a mac, just happened to find it when another friend who does have a mac was asking for similar advice to you previously, but he didn’t end up trying it either)
Fairly certain that Asahi doesn’t yet work with M4 chips, such as in the new mini. Or if it does, it’s not officially supported, so will be a generally poor experience. I mean, my M2 Macbook supports Asahi, and while it’s generally incredible what theyve been able to achieve, it’s still kinda stunted given how much software simply won’t run on that architecture.
Oh and another option could be to try to find emulators that run on mac, and maybe play some older games exclusive to a platform you didn’t previously own, or that you missed playing at thier time of release. Or buy an older second hand console that has games you haven’t played before…
Cloud gaming is financially contributing to the end goal of turning hardware ownership into a rental service, so I’m staying away from that. Even if it can’t be stopped I don’t want to add to the funds endorsing it.
I think the way forward is to just be fine with older hardware and getting less demanding newer titles. There’s those who only game on a Steam Deck, and been happy with it. Emulating old games is an option too.
Here’s an idea that won’t cost anything: Browser games! There are tons of great Incremental games playable for free on a browser, and plenty of other games too.
Never paid a subscription in the first place.
How shockingly good for you.
I’m so happy you provided me this great advice in answer to my question.
Maybe you should have subscribed to “How Not To Be a Huge Ass on the Internet Quarterly”. A lot of people like it for the pictures, but I read it for the articles.
You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that’s now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or “first three months free with Discord Nitro”. This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you’ve been personally enshittified on, but there’s no “answer to your question” other than “mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam”.
See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and “cheap” aren’t compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5’s bootROM keys just leaked, it’s likely that’ll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.
You also didn’t really ask a question. You asked “how do i make games work with my budget” without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you’re playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your “future of gaming” might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was “how do you deal with this” - my answer is “I don’t buy apple products or use subscription services”.
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Not sure what to tell you, but a Mac is the last platform to go to for gaming. Apple has zero interest in gaming and have made the platform virtually hostile to gaming development.
Steam regularly has sales (really good sales, like under $5) for fairly modern games (within the last 10 years).
Wait for a sale on something like an AMD Beelink and use that.
Like I replied to another comment, the Mac was necessary for work (art and music) and was light years ahead of anything else that can be obtained at its price point ($575).
Thanks for the Beelink rec, though.
I also switched my tower out for an M4 mini last year. It surprised me how much I fell in love with it and Mac OS. Retro game corps has a great emulation on Mac video, though I also ended up with a Beelink SER9 that I use exclusively for game streaming. I’m sure there is a substantial cost, but I wish more developers would release for Apple silicon. They’re truly excellent machines.
I don’t know you, but I have more games in my library than gaming hours in a month. I haven’t touched anything released in the past three years, and mostly replay older games and emulators. The entire PS1 and PS2 library, as well as Nintendo 64, GBA, DS, etc… can be played on your fridge, and you can pirate those games for free, or buy their remasters (if they’s any) for cheap.
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Steam Deck is the answer for now. You may still be able to get one of the discontinued LCD models on the cheap, but GamePass is now as expensive as buying a game every month, so it’s better to buy than subscribe. They also make excellent PCs and homelab devices. We bought several LCD versions for the lab instead of Pi 5s, because they are such a good deal.
Really interesting take, especially on the home lab front. I had honestly never considered a steam deck over a pi5, and I’m looking at also building a MESHnet system and stuff that I would need a Pi for.
I love Pi, but the price of the 5 is unreasonable. Since RPF spun hardware into publicly traded a for-profit business, I expect it will only continue to get worse.
Humble bundles and GOG also things to keep an eye on.
I don’t know what I can tell you.
I’m one of those patient gamers, where I’m just happy I finally have a machine that can play about 89% of the games I have to throw at it. Moreso happier that it can confidently run PS2 emulation, something I’ve been chasing for years to have a machine that can do, to own anyways.
I think you just need to sit down and contemplate to yourself what you want out of a machine. It’s not a good healthy mindset to be fretting about upgrading all of the time. I mean, you made a huge leap already going from 15 years to what you have now.
Also consider that, there will still be games released that look graphically demanding and everything, but will require maybe a 1060 GPU, just as an example. Probably 8GB of RAM. It’s only the AAA stuff that wants everything to be tip-top shape. Don’t chase those.
This is honestly the healthiest take, there are just a lot of games currently out that I want to play but have no way to.
Space Marine 2, KCD2, Stalker 2, etc etc etc
It’s just been a good year to be a single player gamer, and I wanna get in on it. 🤷♂️
The good news is that single-player games tend to age well. Down the line, the bugs are as fixed as they’re gonna be. Any expansions are done. Prices may be lower. Mods may have been created. Wikis may have been created. You have a pretty good picture of what the game looks like in its entirety. While there are rare cases that games are no longer available some reason or break on newer OSes with no way to make them run, that’s rare.
With (non-local) multiplayer games, one has a lot less flexibility, since once the crowd has moved on, it’s moved on.
I played +400 hours last year and most demanding game in my library has a GTX 1050 minimum requirement. There’s much more to gaming than yearly AAA releases.
Switching to Bazzite (a Linux Distro, made for gaming). No Ragrets so far
I don’t think bazzite runs on ARM macs.
It looks like it doesn’t support ARM architecture systems at all, or anything other than x86_64.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Hardware_compatibility_for_gaming/
Minimum System Requirements
- Architecture: x86_64
Yeah, I figured that hadn’t changed, but was too lazy to actually look up the source, thanks for adding it.
However, with box64 you can emulate x86_64 on arm, however I think macs don’t have the gpu integration. Crazy thing is on some phones with snapdragon chips you can emulate games up to cyberpunk 2077 decently well.
Older and or used hardware is gonna be a place to start for CPU and GPU. Used dell optiplex can get you most of the way there, then buy a decent GPU when you can. Just make sure it fits in the case and the PSU that comes with the optiplex can handle the power draw. I’d recommend a new PSU though. Dont buy used for PSU or storage is the best advice I can give.
Optiplex are not gonna get you top of the line performance or anything but it’ll be a lot better than nothing and you can always use it for something else later like a nas, a server, home theater PC, etc.
Game Pass sounds great, but the average game play time is ~2 weeks. You’re paying $240–480/year to skim the surface of multiple games.
That’s a lot for what is essentially a demo experience. There are better ways to approach gaming.
Play for a week, refund on Steam.
Free forever!
I thought there was play time limits of like 2 hours for a refund
You could play full games, start to finish. I think it’s kinda unfair to compare them to demos. It was a pretty good deal at $10 a month.
I think money is better spent on Humble Choice since you can buy months that interest you and skip those that don’t, and the games stay in your library. I prefer to spend money to be able to keep games than pay to rent newer ones.
Hence me mentioning the price. When does it stop being worth it? You were clearly happy with $120/year, but everyone has their own threshold.
10$ a year is (was) the price of 2 full price titles. And that’s about the price I pay for games in a year. How much do you pay for games in a year?
Maybe $100/year? I prefer games without a “box price”, though I do make exceptions.
Most are free-to-play that specifically aren’t pay-to-win, and play them for years. I’ll also consider paying for DLC and/or “battle pass” systems in them if the content and bang-for-buck is worth it to me.
