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Steam dropping support for older macOS versions, and that’s bad news for 32-bit games

Via its support webpage this week, Valve has announced that it will drop support for macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave in early 2024. As explained by Ars Technica, this change essentially marks the end of the road for a number of 32-bit games for macOS.

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On its support website, Steam says that it will “officially stop supporting macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave)” on February 15th, 2024.

After that date, existing Steam Client installations on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind including security updates. Steam Support will be unable to offer users technical support for issues related to the old operating systems, and Steam will be unable to guarantee continued functionality of Steam on the unsupported operating system versions.

While it’s unsurprising that Steam is dropping support for macOS versions that were released five and six years ago, there’s a notable side effect of this decision. macOS 10.14 was the last version to support running 32-bit games on macOS, with Apple ending support for 32-bit applications with macOS Catalina.

Apple chose to drop support for 32-bit applications in macOS 10.15 (released 2019), and since many developers have not updated their games to support 64-bit executables, some games will effectively stop functioning on macOS. The Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023. 98%+ of Steam customers on Mac are already running macOS 10.15 or newer. This means 32-bit only games and applications no longer run on your current operating system.

Steam does note, however, that even though support for macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave will end in February, it expects “the Steam client and games on these older operating systems to continue running for some time.”

You can learn more about the decision on Steam’s website. The company says that “98%+ of Steam customers on Mac are already running macOS 10.15 or newer.”

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Avatar for Chance Miller Chance Miller

Chance is the editor-in-chief of 9to5Mac, overseeing the entire site’s operations. He also hosts the 9to5Mac Daily and 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcasts.

You can send tips, questions, and typos to chance@9to5mac.com.

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