Valve has ended SteamVR support on macOS

Apple has never been a company to play well with others, and the same applies to VR. In recent years, Nvidia has stopped making drivers for Apple products, and Apple has abandoned multi-platform APIs line Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL. 

Valve’s SteamVR hasn’t seen widespread adoption on Apple’s hardware, and Apple doesn’t seem interested in improving that situation. With this in mind, Valve’s latest announcement regarding SteamVR makes a lot of sense. Valve’s abandoning macOS support for SteamVR. 

For the time being, macOS users can choose to opt into the (macos) beta branch to gain access to legacy editions of SteamVR for macOS, but moving forward; Valve has no plans to support VR on Apple’s operating system. Simply put, very few VR games support macOS, macOS isn’t a widely accepted gaming platform, and very few Mac gamers have invested in VR. 

Over time, SteamVR’s macOS builds may break thanks to future macOS updates, but given the niche of a niche that is Mac VR gaming, this shift in unlikely to impact any serious VR users. Oculus, one of the world’s leading VR headset developers, dropped macOS support back in 2015, long before the headset released to the public. 

In the future, Valve’s development efforts for SteamVR will be focused on Windows and Linux, and while Linux gaming remains a niche endeavour, Valve has more control over changing that situation, at least when compared to macOS. Valve’s Proton project has already gotten hundreds of Windows games working on Linux, making non-Windows PC gaming a lot more viable than it was previously.