The Mac games scene is – not to put too fine a point on it – a bit of a mess these days. Apple has never been very interested in games on the Mac, and this has meant that Macs have never enjoyed the same range of A-List games titles as owners of Windows PCs or games consoles like the Sony PlayStation or Microsoft’s Xbox. And, just to make things worse, the arrival of macOS Catalina (10.15) a few years ago – which moved the macOS to 64-bit software and no longer supported older 32-bit software – killed off a lot of popular Mac games too. There are, sadly, many games still available on the Steam store that will only run on pre-Catalina versions of the macOS, and we recently had to delete dozens of old games from our list of the best Mac games (fave.co/3Kqn7jJ).
It’s not all bad news, though. In recent years, there’s been a trend for ‘F2P’ games – ‘free to play’ – which can be downloaded and played for free, and then try to make their money by selling ‘in-app purchases’ (IAP) that let you buy new weapons or armour, or fancy clothes, pets and other accessories. Quite a few of these F2P games will run on the Mac – the selection on the Mac App Store isn’t very good, but there are dozens of free Mac games on Steam and a few scattered around other games stores such as Epic and Gog.com.
You do have to be careful here, though, as many F2P games are more interested in selling expensive in-app purchases rather than providing a fun game that you can enjoy without handing over loads of cash (this is particularly the case with card games, which constantly release
