I was surprised to learn that Cyberpunk 2077 was released for Mac, and that you don’t need to buy it again if you already own it on platforms like GoG and Stream.
I installed and gave it a spin on my M1 Max (64GB) and performance is excellent, it managed 60FPS most of the time.
I think this is a major milestone for Mac gaming. This game is demanding and hasn’t been crippled like the Switch version. It looks remarkably good. I also read that the settings are automatically optimized for your setup (RAM, CPU generation etc), which is nice as I hate having to tinker with settings.
I will have many more hours of fun on this game, and don’t need to use Geforce Now, which is very cool! Controller and all other hardware are working great out of the box, so this is an excellent port.
I’m bummed it costs 82 in the US. Though it seems game prices are skyrocketing right now.
But I’ll probably buy it anyways.
I do wish Apple would support bringing more indie games over. I could get rid of my switch (or at least not get a switch 2 – I just don’t use it enough).
Gog.com is good, though not as polished and mainstream as Steam.
Their origin was making available old games that weren’t easily available … kind of a nostalgic trip (gog stands for Good Old Games). I first noticed them when I was looking to play some old RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape (this was before they got official re-releases).
That’s still a part of their business but they’re more of a current gaming platform like Steam.
There are two significant downsides to using gog vs steam…one is the library is still smaller, but unless you’re a huge gamer that likely won’t matter. The other is that gog’s installer and updater does not work well on Macs at all. So unlike the convenience of Steam, there’s a bit more management of games/updates/downloads.
But that’s also one of the benefits of gog. They sell their games as DRM-free as they can. So instead of using their proprietary software to download and manage the games I just download the games directly. Unlike Steam, if gog were to go under I could still keep and play the games I purchased through them.
This is really a long way of saying gog and steam are essentially the same – gog is like buying a book at an independent bookstore, and Steam is like buying from Amazon. They both work well and essentially do the same thing … one’s just a bit more convenient than the other.
Steam also has better sales, but I don’t really buy enough games for that to matter much.
I wonder if they fixed the bug they had for years. In general it would crash on startup and different people had various solutions that would work for a short time and then stop working.
GOG installer has been working fine for a while, though personally I use Heroic as my launcher besides steam. Heroic is an independently made game launcher that can connect with GOG, Epic Games and Amazon Prime Gaming stores and install mac native games from all of them directly. It also allows you to use multiple different versions of translation layers (wine, whisky-wine and even crossover) to install windows copies of games. Not all windows games will run, though we currently see more and more, even just-released games, running. This usually comes with less performance than on windows, due to the translation layers, but has opened up mac gaming significantly. Especially in the past 3 years.
Worth knowing that Heroic can be installed via homebrew.
(Long time lurker, first time poster here - setting a goal to become active in the community this upcoming semester, after benefiting quietly from it for so long. )
I installed gog galaxy again today and with minimal testing it seems to be working. Last time I tried was back in October, so a lot could have changed since then.
Heroic looks interesting. I might try that. Thanks for sharing it.
)