Struggling to find great games on the Mac App Store? You need to let off some Steam. Here’s how to use the Steam games platform on macOS
Apple has a weird relationship with gaming. Bar occasional, short-lived flurries of gaming advocacy, the company has been cool on the subject, mostly using games to showcase the power of shiny new hardware it wants to sell.
But there have always been both casual and dedicated gamers on the Mac, and increasingly Mac gaming finds itself on relatively equal footing with Windows gaming – at least in terms of provision, if not the actual quantity of releases.
Steam is the biggest modern-day success story in terms of gaming content delivery. It was launched on Windows in 2003 – arriving on the Mac in 2010 – and has since grown to a user base of over 150 million registered accounts. Its popularity even led to a line of micro-consoles and the SteamOS operating system.
With this feature, though, we’re sticking resolutely to the Mac. We’ll show you how to get a Steam account up and running, so you can browse and download more great Mac games than you could hope to play in a lifetime.
For more gaming advice, check out our roundup of the best Mac games (many of which are available on Steam) and the best free Mac games.
Install Steam for Mac
To install Steam, you’ll need an Intel Mac running macOS 10.7 (Lion) or later, and 1GB of drive space. The Steam website recommends you have a two-button mouse handy, because many games are designed first and foremost for Windows. However, the vast majority can alternatively be controlled using just a keyboard, or a mix of mouse/trackpad and keyboard.
Get started by going to steampowered.com, and click Install Steam. The welcome page will detect you’re using a Mac, and you should then click Install Steam Now. This will download steam.dmg to your ~/Downloads folder.
Open your Downloads folder and double-click steam.dmg (or do so from Safari’s Downloads button in the toolbar), and click Agree. When a Finder window appears, drag the Steam icon to the Applications folder shortcut.
You can then launch Steam from your Applications folder. You’ll get a standard ‘application downloaded from the Internet’ warning. Click Open. Steam will likely install an update.
Read more at macworld.co.uk