You can finally play Cyberpunk 2077 on your MacBook! Later this week. In 2025. Five years after the game hit PC and consoles (in an admittedly problematic launch). Cyberpunk 2077, arguably the most-anticipated game ever when it arrived in a blizzard of hype and expectations, landed on a Nintendo handheld before it came to the Mac. Insert Nelson Muntz “ha ha!” here.
I don’t often engage in this kind of across-the-fence taunting. Hell, as a life-long Windows user and a career-long Android fanboy, I’ll admit that both Microsoft and Google are looking distinctly unappealing at the moment, as both companies fumble their hardware and try to shove AI into every possible orifice of their software.
But even if it’s largely independent of Microsoft’s actions, PC gaming is in a pretty good spot in 2025, at least from a gamer’s perspective… and specifically from the perspective of a gamer who doesn’t need a new GPU. And despite having an enviably centralized platform store, one that also has access to millions of iOS apps and games, people who actually want to play PC games on the Mac are still at a distinct disadvantage.
As a mental exercise, I’m going to grab ten notable PC games from 2025 without checking if there’s a Mac version, and see what it looks like. Here are the ten released this year that I picked blindly:
- 9 KingsÂ
- Avowed
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows
- Blue Prince
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- DOOM: The Dark Ages
- Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
- Monster Hunter Wilds
- Spider-Man 2
- Stellar Blade
On this list, only 9 Kings (easily the smallest game among them and also developed on the cross-platform Unity engine) and Assassin’s Creed Shadows, are available for Mac right now. To be fair, Avowed and DOOM are published by Microsoft (via its studios Obsidian and Bethesda), and Microsoft has an incentive not to release games on Mac. But also to be fair, many of these games are from massive publishers like Sony, Sega, and Capcom, who definitely have the resources to port games to the Mac on release if they want.
So yeah, Windows as a platform, even as a gaming platform, isn’t without its issues at the moment. And personally I’m hoping that Valve steps up and gives it some much-needed competition for laptops and desktops. But if you want the most games, right away, on the most powerful hardware, Windows is still the way to go.
That said, it’s not as if people with a Mac are completely locked out of PC gaming. There’s a pretty decent list of games that users can “port” themselves to Apple’s M-series Arm hardware using an official Apple Game Porting Toolkit, which is similar to Valve’s Proton compatibility layer for the Steam Deck. And streaming options, notably Nvidia’s GeForce Now, open that up a little wider if you’re willing to dip into a subscription.
