Valve Software’s Steam game marketplace and app will no longer support macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and 10.14 (Mojave). Support page post. This change will take effect on February 15, 2024.
What will happen? Valve is written as follows.
After that date, existing Steam clients installed on these operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind, including security updates. Steam Support will no longer be able to provide technical support to users for issues related to older operating systems, and Steam cannot guarantee the continued functionality of Steam on unsupported operating system versions.
macOS 10.14 (known as Mojave by Apple) was released over five years ago, and time is ticking. So, at first glance, this may not seem like such a big deal. But there’s a reason why these things are especially noteworthy. This change means that support for the last version of macOS that can run 32-bit games will end.
Most of the Steam game library for Mac is 64-bit, but there are also many 32-bit Mac games that haven’t been updated. If you purchase and install via Steam, continued access is not guaranteed, even if you are running High Sierra or Mojave.
“At the end of 2023, the Steam Store will no longer consider games that only offer 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible,” Valve writes. The post also notes that less than 2% of Steam’s current Mac users are running macOS 10.14 or earlier, so this affects them if they continue to use older versions that support 32-bit apps. Only a few users say they are.
To be clear, just because macOS 10.14 isn’t supported doesn’t mean Steam won’t run at all on machines running that OS. This means Valve doesn’t guarantee it works and won’t do anything to help you if something breaks over time. It also means that users who continue to use outdated software may be more vulnerable to security risks that may inhibit its continued use.
Valve doesn’t seem to be taking the lead on this. Rather, it’s in response to Google’s end of support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14 in Chrome. Several parts of the Steam user experience rely on Chrome.
After all, the wave of deprecations makes playing historical games on Mac a complicated task. PowerPC gave way to Intel, Intel Macs went from 32-bit to 64-bit, and more recently Apple moved Macs from Intel to Apple Silicon with the M1 chip and its successor. Each of these changes made it more difficult or impossible to play certain previous games natively, but Rosetta 2 now supports far more 64-bit Intel Mac games than originally feared. You can now save on Apple Silicon.