I upgraded from my 15 year old PC to one of the new Mac Minis at Xmas last year, thinking that I would be fine for gaming with my Xbox / Game Pass, and I would “skip a generation” on PC hardware. I have a small Steam / Epic library, but everything that didn’t work on MacOS, I had a Game Pass version of.
Fast forward a year. Xbox shit itself, RAM and GPU prices / 2026 outlook are dismal, etc etc
What’s my best option going forward for gaming? The only option I see right now is cloud gaming like GeForceNOW, but it seems like such a ripoff.
Any advice?
Edit- a lot of people are fixating on GamePass. I canceled my GamePass sub when the price went up. I no longer have it.
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Game Pass sounds great, but the average game play time is ~2 weeks. You’re paying $240–480/year to skim the surface of multiple games.
That’s a lot for what is essentially a demo experience. There are better ways to approach gaming.
You could play full games, start to finish. I think it’s kinda unfair to compare them to demos. It was a pretty good deal at $10 a month.
I think money is better spent on Humble Choice since you can buy months that interest you and skip those that don’t, and the games stay in your library. I prefer to spend money to be able to keep games than pay to rent newer ones.
Hence me mentioning the price. When does it stop being worth it? You were clearly happy with $120/year, but everyone has their own threshold.
10$ a year is (was) the price of 2 full price titles. And that’s about the price I pay for games in a year. How much do you pay for games in a year?
Maybe $100/year? I prefer games without a “box price”, though I do make exceptions.
Most are free-to-play that specifically aren’t pay-to-win, and play them for years. I’ll also consider paying for DLC and/or “battle pass” systems in them if the content and bang-for-buck is worth it to me.
Play for a week, refund on Steam.
Free forever!
I thought there was play time limits of like 2 hours for a refund
Get a Steam Deck? You can hook it up like a PC, use it sat around. Though its not a powerhouse. Wait and see how the Steam Machine fairs? There’s still a good second hand market for parts too.
Its a shitty time at the moment with scumbag companies and AI, so consumers are completely fucked.
Also: Fuck subscriptions.
Plus the game pass versions of games are complete dogshit compared to the Steam versions most of the time.Steam Machine will be priced “like a PC” so, not really a solution either.
I’ve consistently refused to buy in to Game Pass. I still buy physical games where available. If it’s only digital, I’ll get the Steam version for my Steam Deck.
I wish I didn’t go all in on digital, but then the space not taken up by physical media (in my case, >1,000 games) is also valuable to me. I’ll have to settle for keeping copies of whatever isn’t DRM locked, and obtain pirated cracked versions of whatever is.
The moment Game Pass wouldn’t let me cheese the system and get it for like $1-2 a month, I quit bothering with it. I knew they were trying to get people hooked and raise prices. It was only like a year later and then even my friends canceled theirs.
I buy games heavily on sale, or sail the seas.
Luckily my gaming PC is more than good enough to ride out the next 5 years. knocks on wood. 5800X3D + 6800 XT.
For anyone else cross your fingers the GabeCube isn’t too expensive $$$.
Not sure what to tell you, but a Mac is the last platform to go to for gaming. Apple has zero interest in gaming and have made the platform virtually hostile to gaming development.
Steam regularly has sales (really good sales, like under $5) for fairly modern games (within the last 10 years).
Wait for a sale on something like an AMD Beelink and use that.
Like I replied to another comment, the Mac was necessary for work (art and music) and was light years ahead of anything else that can be obtained at its price point ($575).
Thanks for the Beelink rec, though.
I also switched my tower out for an M4 mini last year. It surprised me how much I fell in love with it and Mac OS. Retro game corps has a great emulation on Mac video, though I also ended up with a Beelink SER9 that I use exclusively for game streaming. I’m sure there is a substantial cost, but I wish more developers would release for Apple silicon. They’re truly excellent machines.
you are seriously limited on the selection of games you can play with Apple silicon
Does Proton even work on Macs? It seems pretty clear at this point Linux is a far better gaming OS.
Nope, that would be FEX. And support for Apple Silicon is currently on the roadmap. So maybe in a couple of years.
Might be possible to run proton in a VM?:
From an colleague of mine, who bought an M1 Macbook Pro when they were new; he told me that there was a Wine fork (don’t know the name sadly) for Apple silicon which kinda worked with most (older) Steam games, not as nice as Proton on x86-64 Linux, but good enough for his game tastes. Don’t know if it’s still maintained or not…
no, it does not.
and a lot of mac games that came out before apple silicon simply will not run. and ive had mostly poor results trying to run games with crossover and whisky.
your best bet is to stick with the limited selection of games that have native apple silicon releases. and with native releases on my m2 mac mini im still experiencing some pretty bad input lag.
some strategy games like rimworld and stellaris are good options.
I don’t know what I can tell you.
I’m one of those patient gamers, where I’m just happy I finally have a machine that can play about 89% of the games I have to throw at it. Moreso happier that it can confidently run PS2 emulation, something I’ve been chasing for years to have a machine that can do, to own anyways.
I think you just need to sit down and contemplate to yourself what you want out of a machine. It’s not a good healthy mindset to be fretting about upgrading all of the time. I mean, you made a huge leap already going from 15 years to what you have now.
Also consider that, there will still be games released that look graphically demanding and everything, but will require maybe a 1060 GPU, just as an example. Probably 8GB of RAM. It’s only the AAA stuff that wants everything to be tip-top shape. Don’t chase those.
This is honestly the healthiest take, there are just a lot of games currently out that I want to play but have no way to.
Space Marine 2, KCD2, Stalker 2, etc etc etc
It’s just been a good year to be a single player gamer, and I wanna get in on it. 🤷♂️
The good news is that single-player games tend to age well. Down the line, the bugs are as fixed as they’re gonna be. Any expansions are done. Prices may be lower. Mods may have been created. Wikis may have been created. You have a pretty good picture of what the game looks like in its entirety. While there are rare cases that games are no longer available some reason or break on newer OSes with no way to make them run, that’s rare.
With (non-local) multiplayer games, one has a lot less flexibility, since once the crowd has moved on, it’s moved on.
I played +400 hours last year and most demanding game in my library has a GTX 1050 minimum requirement. There’s much more to gaming than yearly AAA releases.
Steam Deck is the answer for now. You may still be able to get one of the discontinued LCD models on the cheap, but GamePass is now as expensive as buying a game every month, so it’s better to buy than subscribe. They also make excellent PCs and homelab devices. We bought several LCD versions for the lab instead of Pi 5s, because they are such a good deal.
Really interesting take, especially on the home lab front. I had honestly never considered a steam deck over a pi5, and I’m looking at also building a MESHnet system and stuff that I would need a Pi for.
I love Pi, but the price of the 5 is unreasonable. Since RPF spun hardware into publicly traded a for-profit business, I expect it will only continue to get worse.
Humble bundles and GOG also things to keep an eye on.
I don’t know you, but I have more games in my library than gaming hours in a month. I haven’t touched anything released in the past three years, and mostly replay older games and emulators. The entire PS1 and PS2 library, as well as Nintendo 64, GBA, DS, etc… can be played on your fridge, and you can pirate those games for free, or buy their remasters (if they’s any) for cheap.
Switching to Bazzite (a Linux Distro, made for gaming). No Ragrets so far
I don’t think bazzite runs on ARM macs.
It looks like it doesn’t support ARM architecture systems at all, or anything other than x86_64.
https://docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/Hardware_compatibility_for_gaming/
Minimum System Requirements
- Architecture: x86_64
Yeah, I figured that hadn’t changed, but was too lazy to actually look up the source, thanks for adding it.
However, with box64 you can emulate x86_64 on arm, however I think macs don’t have the gpu integration. Crazy thing is on some phones with snapdragon chips you can emulate games up to cyberpunk 2077 decently well.
Check Craigslist, FB Marketplace, Letgo–just general classifieds. Can generally find decent deals on 1 to 2 generation old PCs, especially if you’re near a US Military installation or college.
Edit: just checked Boulder’s CL–10700k, 3080, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, and 850w PSU and a 27in, 1440p, IPS Monitor for $1000
Cloud gaming is financially contributing to the end goal of turning hardware ownership into a rental service, so I’m staying away from that. Even if it can’t be stopped I don’t want to add to the funds endorsing it.
I think the way forward is to just be fine with older hardware and getting less demanding newer titles. There’s those who only game on a Steam Deck, and been happy with it. Emulating old games is an option too.
I turned 360 degrees around and installed bazzite
Have a look at the Heroic Launcher. I remember reading it included a feature to play some Windows games in compatibility mode or something?
Apart from that I guess it’s Geforce Now, Amazon Luna etc…
Can confirm.
Most games I run on Heroic are free giveaways from Epic. Those are, to the best of my knowledge, all Windows. Heroic handles the compatibility with Proton, similar to how Steam does it. With a fancypants workaround you can even install Sims 4 as a direct game exe, and well, you can run any program from it if you really wanted
I’ve used it for Epic and GOG, Lutris for Ubi/EA, but can either play MS UWP games? That seemed to be the one huge hurdle for any third party launcher in general.
That’s the old price. GamePass Ultimate went up briefly from $14.99 to $19.99 then doubled (from its original price) to $29.99 per month.
I got locked in at the original price. Better yet, I got the GamePass All Access deal right before it went away. That gets you the $500 Xbox Series X and 2 years of GamePass Ultimate for about 35 bucks a month. If you consider GPU to be $15 a month, that pushes the Xbox down to $480. Not a bad deal at all! You get the Xbox and a 24-month code straight up and make payments (it’s a credit card with 0% interest for that purchase, so you have to qualify for it). That’s why I have an XSX and not a PS5 like I would have liked. I couldn’t come up with $500 straight up for a PS5, but I could make $35 a month for 2 years plus I got GamePass.
I still game on my Xbox (I’m a Mac user on computers — we got Cyberpunk and Blue Prince last year, and I own both on Steam, but they play better on my Xbox). I just buy games on sale. I got the Mass Effect Legendary Edition (remaster of the Shepard trilogy) for $6. That sale is still on. They also have Mass Effect 4 for $3 (or $4 for Deluxe) and the first one (OG 360 version) for $5. Bought all of it. Love those games. I got Hogwarts Legacy for $10. That nasty trans-hating Harry Potter author didn’t have any input in the game and in fact it has a bunch of gay couples and a trans character to spite her. I really don’t like her views and avoided the game for a couple years, but I’m hooked. I love flying around and exploring the castle. I also play Switch games. Those tend to last longer than PC/Xbox games. My wife got Animal Crossing last year and burned out after a couple weeks. I still check in on my island a few times a week. It’s honestly a lovely game.
