Steam for Mac Now Available as Native Apple Silicon App With Latest Beta Release

Steam for Mac is one step closer to becoming a native Apple Silicon app. The Steam client and its helper application can now run natively on Mac computers equipped with M-series chips, with the latest beta version rolling out to testers on Thursday. With Steam about to transition to universal apps, it should offer faster performance and efficient memory consumption than the stable version, which relies on Apple’s translation (emulation) environment to allow older apps to run on modern Mac computers.

Steam for Mac runs directly on Apple Silicon instead of using Rosetta 2

Release notes for the Steam client beta released on Friday reveal that both the main Steam client and the Steam Helper app will run natively on Mac models equipped with Apple Silicon. This means that Valve has finally updated the Steam app’s code to run directly on the Apple Silicon chip, meaning it no longer requires Apple’s Rosetta 2 environment.

Beta testers who updated to the latest version of Steam for Mac reported that the native version of the app ran much faster than previous versions. The app takes less time to launch, and navigating to the Library, Store, and Community tabs is now faster.

The Steam client relies on Chromium as the application interface, and the stable version of the application is still extremely slow on modern Mac models. However, an upcoming update should bring native apps into the stable update channel, bringing these performance improvements to all Steam users.

In the months after Apple launched the first Mac models with the M1 chip in November 2020, developers began rolling out native versions of their apps for Mac computers. Over the next few years, many other app developers switched to using universal apps that ran natively on Apple Silicon chips, while some other apps still use Rosetta 2 to run on the company’s latest computers.

Shortly after Apple announced that macOS Tahoe would be the last operating system upgrade for Intel-powered Mac computers, Valve decided to launch a native version of Steam for Mac. The updated developer documentation also revealed that Rosetta 2 will be deprecated when macOS 28 is released in 2027, and Apple will retain some translation layers to support older games that have not been updated to run on modern Mac models.