Latest Steam Client Beta adds native support for Apple Silicon Macs ahead of Apple’s planned sunsetting of Rosetta 2

Valve-owned online game store Steam this week announced the release of a new Steam Client Beta that runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs without the need for Rosetta 2.

The news comes only a few days after we learned that the upcoming macOS Tahoe 26 will be the last major firmware update to support Intel-based Macs. We also learned after that announcement that Rosetta 2, a translation layer that allows apps containing x86_64 instructions to run on Apple’s ARM-based silicon, would be deprecated after macOS 27, giving developers just two more years to utilize it.

Apple’s reasoning was that they intended for Rosetta 2 to be a temporary migration tool between Intel and Apple Silicon Macs while developers worked on native Apple Silicon apps — it was never intended to be a permanent band-aid, as some developers have certainly treated it.

The upgraded Steam Client Beta is mostly good news for Apple Silicon Mac owners, as a fully native build will be able to take better advantage of Apple’s lightweight and performant hardware. Users can expect faster and more responsive app behavior, including app launches, navigation, and page changes, among other things.

Anyone who has ever used the original Steam client for macOS knows that it wasn’t always the most performant software known to the platform. Fortunately, support for Apple Silicon has largely improved that.

Another reason why this is good news is that Apple used stage time at WWDC 2025 to announce Metal 4, the company’s next generation graphics API that developers can use when building their games. With Steam gaining native Apple Silicon functionality, this could push more game developers to build Mac-compatible games, potentially bolstering what has often been regarded as a weak ecosystem for gaming.

While anyone can download and try the Stream Client Beta, it’s still considered a beta and could be riddled with bugs. For that reason, we recommend that most users continue using the regular release channel until Apple Silicon support becomes a part of it.

Are you excited to see Steam getting support for Apple Silicon? Let us know in the comments section down below.

Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2025/06/13/steam-beta-macos-apple-silicon-support/