Valve on Thursday announced that SteamVR no longer supports macOS.
As spotted by UploadVR on Friday morning, developer Valve relayed the news in a Steam announcement, explaining that the decision was made so that its engineers can “focus on Windows and Linux.”
“SteamVR has ended OSX support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux,” it says. “We recommend that OSX users continue to opt into the SteamVR [macos] branches for access to legacy builds.”
“Users can opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties… -> Betas,” it concludes.
No further explanations were provided, and frankly, there’s isn’t much else to Valve’s announcement at all.
The only other information shared in the update notes are instructions that tell macOS users how to opt into legacy SteamVR builds by accessing the software’s “Betas” tab in its Properties menu. That’s a handy tool for macOS-using SteamVR faithfuls, but it’s a temporary measure: eventually, outdated versions of SteamVR will probably stop functioning in one way or another.
It’s a sad end for a feature that was originally so promising that Apple even made it part of the WWDC keynote presentation in 2017. It was supposedly proof of Apple’s commitment to embracing better graphical performance.
This news will certainly be disappointing to some, but Valve has likely examined SteamVR’s macOS user numbers and decided that the cost of supporting it simply isn’t worthwhile in the long run.
