Where To Get Games For Your Mac

There are three main places you can find, buy and download games for your Mac. The Mac App store is the obvious place, but there are also two well-established sites that sell a variety of top titles. In addition, we may soon have a fourth option when Apple launches the Apple Arcade.


You can also view this video on YouTube for closed captioning and more streaming options: Where To Get Games For Your Mac.

Video Transcript / CaptionsCLICK TO EXPAND

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode I'm going to show you where you can get games for your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you by the more than 350 people that support it in its Patreon Campaign. Find out how you can become a part of it at macmost.com/patreon.

So while the Mac is not a great gaming platform there are plenty of games available. There are three main places that you can go to find games for your Mac. First off we've got the Mac App Store. You already have that on your Mac. You just go to the App Store and then in the left sidebar go to Play and it takes you to a section where it features new games and editor's picks and games in different categories. So you can always check here to browse for games. You can also go to Categories and then Games and you can see the list of the top paid and free games. Click on See All to expand those lists.

There are a ton of games here from some triple A new titles to a lot of cheap little puzzle games which are sometimes free with an app purchase or sometimes completely free. So there's just about something here for everyone. The advantage to using the Mac App Store are that you are probably already setup to use it. So you can quickly go in and make a purchase without signing up for something new. Also, of course, anything that you buy in the Mac App Store you can install on any Mac, using your Apple ID, and your purchases are kept around forever. So you can uninstall the app and then reinstall it. That's really useful for games because sometimes we get tired of a game and then later on want to go back to it.

Another advantage to using the Mac App Store is it works with family sharing. So you can buy a game and then other members of your family, using family sharing, can also play. The disadvantages of it are the most major games are not going to appear in the Mac App Store. So you're going to get a few of them but if you're serious about gaming and want to play some of the top Mac games you're probably going to have to go to one of these other places.

Probably the biggest place to go is Steam. You can go to steampowered.com and it's an online store but there's also an engine involved. So you have to download the Steam app and that's how you would actually download the games and play them. So you buy them here. You can shop for them here. But you need the Steam app to actually get them onto your Mac. This isn't a big deal. I've had that installed for a long time and I've bought many games over the years from Steam. If you look at the games list you'll see there's even a browse by platform there and you can go to Mac and just look at the games that are available for Mac. The list is pretty deep. You can see it goes many pages in so if there's not something you see on the front page don't think that there wouldn't be something on page 6 or 10 or something that wouldn't be a big title that you might be interested in.

While Steam is the biggest player it's not your only choice. There's a site called GOG that has lots of games as well. So GOG has been around for a long time and originally it featured old vintage games that had been updated to work on current platforms. But now it also has triple A new titles as well. You can go into the store here and when you go to browse the games there's actually a big section here that's just Mac games. So you're going to find a lot of new stuff. You're also going to find a lot of old stuff. I first got acquainted with GOG years ago when I saw that they had Ultima, the original series from way back when, and I was able to download that and play it on my Mac. You can still get those as well as a lot of new games.

One of the advantages to using GOG is a lot of the games can just be downloaded on their own. So you can purchase them on the website and download them. They do have an app similar to Steam that has extra functionality, like chatting and multi player stuff, but it's mostly optional.

Now there will be a fourth place soon to buy games for your Mac. That's Apple Arcade which was just announced. So this is going to be a different kind of thing. You're going to pay a subscription fee and then you'll be able to play any of the games in Apple Arcade. It's supposed to work on Macs and also iOS and maybe Apple TV as well. Some of the games will be exclusive or maybe all. We don't really know the details yet. So we have to wait for later this year to see if there is a fourth great place to get games for your Mac.

Related Posts:
Apple May Be Planning Game Subscription Service, Updates To Pages, Numbers and Keynote Bring a Few New Features, Apple Offering iTunes/App Store Bonus Again, Researcher Demos Keychain Exploit But Refuses To Help Apple