If you’ve played games in your Steam library on the Mac, you’ll know that switching from an Intel Mac to one with Apple Silicon, you suddenly needed Rosetta 2, the emulator built into macOS, to do it. It was a smooth process, so you might not have even noticed it. But Rosetta 2 has its last days ahead, so it’s good news that Steam has just revealed a way to play its games natively.
At WWDC25, Apple announced that Rosetta 2’s support is coming to an end. “Rosetta was designed to make the transition to Apple silicon easier, and we plan to make it available for the next two major macOS releases – through macOS 27 – as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps to help developers complete the migration of their apps. Beyond this timeframe, we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks,” Apple said.
Rosetta 2 is tightly integrated into the Mac, but it had its downsides, such as slower performance and an experience that could be “clunky,” as 9to5Mac puts it.
Valve has just released a new version of Steam for Mac as part of a beta update and it works directly on Apple Silicon as it’s what’s called a Universal app, which signals it will work faster. “Under the hood, the key change is that Valve has moved the Chromium Embedded Framework from Intel-only to Apple Silicon. That cuts out one of the biggest performance bottlenecks in the entire app,” 9to5Mac says.
If you’d like to try the beta, open the Steam app, choose Steam from the menu bar, then choose Preferences, which will open the Steam settings menu. Here, click on Interface and look for Client Beta Participation. It’ll say No beta chosen but you can now select Steam Beta Update and you’ll be steered to restarting the app. It will download the update (around 230MB) and relaunch Steam.
Initial reviews, such as this on YouTube by Andrew Tsai, suggest that the result of installing the beta is an improved experience, with faster launch, smoother scrolling and more.
