If you want to run Windows game on your Mac, you’ve so far had two options – the free Whisky app, and the paid CrossOver one. Sadly, but understandably, Whisky is now going away …
If you want to run general Windows apps on your Apple Silicon Mac, you can do so using VMware Fusion Pro or Parallels Desktop. But if it’s Windows games you want to run, then that’s a far more demanding business, and most people have opted for the more specialist Wine-based apps Whisky or CrossOver.
Whisky had the advantage of being free, but its developer says he is now ceasing to update it, meaning it will likely quickly prove useless for new games.
Isaac Marovitz says that it has just gotten too hard to support, and he no longer enjoys it.
I lost interest in the project. Running it is incredibly time-consuming, and as I’m still a student and also not being paid for work on Whisky it becomes hard to justify working on it if I no longer enjoy it […]
Developing Wine is hard. The codebase is exclusively written in C for maximum portability, but that also places a rather high barrier to entry for those looking to contribute. Not to mention the reverse engineering skills required to debug malfunctioning apps and games. A lot of incredibly talented people spend a lot of time working on it, but for a project like Wine, you need people working on it full-time.
Wine is one of those few projects that actually has sizeable funding behind it. Valve has invested a lot into the project as it’s the backbone of Proton, on which their whole gaming-on-Linux and Steam Deck strategy is based.
The problem is, macOS is not Linux, and it poses significant challenges that are unique to it over any other UNIX operating system. Fixes for macOS have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS. As you can imagine, the pool of developers with those skills is very limited.
Additionally, he says that CrossOver is doing the heavy lifting, it’s right that CodeWeavers should be paid for their work.
Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don’t produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so. As a result, the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero. This is not a fair trade, and continuing this parasitic relationship could easily harm CrossOver’s continued profitability and the existence of Wine on Mac as a whole.
CrossOver costs $74, including all updates for 12 months. It’s not actually a subscription model, as you can buy it once and continue to use it forever, but you’ll likely need periodic updates for new games.
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