Gaming on macOS in 2026: Tips, Tricks and Guides
Gaming has changed in recent years for both Mac and Linux. In this post, you’ll learn about many of the ways to play, how to improve performance and what to expect. I will also be noting which I have used myself and have experience with, as well as my favourite one.
This post doesn’t cover remote environments like Parsec, Xbox Cloud or anything else.
State of macOS Gaming in 2026
Throughout the recent years, gaming on the Mac has been improving gradually, thanks to many great developers coming up with their own solutions to share with the world. Apple has also been doing their part, trying to bring gaming to the Mac now more than ever, thanks to Metal and the Game Porting Toolkit.
There are multiple ways of playing games on the Mac nowadays so we’ll be going over each of the more popular ones and get into their pros and cons. I’ll be noting which are paid and which are free in advance.
In this specific post, we’re going to cover Whisky, CrossOver and Parallels, as well as some honourable mentions.
1. CrossOver (Paid & Free Trial) - Personal Favourite and Experience
Cost tiers:| Free | 0€ | 14 days || Plus | 74€ | 1 Year * || Life | 484€ | Lifetime |
* Indefinite Access but 1 Year of Support and Updates1.1 About
When it comes to gaming on the Mac without needing Windows Virtual Machines, CrossOver comes to mind right off the bat.
CrossOver is based on Wine, an Open Source Windows Compatibility Layer, which has been at the forefront of non-Windows gaming for many many years and has experienced a boom in popularity because of Valve’s version of Wine, called Proton.
1.2 Experience and Features
Using CrossOver is quite easy. You install it as any other app, boot it up, and can immediately create your first Bottle and install your needed apps into it. Bottles are environments that emulate a Windows Environment.
But how do you install apps? When you click into your Bottle, there’s a button called “Install Application into Bottle”. Pressing that gives you a list of the most popular installed apps on CrossOver. Of course these aren’t the only ones. You can go ahead and search for any others you might want. But what if you can’t find them? No worries! Top right of the Install dialog, CrossOver gives you the ability to “Install an unlisted application”. Then just follow the on-screen dialog and “BOOM” you’re done!
After you’re done installing, it should pop up in the bottle. Now you just double click the app and enjoy the experience of the feel and handling the way you might already be used to on Windows.
Some games or apps might need extra configuration or fine tuning to fully work but that is hardly avoidable with most solutions
Essentially everything tedious about Wine’s setup and configuration is made very simple and straightforward in CrossOver’s version, while still keeping all the configuration you’d need to fine tune any apps, bottles or the installation itself.
1.3 Troubleshooting
There are going to be times, when you might be facing issues with running certain apps or games because of missing components such as “Visual C++” or ”.NET” or anything similar.
We don’t have enough time to look into them in this post, but I invite you to look at my other post where I go in-depth into CrossOver and give you a full review of it once it’s published.
The mentioned post is still in development.Come back another day, maybe it's already up!It will be linked here once the time comes.Also, why not subscribe to the RSS Feed as well? :)
2. Parallels (Paid & Free Trial) - Personal Experience
Cost tiers:| Standard | 99,99€ | 1 Year | - No Trial| Pro | 119,99€ | 1 Year | - Free Trial| Business | 149,99€ | 1 Year | - Free Trial
+ and also Enterprise tier which can only be gotten via Sales ContactThere are many features you get and don’t get with each tier. Too many to talk about here. You can check them out here: Parallels Desktop
2.1 About
If you’re aiming for a more “Native-like” approach and have a powerful Mac to be able to back that claim up, Parallels definitely comes to mind. It is a virtual machine approach to the whole Windows compatibility option. It offers perfect integration into the Mac system and brings along many features for user convenience, simplicity and compatibility.
2.2 Experience and Features
Using Parallels is also very easy. By following the setup steps it provides you, you are able to get going in no time! But compared to CrossOver for example, it takes A LOT more resources, because it is all running in a full Windows Virtual Machine and not an Emulated Environment.
While that sounds like an issue, it only poses as one if your Mac is on the lower end when it comes to Memory, since it uses shared memory between the CPU and GPU, unlike the split approach of a standard Desktop PC with a CPU and GPU. If you want a very smooth experience using it for Productivity and Gaming, I personally recommend over 16GB of memory. But having 16GB is also fine. I used it on mine and I was able to play games and get work done regardless. The performance wasn’t what I had hoped for because of the memory limitation. However, I am sure if I had 32GB on my Mac, it would run 10x better!
Experience aside, let’s look at key selling points that make it a good option to consider regardless of a more steep price. For example, installing Windows is as easy as a few mouse clicks and it already does the job for you. It integrates with your system, meaning that everything feels like it’s part of your Mac instead of being a separate machine. It brings useful system tools to the table too if you’d need them.
But which plan would you even choose? In my personal experience, the viable one for the average gamer would be Pro, since it gives you everything you’d need to be able to run games with no issue on a powerful machine. Yes, the price is a lot more than Standard, however the performance difference is worth it. Keep an eye out on their site though. They like to offer discounts semi-regularly at times! Keep in mind, these prices apply for the 1st year and revert to the original price the next billing cycle!
As of writing this post (5th June 2026), Pro is on sale at 77,99€ per year!
3. Whisky (Free & Open Source) - Personal Experience
Cost tiers:| Open Source | 0€ | Lifetime |3.1 About
Whisky is a so-called “free alternative” to CrossOver.
It is important to note that the original creator and maintainer of the Whisky project, discontinued and archived the app as of May 11, 2025.
However, a fork of the project popped up and is a Community Maintained version of it, with the intention to address already existing issues with the original, keeping the project alive and up to date!
3.2 Experience and Features
You install it, open it up, make a bottle and you’re ready! It offers all the Wine configuration you’d need but doesn’t offer a modified version of Wine, the extensive polish and installation features that CrossOver does. So if you strongly prefer Open Source, this might be an option for you.
I haven’t tried the Community Maintained version of it yet, since I am not looking to switch apps, but it is important to note that before I started using CrossOver, I used Whisky as my day-to-day!
4. Honourable Mentions
These were the main 3 players that you should consider when it comes to support, ease of use and performance.
But obviously there are alternatives to almost all of these as well as other solutions. But none have gotten to the point of mimicking any of the above-mentioned. Let’s list a few more!
4.1 Apple Game Porting Toolkit
This one has already been mentioned at the start of the post and is already used by CrossOver itself to run games. However it can be used on its own for free, but requires more setup, technical know-how and patience to reach.
4.2 VMware Fusion
If we’re staying on the free side and want to stick to how Parallels functions, there’s also VMware Fusion. While it used to be paid, they now offer non-commercial Pro licenses for free! It offers all you’d need but needs more resources compared to Apple’s GPTK and isn’t as integrated and straightforward as Parallels.
4.3 UTM?
For gaming, UTM is NOT an option you could consider, since it doesn’t offer the 3D acceleration and performance others do in the Virtual Machine space. However, if you don’t need many frames or insane speeds, it’s a great VM app to have, which offers both Virtualisation and Emulation of an incredible amount of architectures.
Conclusion
So to summarise, there are more and more options for gaming on Mac than there ever were and I expect the support and demand to continue growing over the years. Sure, we won’t be seeing the incredibly extensive support that Linux has been receiving but Mac also won’t fully be left in the dark either. So don’t let your hopes die, we’ll get there at some point!
If you’d like to see what kind of performance you could expect gaming on Mac, I’ll be sharing that exact thing sometime in the future in a different post. It will be linked here when it’s ready!
The mentioned post is still in development.Come back another day, maybe it's already up!It will be linked here once the time comes.Also, why not subscribe to the RSS Feed as well? :)