Valve Drops SteamVR for macOS, as Linux and Windows Now the Key Focus

Valve has surprisingly decided to abandon SteamVR for macOS, with the company to only focus on Linux and Windows going forward.

While it’s not known why the company has decided to drop the support for the macOS version of SteamVR, Valve says that developers continue building apps for Apple’s operating system, only that no new feature or bug fixes will be released in the future.

Needless to say, this isn’t necessarily good news for macOS developers who invested in SteamVR, but Valve says from this point, it’ll only focus on the development of the platform on Windows and Linux.

“SteamVR has ended macOS support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux. We recommend that macOS 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,” Valve explains.

Surprising decision

Valve’s decision to drop SteamVR support for macOS is something that comes out of the blue, despite some people actually saying it makes sense given the low usage.

But on the other hand, Valve launched SteamVR for macOS with much fanfare in June 2017, taking the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) to share the announcement with the developer community.

For the time being, however, focusing on Windows and Linux just seems to be the better way to go. While the strong dev support on Windows is no surprise, Linux is also gaining more ground in this area.

For example, Linux has improved a lot in terms of gaming, and this allowed more Steam tiles to be released on the platform, with some diehard fans even projecting that at some point in the future, it could become a gaming alternative to Windows from one end to another.