Running Windows games on Mac makes it even more expensive

If you want to run Windows games on your Mac, so far, there have been two options: the free whiskey app and the paid crossover 1. Sadly, but of course, the whiskey is gone now…

If you want to run popular Windows apps on your Apple Silicon Mac, you can do so using VMware Fusion Pro or Parallels Desktop. But if it’s Windows game If you want to run it, it’s a much tougher business and most people opted for more specialized wine-based app whiskey or crossovers.

Whiskey had the advantage that it was free, but the developer says he is about to update it now. This means that it’s not going to be useful in new games anytime soon.

Isaac Marovitz says it’s too difficult to support and he doesn’t enjoy it.

I lost interest in the project. It takes an incredibly time to do it. I’m still a student and I’m not paid for my whiskey job, so if I’m not enjoying it anymore, it’s hard to justify working on it (…)

Wine development is difficult. The codebase is written exclusively in C for maximum portability, but for those trying to contribute, it presents a fairly high barrier to entry. Not to mention the reverse engineering skills needed to debug malfunctioning apps and games. Many incredibly talented people spend a lot of time working on it, but projects like wine require people to work full-time.

Wine is one of the few projects that actually have substantial funds behind it. Valve invested a lot in the project as it is the backbone of Proton. This project is based on the entire Gaming-on-Linux and Steam Deck strategy.

The problem is that macos poses an important challenge inherent to it not Linux, but on any other UNIX operating system. MacOS fixes must come from someone with incredibly knowledgeable about C, wine, windows, as well as MacOS. As you can imagine, there is a very limited pool of developers with these skills.

Furthermore, he says the crossover is doing heavy lifting and it is right that Code Weber should be paid for their work.

The whiskey is based on a crossover, but there are no customised modifications. I honestly don’t have the skills or time needed to do so. As a result, the total amount of whiskey contributes to the wine is virtually zero. This is not fair trade, but by continuing this parasitic relationship, it can easily harm the continued profitability of the crossover and the presence of wine across the Mac.

The crossover costs $74. This includes all updates over the course of 12 months. It’s not actually a subscription model. You can buy it once and continue to use it forever, but you may need to regularly update your new game.

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Image: The Kingdom is coming