Valve earlierRelease announcement, confirmed that it will cancel the development of SteamVR on the macOS platform, and stated that it will continue to focus on the development of SteamVR on Windows and Linux platforms in the future, which means that no virtual reality content will be promoted on Mac hardware in the future.
At the WWDC 2017 event in 2017, Apple announced that it would collaborate with Valve to enable SteamVR to run on the macOS platform. It also released API resources such as Metal for VR and allowed Mac devices to use virtual reality headsets such as HTC VIVE or Oculus Rift through external graphics cards or adapters. At the time, it even provided developers with aExternal Graphics Card Box Hardware Development Kit.
While SteamVR continued to beta-test on macOS, Valve and Apple seemingly stopped collaborating further, instead focusing on development on Windows and Linux platforms. Statistics show that only approximately 4% of gamers currently use macOS, indicating that the proportion of gamers who play games on Apple Mac hardware remains relatively small, and the proportion of those who play games through virtual reality is significantly smaller.
Therefore, Valve's announcement to cancel its VR development on macOS isn't entirely surprising. After all, macOS offers significantly fewer resources than Windows in terms of game development, and unlike Linux, it lacks the open design that has attracted numerous open communities to continuously expand its application resources.
On the other hand, judging from the actual number of users, the number of people playing games on Mac devices is indeed far less than that on Windows PC devices, and there is a very obvious gap. Perhaps for this reason, Valve finally gave up on continuing to develop SteamVR on the macOS platform.
Such a result may not have a significant impact on players, but it may have a certain impact on some developers who have already invested in the development of virtual reality content on the macOS platform.
