Can CS2 Run on a Mac?

Counter-Strike is one of the most iconic First Person Shooter games of all time, and thus the recent release of Counter-Strike 2 was monumental for the Counter-Strike community. However, some players who played on Mac were devastated to learn that they would not be able to run the game on their operating system.

Since day one of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, players running MacOS could run the game. CS:GO was relatively light on resources compared to many modern shooters, so with a decent computer, players could achieve good performance in terms of frames and ping. However, when Counter-Strike 2 was announced in early 2023 and the closed beta version of the game was rolled out to certain players, Mac users quickly learned that CS2 was not compatible with their operating system.

However, many players remained confident that this was only for the beta, and that once the official release of CS2 arrived, they would be able to play the long-awaited addition to the Counter-Strike series. But their optimism was met with unfortunate news: CS2 would not be available to anybody running MacOS software. Soon after this was discovered, Valve made the following statement:

As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players.

Although less than one percent of active CS:GO players may seem like a small amount, with more than 30 million unique users every month, this means that close to 300,000 fans of the game have been abandoned and left to find new games to replace the hole that CS2 has left in their heart.

TL;DR: CS2 is not available to play on a Mac, and as far as we currently know, MacOS operating systems will not be supported by CS2.