The first tab lists apps or games that are specifically designed for the Mac, while the second tab lists iPad apps that can also run on Macs with Apple Silicon (and these games won’t show up in the Mac App Store at all if you’re using an older Mac that still has an Intel processor). And here’s a handy tip – if you do a search on the Mac App Store, for a word such as ‘Marvel’, you’ll find that the search results will show two tabs. Some of the latest iPad games – such as the hugely popular Marvel Snap – are designed to run on Apple’s M1 and M2 processors, and the developers can also make these games available on the Mac App Store as well. The transition to Apple Silicon has helped to bring some new games to the Mac too.

You do have to be careful here, though, as many F2P games are more interested in selling expensive in-app purchases rather than providing a fun game that you can enjoy without handing over loads of cash (this is particularly the case with card games, which constantly release new packs of cards for people to buy and collect). Quite a few of these F2P games will run on the Mac – the selection on the Mac App Store isn’t very good, but there are dozens of free Mac games on Steam and a few scattered around other games stores such as Epic and Gog.com. In recent years, there’s been a trend for ‘F2P’ games – ‘free to play’ – which can be downloaded and played for free, and then try to make their money by selling ‘in-app purchases’ (IAP) that let you buy new weapons or armour, or fancy clothes, pets and other accessories. There are, sadly, many games still available on the Steam store that will only run on pre-Catalina versions of the macOS, and we recently had to delete dozens of old games from our list of the best Mac games. And, just to make things worse, the arrival of macOS Catalina (10.15) a few years ago – which moved the macOS to 64-bit software and no longer supported older 32-bit software – killed off a lot of popular Mac games too. Apple has never been very interested in games on the Mac, and this has meant that Macs have never enjoyed the same range of A-List games titles as owners of Windows PCs or games consoles like the Sony Playstation or Microsoft’s XBox. The Mac games scene is – not to put too fine a point on it – a bit of a mess these days.

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