The Humble Bundle game service is ending Mac support

Humble is a game service that is known for its Bundles, curated collections of independent games where buyers can not only set the price, but also decide how the money is divided amongst the developers. However, Humble recently sent an email to its customers announcing that Mac and Linux support will end on January 31, 2022. The company will only support Windows games through a subscription service.

If you’re a Humble user and have games stored in the Humble Trove, the company’s catalog of games, you have until the end of this month to download them. After that, only PC versions will be available. According to a Humble blog post, the Windows-only Humble Choice subscription service is $11.99 per month and grants access to all of the games in the entire collection.

It’s an unfortunate end of a Mac service that was introduced well over ten years ago, but to anyone familiar with gaming on the Mac, it’s not surprising. There are many factors that work against the Mac and make it tough for a game developer (indy or large) to make a viable business with Mac games.

Decades ago, Apple actually had game “evangelists” and a dedicated games API team (the APIs were called “sprockets”), but the Mac’s small marketshare and slower GPU performance was a huge hurdle that many developers decided wasn’t worth overcoming. While today’s Apple silicon offered much improved graphics over past third-party implementations, Apple’s abandonment of 32-bit app support, its preference for its own Metal graphics API over OpenGL, and other obstacles make it difficult for a high-end Mac game to gain any traction.