Create amazing experiences using the powerful suite of game technologies built to harness the full capabilities of Apple platforms. Spanning from high-level to low-level, these technologies offer a wide array of graphics, gameplay and social features to make your titles even better.

• Gaming App For Mac
• Best Mac For Gaming
• Gaming On Mac Pro

ARKit

Mac Game Compatibility Checker™ Ever purchase a game but only later learn it's not compatible with your Mac? The MacGameStore app's built-in Compatibility Checker compares your Mac to the game's system requirements in real-time. Don't waste your money on games that won't work on your Mac. Portal 2 ($9.99) Portal 2 may be the perfect game. It’s a puzzler at heart, but it injects those. Riot Games, the developer, invests a lot of time and effort to constantly update the game and introduce new champions and rotating game modes, so you’ll surely never get bored. In order to run the game, you’ll require a Mac running OS X 10.8.5 or higher, with a 2GHz processor, at least 2GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT or better.

Build unparalleled augmented reality experiences for hundreds of millions of users on iOS and iPadOS, the biggest AR platforms in the world.

Metal

Maximize the graphics and compute potential of your games with Metal, which provides the best access to the GPU on iOS, macOS, and tvOS.

SceneKit

Use this fully featured high-level graphics framework to create 3D animated scenes and effects in your games.

SpriteKit

With SpriteKit, it’s easy to create high-performance, power-efficient 2D games.

ReplayKit

Enable players to share gameplay recordings or broadcast live games to players and viewers online with this easy-to-use framework.

GameplayKit

This framework provides a collection of essential tools and techniques used to implement modern gameplay algorithms.

Model I/O

Integrate physically-based materials, models, and lighting for SceneKit, GameplayKit, and Metal with Model I/O.

Game Center

Take advantage of Game Center, Apple’s social gaming network. Gamers can track their best scores on a leaderboard, compare their achievements, and start a multiplayer game through auto-matching.

Game Controller

Integrate your games with MFi game controllers and take advantage of other modes of input. Learn how to add support for physical D-pads, buttons, triggers, joysticks, and more.

On-Demand Resources

Create smaller app bundles, enable faster downloads, and add up to 20 GB of additional content hosted on the App Store.

Apple Arcade

We’re looking for games that redefine games.

If you’re working on a groundbreaking, unreleased game and would like it to be considered for Apple Arcade, we’d love to hear from you.

All Mac® users know about the Mac App Store®, and most have probably used it to get an app or two. If you’re also a Parallels Desktop® for Mac user, there’s another store you should check out: the Microsoft Store.

The Microsoft Store is accessible from Windows 8 or 10—but in all practical terms, this means onlvidy Windows 10, since Windows 8 is used so rarely these days.

The Microsoft Store is for all things to play or consume on Windows 10: movies, music, apps, books, fonts, extensions to the Edge browser, and even hardware. In Apple® terms, it’s iTunes®, the Mac App Store, iBooks®, and the Apple Store® all rolled into one. However, in this blog post, I will focus mainly on apps available from the Microsoft Store.

Accessing the Store

Just as Apple has the App Store app, Microsoft has the Microsoft Store app. (See Figure 1.)

Here are some apps I have downloaded from the Microsoft Store, none of which are available on the Mac App Store:

*Available for the iPhone®/iPad® in the Apple App Store.

All of these apps run fine for me on my MacBook Pro® in a Windows 10 VM using Parallels Desktop 14—with the single exception of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition. I used every setting I know to get this app to run with acceptable performance, but in the end, I gave up. (Age of Empires is my favorite game of all time, as I posted back in 2014.)

You can predict whether an app in the Microsoft Store will run in Parallels Desktop by looking at its system requirements from within your virtual machine. (See Figure 2.)

Figures 3–5 show some other apps from the Microsoft Store running in Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro.

Gaming App For Mac

Video 1 shows some games from the Microsoft Store running in Parallels Desktop 14 on my MacBook Pro:

Best Mac For Gaming

And Video 2 shows some of the 3D models available for the Sensavis Visual Learning Tool:

As of today, there are about 800,000 Windows 10 apps in the Microsoft Store, as opposed to only about 11,000 in the Mac App Store. There are a number of excellent apps in both stores, and the Mac user with Parallels Desktop can take advantage of both to find the perfect app for your needs.

Gaming On Mac Pro

Have you found a particularly useful or novel app on the Microsoft Store? If so, tell us about it in the comments.