Couldn't Apple spend their resources on that? Proton is open-source, and Apple's the one with the incentive to have more "prestige" AAA game devs to parade around during keynotes.
Apple could but they're not interested in non-native games, they want native ports or nothing. As I discussed a few posts over, Apple went to the trouble of developing a DirectX compatibility layer, but then told game developers they're not allowed to use it for anything besides evaluating whether their game would run well enough on Mac hardware. If they go ahead with a port then Apple still expects them to do it all the hard way.
It's textbook "perfect is the enemy of good" because yeah, compatibility layers have overhead, native is better, but if you insist on native everything but can't get devs on board then you just end up with no games.
Compare Steam Machine (2014) to Steam Machine (2026). The difference this time around is Proton support, and you can pretty easily see the hype on the internet for the new version, even after the original version was mocked relentlessly in some circles for having "no games."
Well, some games like Civ V still manage to work! But they actually had to port it to 64-bit, otherwise it'd have the fate of all other 32-bit macOS games unfortunately...
Also, how could Apple kill the old software that is better than the new, if it doesn't control the emulation? This way they don't have to even have 10% of the features to force you to buy again.
I think they are also absolutely addicted to cruddy pay to win mobile games and they don’t want to give up that sweet drip feed of IAP that they get a 30% cut of… which is substantial.
For funsies, try searching App Store apps and find a way to filter out results for apps with IAP. Nope!
(Source: me, who spent time at a mobile gaming company as we figured out how to continuously optimize our funnels so that some rich dudes in Qatar could continue to spend $40K a month on useless cosmetics.)
Apple thinks PC games are for gross nerds and would rather not sully their fashion image by associating with gamer any more than is absolutely necessary. So no, Apple won't be doing that.
Every few years at WWDC they'll make some mention of some upcoming new gaming features. A couple years ago they showcased that their new iPhones could run the latest Resident Evil game. Hell, they brought out Kojima one year to announce a Death Stranding port for Mac.
The efforts are usually short-lived and mostly fruitless, but I wouldn't say they're "grossed out" by gaming nerds.
It would make sense, but Apple has large amounts of disdain for people having fun with their products. This evidenced by the large amounts of engineering they've put into very large, capable, and efficient GPUs, only to squander them on rendering web pages and liquid glass.
They released Apple Vision Pro with no ability to play popular PC games on it.
That's great as long as it works, but D3DMetal is a proprietary, closed-source Apple library so you can and probably will get rug-pulled by Apple neglecting or deprecating it as their priorities change. They've only ever positioned it as an "evaluation environment" for developers to estimate how their game will run before going ahead with a native Mac port, not as something for end-users to play Windows games with, so if developers don't bite then they'll have no reason to keep working on it.
Right now, the user experience with Crossover is that you have to manage the whole thing of installing Windows Steam in a Wine bottle, then installing games within that second Steam installation, then dealing with the fact that Steam doesn't seem to like having two instances running on the same computer (my native Steam loses connectivity every time I start the Crossover instance).
Wanting Proton on Mac isn't about that specific fork of Wine, it's shorthand for wanting the user experience that Valve gives you on Linux.
As a comparison, before proton, you could run steam with wine under linux. Wine directx implementation was sufficient to make a quite a few games work just fine, but the experience was atrocious. You either had to install a new instance of steam per game or install everything under one bottle which didn't work well as you had to tweak the install per grame. Personally I used it just for one or two of games that I really wanted to play and could actually run outsisde of steam after installation.
