There are ways to jack in without using SteamVR, but still. Ain’t that a kick in the teeth. Here’s Valve’s little statement. To access the legacy builds you can “opt into a branch by right-clicking on SteamVR in Steam, and selecting Properties… -> Betas.” You can also use Boot Camp to load into Windows, but that is a faff and a shame. SteamVR is Valve’s software for running VR games. Not every game needs it, and you can use a tool called OpenComposite to play SteamVR games without having SteamVR installed. I haven’t used that myself, so can’t speak to how well it works. Thanks to a surge of interest caused by Half-Life: Alyx, nearly a million Steam users now own cybergoggles - but that’s still only 2% of all Steam users, and only 4% of Steam users play on Macs. The number of people with a Mac beefy enough to play VR games will be relatively minuscule, so it’s an understandable move, if not a welcome one. In brighter news, you can at least play Disco Elysium on Mac, thanks to a recent update. Who needs Alyx when you could be an alcoholic detective getting into arguments with your necktie?
