One of the best game launchers for Mac just got macOS Sonoma's best gaming feature

(Image credit: iMore)

One of the best open-source gaming launchers, Heroic Games Launcher, has been updated to support macOS Sonoma and its Game Porting Toolkit.

Heroic Games Launcher is an easier way of managing your games bought from Epic Games, GOG, and Amazon, all in one place on your Mac. But this new update, which will benefit you more once macOS Sonoma launches later this year, could help lay the groundwork for unsupported games to work on the Mac too.

For those unaware, Apple's 'Game Porting Toolkit' allows developers to move their game over to a Mac running macOS Sonoma with little effort. But it goes deeper than that. A video over at Apple's developer site, explains how this is done, essentially, it's similar to its Rosetta 2 feature, which enabled apps running on Intel Macs to run on Apple silicon models by way of emulation.

The same applies here but for games. Once the latest macOS update is released, any games that are updated to have this framework will work in this launcher - and this could be huge for gaming on the Mac. "Another big addition to this release is our new Apple Gaming Port toolkit detection. This feature makes it easier to use Apple's GPTK on the Heroic launcher to play DX11 and DX12 games," the release notes state.

macOS Sonoma could finally make an impact with games

Heroic Games Launcher showing Hitman on macOS — (Image credit: iMore)

We've spoken before about gaming on the Mac and how we've been here before with Apple's efforts in decades past, but with its new Toolkit, we've already seen games like Cyberpunk 2077 run on an Apple silicon Mac with almost no issues.

Heroic Games Launcher implementing this could allow for some games, such as Fortnite, to eventually run on the Mac with some updates. But on the other hand, it could also allow some games to unofficially run on the Mac thanks to the Toolkit.

Apps like Whisky have already packaged up the Toolkit as an easy-to-use tool to help run games on macOS Sonoma, so we could see these efforts apply to Heroic Games in the future.

But are there any particular games that you'd like to see come to the Mac thanks to this Toolkit? Do let us know over at the iMore Forums.

Daryl is iMore's Features Editor, overseeing long-form and in-depth articles and op-eds. Daryl loves using his experience as both a journalist and Apple fan to tell stories about Apple's products and its community, from the apps we use everyday to the products that have been long forgotten in the Cupertino archives.

Previously Software & Downloads Writer at TechRadar, and Deputy Editor at StealthOptional, he's also written a book, 'The Making of Tomb Raider', which tells the story of the beginnings of Lara Croft and the series' early development. He's also written for many other publications including WIRED, MacFormat, Bloody Disgusting, VGC, GamesRadar, Nintendo Life, VRV Blog, The Loop Magazine, SUPER JUMP, Gizmodo, Film Stories, TopTenReviews, Miketendo64 and Daily Star.