Is it one of those times when we can't have nice things because of corporate licenses and contracts, in this case, between Apple and Microsoft?
Its not surprising, and not because of anticompetitive contracts.
- Apple is a completely different CPU architecture, graphics architecture, and graphics API. Thats not an easy port for most studios.
- There is no evidence that the Mac gamer consumer base is large. Maybe it is, but thats a chicken and egg problem.
- Many (a large fraction?) of Macs run the base M1/M2 in shells that can't sustain high power for very long, with a small combined CPU/GPU RAM pool of 16GB. Or even worse, 8GB. This would provide an unsatisfactory experience in many modern PC games, even with really fast Proton-esque translation layers.
> Why can't Apple do what Linux does and allow Windows games to run on Mac?
I dunno the answer to that, but this question answers your original question.
Most "big" game devs do precisely zero linux testing. The handful that do basically boot up Steam on Ubuntu or a Steam Deck and check if the game starts up and runs for a bit. Thats a remarkable level of turnkey compatibility that Apple is nowhere close to yet.
The mac market is small compared to the PC market. Now factor in that Apple CPU's are a different architecture and it makes sense that Linux would have more games written to be compatible with it vs. MacOS.
But, just like Linux there are emulators that will let you do it...
https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
There are many more out there but that is probably the most widely known.
Specifically because it doesn't have native Vulkan drivers to run DXVK at high performance. That's just about it; Game Porting Toolkit is a confirmed fork of DXVK with Metal bindings. Apple hardware could be supported upstream if it was on their agenda, but... eh.