Malcolm Owen for AppleInsider:
Game publisher Aspyr is ceasing sale of its 32-bit Mac game catalog on Tuesday, with Monday being the last day the company is offering the titles for purchase, citing Apple’s shift of macOS to 64-bit and end of support for 32-bit as the reason for the change.
Apple has warned for some time that it was discontinuing support for 32-bit applications in macOS, with the recently-revealed macOS Catalina 10.15 being the first version of the operating system to work with just 64-bit apps. High Sierra was the last to support 32-bit apps fully, while the current macOS Mojave will be the last to support 32-bit applications at all.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s the end of an era, for sure. Buh-bye 32-bit apps!
From Aspyr’s support notice:
After today, the entire library of Aspyr titles on Mac will be 64-bit or will receive a 64-bit update before September.
For players who choose not to upgrade to Catalina, your games will continue to work and play just as always! So keep calm and game on. All your purchases on the App Store are linked to your App Store account, and you’ll be able to keep playing as long as you continue to use macOS Mojave.
For Steam players, if you stay on Mojave, you will be able to access your 32-bit Aspyr titles purchased on Steam. Alternatively, our titles all support SteamPlay, so you’ll be able to continue playing on a PC and/or Linux machine. We will continue to support our 32-bit games on Linux, so if you have any issues please reach out to our support team via support.aspyr.com.
Even with this change, it’s important to note that many of the titles we offer today are already 64-bit or will be by September, and will work on Catalina (and beyond) upon its release.
More info an the list of game titles that are being removed here.
How about providing 64 bit versions for your customers so we can keep upgrading our Macs instead of just withdrawing these games.
OK I’m confused, are they being withdrawn and replaced by 64-bit versions or are they just being withdrawn?
OK I’m not confused, I just misread the press release. The WHOLE library will be updated to 64-bit. Cool!
Pity thousands of apps will not receive this treatment! I get the feeling that dropping 32-bit will be a bit more disruptive than Apple predicts.
No, it will be precisely as they’ve predicted internally. People who need 32-bit apps have a real cool hack that will keep their apps running well into the future!
They won’t upgrade. There’s like, ZERO disruption!
The ONLY disruption will be to that tiny group of people who KNOW they need a critical 32-bit app BUT just feel a very very STRONG desire to get rid of their legacy system anyway. One would HOPE there wouldn’t be many of those, but the 5 that actually upgrade will take to ALLL the message boards to make sure everyone knows about this thing that everyone has known about for awhile.
Good luck when your regular ma and pa users realise a whole lot of their apps break!
The only issue I have with Apple dropping support for 32-bit apps is that I’ve stuck with Adobe CS6 rather than getting shackled to subscription-ware. Fortunately, I seem to be able to run High Sierra in a Parallels VM box, but it would have been nice not to have to go through that step to run Photoshop or AI.