Epic Games on an Apple Silicon Mac

Mac launcher vs Windows launcher

Epic ships a Mac build of its launcher, and for a game with a macOS version that is all you need. But like the Mac Steam client and the Mac GOG Galaxy, it only offers you the Mac builds; Windows-only titles simply aren't installable from it.

The Windows launcher doesn't know what it's running on. Inside a Wine-based Windows environment it sees a Windows PC, which is what should put the Windows version of everything your account owns in front of you — purchases and the free weekly giveaways alike. Nothing is transferred and nothing is bought twice. How far we have actually taken that on a Mac is set out under what we've tested.

Which app to run it in

• Heroic Games Launcher is free and open source, and takes a different route entirely: it talks to Epic's servers itself, so it downloads and runs your Epic games without the Epic launcher being installed at all. If you want the shortest path to an Epic game on a Mac today, start here.
• Mythic is a free, open-source Mac app built around Apple's Game Porting Toolkit, and Epic is the library it was built for.
• CrossOver installs the Epic Games Launcher from its app catalogue and includes D3DMetal. Paid, with a 14-day trial; its 26.x updates have specifically fixed Epic launcher problems.
• Grapple (ours) installs the Windows launcher in one click on either plan and handles the first-run mess described below. Free runs one game of yours, forever, and launchers never count as that game. DirectX 9 to 12 is covered — D3DMetal comes with the app.
• Sikarugir is free and manual: make a wrapper, run the installer in it, do the fiddling yourself.

For every method side by side, including cloud gaming, see every way to play Windows games on a Mac.

Step by step

The same steps apply whichever app you use; only the buttons differ.

1. Check whether the game has a Mac build. Epic Games Store pages list the platforms a game supports. If there's a macOS build, install it with the Mac version of the Epic Games Launcher and stop here.
2. Rule out anti-cheat first. Fortnite and several other Epic titles use kernel-level anti-cheat that will not run through any Wine-based tool on a Mac. Check before you spend an afternoon on the setup.
3. Set up a Windows environment. Install a Wine-based app that runs on Apple Silicon — CrossOver, Sikarugir or Grapple — and let it create a 64-bit Windows environment. They all need Rosetta 2; macOS offers to install it the first time it's needed.
4. Install the Windows Epic Games Launcher inside it. Run Epic's installer in that environment, or use your app's one-click Epic setup if it has one. What the installer puts down is a small bootstrap, not the finished launcher.
5. Let it download the rest of itself. On first start the bootstrap downloads the full launcher — around 1 GB — and replaces itself with it. Expect a few minutes of apparently nothing happening.
6. Sign in and pick a graphics layer. Sign in with your Epic account, then choose the graphics layer for the games you install: DXMT or D3DMetal for DirectX 10/11, D3DMetal for DirectX 12. The launcher's own window is fussier than the games are.

The first run: a 1 GB download

This is the part nobody warns you about. Epic's installer is small, and what it installs is a bootstrap launcher whose only job is to download the real one — roughly 1 GB — and replace itself with it. On our Mac the whole first run took about four minutes, most of it looking like nothing was happening. Every run after that starts the launcher directly.

Three things make that swap harder under Wine than on a PC, and they are worth knowing about:

• The updater service. The launcher checks whether a Windows service is registered before it will draw anything, and gives up in silence when it isn't. Windows registers that service from an elevated relaunch; Wine reports every process as un-elevated, so on a Mac the relaunch never happens and the launcher sits there burning CPU. Registering it directly takes a second.
• The self-update loop. Left alone, the bootstrap downloads the full build, hands it to the updater service, the install fails because the bootstrap is still shutting down, and the service starts the bootstrap again — forever. The way out is to let the download finish, stop everything, and run the install on its own.
• The launcher's own window. It draws itself with DirectX 11 and quits outright if it can't get a device, which not every DirectX-to-Metal layer will give it. In our testing only DXVK did. The games you install are a separate question — they use whichever layer suits them.

If you are doing this by hand, budget an evening and expect to restart the launcher more than once. If your app handles it for you, budget four minutes and a cup of tea.

What we've tested — and what we haven't

Here is the line, drawn where we actually ran out of evidence. On a real Apple Silicon Mac:

• Tested. The launcher installs, downloads and installs its own full build, and reaches its sign-in page. We confirmed that from its logs and from what the processes were doing; nobody has sat and watched the sign-in page draw.
• Not tested. Signing in. Seeing your library. Downloading a game. Installing a game. Launching a game. There is no Epic account on our test Mac, so none of that has been through a single run.

So we don't claim that any Epic game runs on a Mac through Grapple, and you won't find an Epic title on our compatibility pages until we have played one and can say which Mac it ran on. Get there first and we'll publish what you found.

Fortnite and anti-cheat

The most-asked Epic question on a Mac has the least satisfying answer. Fortnite uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which can support Wine and Proton — but only when the game's publisher opts in, and Epic has said no. That holds for every Wine-based Mac tool, ours included, and no setting changes it. Epic points Mac players at cloud gaming instead. The details are on our Fortnite compatibility page.

Epic games without kernel-level anti-cheat are a different matter — plenty of the store's single-player catalogue has nothing standing in the way beyond ordinary DirectX translation. Which ones actually run, we can't tell you yet. The wider picture is in anti-cheat games on a Mac.

FAQ