Palworld is a Japanese open-world multiplayer action-adventure game that is heavily inspired by the Pokemon franchise and has a ton of unique twists. It is one of the fastest-selling games on Steam, with over 2 million copies sold in a day of its release window.

With Palworld seeing such massive success, this begs the question, how do you play Palworld on the Mac? And, is it natively supported on Apple Silicon?

Can You Play Palworld on Mac?

Despite not officially supporting macOS, Palworld can be played on Mac thanks to virtualization tools like CrossOver.

In fact, we downloaded and tested ourselves and can confirm Crossover (and, in theory, any other Wine-based application) can run Palworld without bugs or significant issues.

With the introduction of Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, many games that generally were not supported on the macOS can now be played at reasonable frame rates on the platform. The beauty of the toolkit is that there’s no need for explicit support for the game to be rendered playable. It is just an out-of-the-box solution that tools like CrossOver take advantage of to deliver a much better experience. 

How to Play Palworld on Mac?

We’ve already tested Palworld on the Mac to provide you with the latest and most accurate results of how you can play the game. As we’ve mentioned, Palworld is not a native Apple Silicon game and cannot be run on macOS without the use of tools like CrossOver. But, while we’re big fans of native, this game is too good to ignore. This is why we’re going to go over exactly how you can play Palworld on Mac.

Best Method to play Palworld on Mac M1: CrossOver

Mac Used: M1 Pro 14-inch MacBook Pro 
Method: CrossOver 23 (version 23.7) + Steam Early Access version of the game

Here are some quick benchmarks we’ve recorded ourselves of Palworld running on Mac using CrossOver:

As you can immediately see, we’re not getting the best performance from the game even though we have a decent M1 Pro that runs the game well. Performance at fullscreen leads to an average FPS of 28, which is extremely choppy. When moving into more open areas (which is most of the game), you’ll see your FPS dip down below 26-27, which can be extremely jarring.

If you play the game in Windowed Mode, expect to see better results. However, you’ll be sacrificing most of your resolution since the game will be played at 30-40 FPS.

Sadly, the game really does not look good at that resolution, so we wouldn’t really recommend it. Thankfully, the game does not have any keyboard, mouse, or trackpad issues, even though Steam players have reported some slight glitches with an Xbox controller – CrossOver seems to be fine for now.

Since the game is currently in Early Access, we are hoping that performance improves over time. Plus, CrossOver has not optimized the game for Mac just yet. Because of this, a future update may also take the FPS a step up further as well. If you want to test out whether the game works well on your Mac, CrossOver offers a 14-day trial, allowing you to test the game out before you purchase the tool. We cover how to play Windows games using CrossOver here.

The Verdict: Should I Play Palworld On My Mac?

You can play Palworld on your Mac if you have an M1 Pro or a better MacBook. The game will feel choppy at times, but it still is a relatively playable experience. However, if you have a base M1 Macbook Air, we do not recommend that you play Palworld for now. 

The game will feel extremely laggy, and you won’t really be able to enjoy the open world at all due to the constant FPS drops and lag. We’re positive that the situation will improve over time as CrossOver optimizes the game for the Mac and Palworld gets out of Early Access, leading to performance gain on all ends.

Is Palworld Coming to Mac?

Palworld does not seem to be coming to the Mac anytime soon. This is because Palworld is a game developed by a relatively small Japanese studio that has just seen a huge burst of sales. This is Pocket Pair’s first major success, and they simply currently do not have the budget and resources to create a native Apple Silicon application for Palworld. Because of this, don’t expect the game to see any massive performance improvements or be Apple Silicon native anytime soon. 

Palworld “Mac” Requirements

As we’ve mentioned, Palwworld has not been released on the Mac just yet. However, the game’s official Windows requirements seem to paint a pretty clear picture of what you can expect from the game on the Mac’s end. They are the following:

Mac games like Palworld

Aren’t you happy with the FPS Palworld is providing right now? No problem, there are a ton of fun survival games that you can check out that mimic the feel of Palworld. Our top pick is going to be No Man’s Sky, an excellent survival game that has really been improved over time. 

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