Hello Mac game developers,
We wanted to amplify the messaging around Rosetta’s deprecation and signpost you to the options for your projects, with plenty of runway to plan ahead.
Developers shipping Universal Mac binaries or Apple silicon only are not affected. This post is particularly relevant to Unity creators shipping games for the Mac Desktop where:
- Your game ships only Intel x86_64 binaries
AND - Your customers play on Apple silicon hardware
If that’s you and:
- You are on Unity 2020.3+ and your game gets major updates: At minimum plan to move to a Universal binary. We strongly recommend you consider an Apple silicon only binary if dropping Intel hardware is acceptable for your product.
- You are on pre-2020.3 and you do not intend to update: You can test your game against Apple’s upcoming legacy support for older games, during the macOS 27 beta.
More details and important dates are below.
The timeline
- Now (macOS 26.4 / 26.5): users launching an Intel-only app on Apple Silicon hardware already see a system alert warning that Rosetta will not be available in a future macOS release.
- macOS 27 Public Release (Golden Gate, Autumn 2026): the last macOS to contain Rosetta for general use.
- macOS 28 onwards (est Autumn 2027): Rosetta is removed for the majority of use cases. Apple has shared publicly that it will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older and unmaintained gaming titles that still rely on Intel-based frameworks.
- Unity: we recently announced that we are moving away from Mac Intel support altogether after Unity 6.7 LTS, across both Unity Mac Editor and Mac Runtime.
Background
Rosetta is a translation layer that enables users to run Mac Intel (x86_64) applications on Apple silicon hardware. Launched in 2020, its purpose was to ease the transition for developers to Apple silicon. If you ship Mac games with only Intel x86_64 executables and your customers have Apple silicon hardware, the Rosetta layer is doing the work under the hood today.
Apple announced Rosetta’s deprecation during WWDC 2025. As the timeline above shows, macOS 27 is the last release to contain it for general use; from macOS 28, only a limited subset remains for legacy games.
What you should do next depends on your project’s Unity version and whether you intend to keep updating it.
Actively updated games
If you are on Unity 2020.3 or later and intend to support or update your game going forward, we recommend planning your transition in this order:
- Ship a Universal binary: At minimum move to a Universal binary, which includes both Mac Intel and Apple silicon executables. This keeps all of your customers’ hardware covered, and it will avoid kicking off the ‘legacy’ layer for your product from macOS 28+.
- Move to Apple silicon only: This removes your dependency on Rosetta entirely, however it will make your application unavailable to older Mac Intel-based hardware.
Keep Unity’s own timeline in mind. As noted above, we are moving away from Mac Intel support after Unity 6.7 LTS, so plan to be off Mac Intel builds accordingly.
If, for any reason, both of the above are unfeasible for your scenario, please follow the guidance below for older and unmaintained games.
Older / unmaintained games
If your project is old, on a Unity version below 2020.3 (which does not offer Apple silicon export), and you do not plan to make major updates, or cannot update to a more recent version of the engine, you should plan to test your game with the new tooling that Apple provides for older and unmaintained games.
A couple of important points to take note of:
- This is a beta-only testing tool. It is available now, under the macOS 27 beta, and will be removed before macOS 27 becomes generally available. Its purpose is to let you confirm whether Apple’s legacy layer can still run your game.
- It disables Rosetta and may affect other processes.
From Apple’s announcement:
A new command line tool lets you enable support for legacy Intel-based games during beta releases. To enable it, run the following command in Terminal: sudo game-test-tool enable. Restart your Mac computer for the change to take effect. Once enabled, games run transparently through the new underlying system behavior. Note that enabling legacy game support disables Rosetta, non-game processes might crash or behave unexpectedly, and this feature is intended only for playing legacy Intel-based games and is not available outside of macOS beta releases.
We recommend that you run the tooling for your project every time you make an update to your game, to check whether the underlying legacy support can still handle the API calls you need. In case it cannot, you may need to upgrade (see Actively updated games above). Any issues you find with this tooling, please submit to Apple directly.
Questions
We welcome any questions or comments below.
The Unity Apple Platform team