Install Windows Steam on Mac

Sometimes one Steam just isn't enough

Steam logo

This tutorial will show you how to use Wine to install the Windows version of Steam on your Mac. Why? Well, even though Steam runs on OS X and Windows, some games are Windows-only.

This tutorial will not be able to troubleshoot how to get specific games to work. For that, check out Wine's App Database.

Downloading and Installing winetricks


cd ~/wine/bin # or wherever you installed Wine
curl http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks > winetricks # downloads winetricks
chmod +x winetricks # makes winetricks into an executable script

Note: if you don't have curl installed, simply go to that website, save the page as 'winetricks', move it to the folder with all of your Wine binaries, then do the chmod +x winetricks.

Installing Steam Dependencies


winetricks tahoma
winetricks flash # It may install twice; that's okay

Installing Steam

Now that winetricks is ready to go, installing Steam is no problem:

Go to the Steam website and click 'Also available for Windows', beneath the green 'Install Steam Now' button.
Save the 'SteamInstall.msi' file to your Downloads folder
Open a Terminal and cd ~/Downloads (or wherever you saved the Steam installer)
Enter wine start SteamInstall.msi to start the installation process
You may get an "Installation ended prematurely because of an error" message while installing Steam, but don't worry about that.
Once Steam installs, cd to and open its folder in Terminal to make sure it's there:
- cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam && open .
Run wine Steam.exe
Wait for Steam to update itself, and that's it!

Video Demonstration

Here's a video walk-through of the installation process: