I think it's more about not wanting to port the steam client to arm than it is about porting the game. There's source engine games ported to ppc and arm platforms after all.

> I play Dota from time to time on my M1 Max Macbook Pro and it runs more than fine.

Dota on macOS doesn't ship an arm binary and uses moltenVK to translate graphics api calls, it's on borrowed time if valve doesn't want to ship proper binaries as rosetta isn't gonna exist in a few years.

The irony is that the steam client is basically a web app container. It’s high time they invest in making steam a universal cross platform and cross architecture app. They’ve gotten by with a mediocre app for a really really long time.

I miss the old flat style steam had when I was a kid - the simple vgui toolkit used in all their games of the era was simple and responsive. Now they have the same 2003 vgui elements in the app still but entire sections of the app have been redesigned with some CEF based web view thing that randomly likes to turn into a nonresponsive black blob on the screen until you force kill and restart or simply not appear on the screen at all.

They still keep it updated and even fix macOS specific bugs so I'd hope they'd keep that up. But yeah, I guess once Rosetta goes they'll probably just throw the towel in.

I hope they don't. Source is already pretty much isa agnostic, it isn't difficult at all for them to set up the infrastructure to ship universal binaries for macOS and it just seems to be a power play on Valve's part.