It's disheartening to hear that such an excellent game was kept from entire platforms because of what happened in that story.
Why won't Apple prioritize a stable graphics layer?
The question are: would Valve had still made a profit if it sell only 50000 copies pre-orders and then the normal copies? Probably yes. Would it be easier to Valve to make their games work on the current macOS? Probably yes, they had the updated CS2 already working on macOS, but then canned it at the last minute for the usual "no one will play it on Mac".
But Valve didn't even try, they ported Steam to macOS in 2010, ported a bunch of games to 32-bit, when every Mac out there was already 64-bit, and called it a day. They didn't even fix their store to properly show which game is 64-bit or not, or fixed their Steam Input to properly support controllers. They left the app half-broken and then complained they had not enough users. Steam is still a x86_64 app after 4 years of Apple Silicon.
On the other hand Apple didn't even care about games too much. So yes, no one really cares.
Mac is just an unstable platform. Developers either put up with it or get shown the door. Valve doesn't like to be pushed around by the platforms it uses, which is why they rejected the PS3 and began to prop up Linux as a viable alternative for gaming.
The only Valve game with official macOS support right now is Dota 2, which is x86-64. Once Rosetta disappears (whenever that is), there won't be any official Valve games available for modern macOS.
This is how I feel, I own all the Half-Life and Portal games on Steam, but since the 64 bit ARM transition they're just useless bits. And it feels like it shouldn't that big a problem to port them, but nobody seems to care enough.
