> manufacturers just aren't that interested in supporting them
AAA games are starting to show up on Steam for macOS these days. Baldur's Gate 3 runs pretty well, for example!
The real shame is that some older indie games are disappearing just as easily, given Apple's deprecation strategy – while Microsoft basically never breaks backwards compatibility, Apple recently cut off 32 bit games (killing about half my Steam library), and presumably Intel-only binaries are next.
Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac applications five years ago; recent only by comparison to Microsoft's theoretical backwards compatibility. Apple dropped support for 32-bit Mac hardware, firmware, and drivers in 2012, so there was a period of seven years where game developers had every reason to make their Mac releases 64-bit, but to a disappointingly large degree they didn't.
This was probably due in large part to a lack of pressure on the Windows side. It was absolutely absurd that even a big budget (and memory-hungry) game like Skyrim was released in 2011 as a 32-bit only game, and didn't get a 64-bit release until 2016.
I didn't enjoy macOS killing compatibility with so much of my Steam library either, but I do at least respect that Apple had some solid reasons, and save some of my ire for the game devs that shipped outdated binaries.
Dropping 32bit support was the right decision. Most of those games work fine in emulation on Apple Silicon if they are single player, or alternatively in a cloud gaming service like Nvidia's that you can use to access your Steam library directly.
Well, as I said, about half my library is gone due to the lack of 32 bit support. The entire Orange Box by Valve, a few indie games...
Not sure if many of them are even available in emulators, and a cloud gaming service for a 2D indie game seems like overkill.
And yes, I generally agree with Apple deprecating technologies after a while (sometimes it's better to make a clear cut by forcing a minimum API version, CPU architecture etc. rather than to have compatibility be hit and miss for really old things), but in the case of gaming specifically, I sometimes prefer Microsoft's approach.
There are also tools like CrossOver[1] or even free tools like Wine that work reasonably well, 2D games should not have an issue. People have played TF2 in Wine on Apple Silicon. So while half your Steam library won't run directly, it's not like it's gone forever. Parallels is also an option.
It's probably a bit of a chicken and egg thing at this point, plus the fact that most "serious" gamers are going to have desktop PC's anyway.