Is Valorant on Mac?

With anywhere from 15 to 20+ million players enjoying Valorant every month, it’s safe to say that the title’s popularity is pretty well solidified. And this is a game that isn’t even available on Steam. If you’re switching platforms, here’s how to uninstall Valorant properly. However, due to how Riot Games has structured their anti-cheat system, a considerable number of players were more or less locked out of Valoran at launch: Mac users.

The game has been out and ruling the charts for almost five years now, so what’s the deal? Is Valorant on Mac yet? Unfortunately, the answer as of March 2025 is still no. BUT! A workaround does exist for a select group of Mac users, and there’s actually a good explanation why you can’t play Valorant on your shiny new MacBook Pro.

Let’s talk about it.

Valorant’s Competitive Secret Sauce

When it comes to the exact reason why you can’t play Valorant on Mac, we need to take a good hard look at the anti-cheat used to keep things fair. That system is called Vanguard, and it was built from the ground up by Riot to maintain the integrity of the competition that drives their biggest games. We aren’t going to dig too deep into the mechanics of how Vanguard works, so here is all you need to know: Vanguard was built for use on Windows, and only Windows.

According to a Reddit post from a Riot dev, things are this way because porting things to Mac takes an incredible amount of time and effort, and the studio has chosen instead to focus their development efforts in ways that most benefit their entire community. Yeah, it’s a bummer if you happen to be in the small cross section of that community that happens to exclusively use Apple hardware, but there is a way to get around this barrier. If your hardware is old enough, that is…

How to Play Valorant on Mac

For a long time, Apple had a feature available on their machines called Bootcamp. What Bootcamp does is allow users to install Windows on a separate partition of their hard drive, giving them the ability to dual boot both operating systems on a single machine. Crazy, right? To get Boot Camp up and running, all you need to do is pull up the Boot Camp Assistant on your machine. This Apple support page will be able to walk you through that process. Boom! You’re in!

Unless you’re using a MacOS computer from the past five or six years. If you are, then you’ll notice that Boot Camp isn’t anywhere to be found on your machine. That’s because the new ARM-based Apple Silicon chips that power these computers – the “M Series” chips – aren’t compatible with it. Boot Camp only runs on Intel-based Apple computers, and you can only play Valorant on Mac with Boot Camp, which means that if you have a Mac that can play Valorant – it probably wouldn’t run very well anyway. Quite the unfortunate situation.

The Current State of Things

Officially, there’s no way to play Valorant on Mac, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. Riot just has too much on their plate. So sadly, unless you have an ancient Mac, the only answer is to really just get a PC. The upside is that PC gaming has really taken off lately, so there’s no shortage of awesome games to play with better quality and performance than you would get on a console.

Speaking of console, you could absolutely play Valorant on a PS5 or Xbox Series console. Here’s the latest update on console availability. The only reason that we didn’t discuss that more in-depth is because it’s a well-known fact that the real competitive shooter scene will always be found on PC, regardless of what game we’re talking about. Mouse and keyboard control will always trounce controllers, and no amount of aim assist can change that.

Now, if you want to get in on the Valorant action and you’re not too worried about your rank or competing at a high level, then console Valorant play is totally viable. Or, if you’re looking for a shortcut to jump into the game, you can buy a Valorant account. Even better, the cost of getting into the PlayStation or Xbox ecosystem has been steadily going down, which makes it much cheaper than building a top or even mid-level gaming PC. The choice is ultimately yours at the end of the day, but for Riot fans stuck on Mac, we’re sorry we didn’t have better news to share.