Published on April 21, 20200

Does Valorant Work on Mac? | Can You Play Riot’s Shooter on Mac OS?

With no Valorant console versions in sight, some players are wondering about the possibility of playing Riot's upcoming shooter on Mac. Does Valorant work on Mac, or is the competitive online FPS staying as a PC exclusive for many months to come, or indeed for its entire lifespan? The question makes perfect sense, since League of Legends supports both PC and Mac, and it would be very reasonable to see Valorant also following suit.

Can I Play Valorant on Mac OS?

The answer for that question is a resounding no, at least for now. Even if you managed to get a Valorant beta key from the very random Twitch drops, these are exclusive to the PC client. You can only play Valorant on a machine equipped with a Windows operating system.

Some Mac players are already considering a few workarounds that could get Valorant running on their machines. Using virtual machine options or a utility called Bootcamp are under heavy scrutiny, but the results are either non-existing or with severe performance issues. One thread on Reddit shows the problems that a player had while running Valorant on Bootcamp, and when he contacted Riot support, he received the following reply:

“Hate to give you some bad news, but the game is not supported on Macs at the moment, and while you can try a workaround like Bootcamp, it is not guaranteed to work. Because Bootcamp is a 3rd party program developed by another company we can't go into detailed troubleshooting with it. I can give you a few basic troubleshooting steps, but we can't go further than this:

Follow this guide to perform what's known as a ‘clean-boot'. This will start Windows with no extra programs running, as we want to test the game with no interference. Note: Do not disable the Riot Vanguard app, or it will prevent you from launching or playing.

Ensure that you are not running any sort of 3rd party antivirus like Sophos or BitDefender. You should not have to worry about system security as the base Windows Defender does a fine job. Also make sure “gaming” programs like AMD Raptr, Razer, and Nvidia share are disabled.

2) Make sure you are an admin on your machine, run the game as an admin by right clicking and selecting “Run as administrator” on the shortcut.

3) Run Windows Update and accept all available updates. You must be on the latest version of Windows to play.

4) If the above steps do not help, uninstall VALORANT, Riot Client and Riot Vanguard.

This guide shows the process for Vanguard but it will be the same for all 3. After running the uninstaller manually delete the entire directory your game files were stored in, by default it's C:\Riot Games You'll then want to reinstall by using the link in the VALORANT beta website. Ensure you are running the installer as an admin.”

Despite the guide above, most players are still having problems learning how to play Valorant on Mac. So, does Valorant work on Mac? Currently there isn't a reliable way to run Valorant on machines with Mac OS, and Riot hasn't revealed any plans for an official Mac client. However, this could eventually happen further down the line, as its flagship title League of Legends has already proved.