Disclaimers

Last updated: [OWNER: the date these disclaimers take effect]

Not affiliated

Malbec is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Apple, Microsoft, Valve, Blizzard Entertainment, CodeWeavers or any game publisher.

Malbec’s engine includes work from Recall, an open-source project by Joshua Asher Nelson, used under Recall’s licenses (MIT and Apache-2.0). Recall and its author are not affiliated with Malbec.

Trademarks

Overwatch and Battle.net are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment. Steam is a trademark of Valve. CrossOver is a trademark of CodeWeavers. DirectX and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft. Mac, macOS, Metal, Apple silicon and Rosetta are trademarks of Apple. Other game names are trademarks of their owners. We use these names only to say which games and products Malbec works with or is compared to.

Anti-cheat and your accounts

Malbec doesn’t change game files or game memory (the one file it writes is Overwatch’s display settings file; see the terms), and it includes no ways around anti-cheat. It runs games through Wine, the same way other Windows compatibility apps on the Mac do.

Some games use anti-cheat that refuses to run under compatibility software. Games with kernel-level anti-cheat (for example Valorant and Fortnite) don’t run in Malbec. Malbec labels the games it knows about as Won’t run, with the reason.

Game publishers decide what their anti-cheat allows. We can’t guarantee that a publisher won’t restrict an account that plays through compatibility software. You play under the publisher’s and the store’s terms, and at your own risk.

Game artwork

Game artwork belongs to each game’s publisher. Malbec isn’t affiliated with the publishers whose art it shows.

In the app, Malbec shows game artwork from Steam’s public servers for games in your library and in Malbec’s catalog. Malbec downloads it on your Mac when it’s shown and never ships it in the app. You can turn it off in Settings › Games › Show game artwork from Steam; Malbec then shows its own text covers.

On Malbec’s website, we show the publishers’ Steam cover and wide artwork for each game in Malbec’s catalog, to identify the games that run in Malbec: on the home page, on the games page and on each game’s own page. We copied it once from Steam and keep it on our own site; the website doesn’t load it from Steam. Games that don’t run in Malbec keep Malbec’s own text covers. We don’t use game artwork in ads or social media posts. If you publish one of these games and want its artwork taken off our site, write to press@malbec.app.

Compatibility labels

Every game has a label: Tuned, Supported, Preview, Untested or Won’t run.

Tuned: profiled frame by frame, with settings of its own for that game. The label itself is not a measurement.
Supported: we played it end to end on Malbec’s engine: install, play, save, quit, play again.
Preview: expected to work; not signed off yet.
Untested: a game you added. It may run well; nobody has checked it yet. Before you play, Malbec shows any reason it knows of that the game won’t run, but a game nobody has tested can still fail.
Won’t run: blocked by kernel-level anti-cheat, needs DirectX 12, or blocked by its publisher. The label gives the reason and where it comes from.

Labels describe our testing on the date we did it. They are not a promise that a game will keep running after the game, its store or macOS changes. If a game has a Mac version, Malbec says so, and we suggest you play that version.

Performance

Every performance number we publish names the Mac, the game and scene, the settings, the date, how many runs we made and how we measured, and links to the raw data. Numbers from other projects are theirs, quoted as theirs and linked. Your results depend on your Mac, the game version and its settings.

When we compare Malbec with CrossOver, we measure both ourselves, on the same Mac, on the same day and with the same in-game settings, and we name the version of CrossOver and the setting it ran with. We publish every run in the comparison, the frame times behind them and the limits of the test next to the numbers. CodeWeavers, the maker of CrossOver, hasn’t reviewed or endorsed these measurements.

LAWYER: Owner decision, 22 October 2026: the website now publishes a named comparison with CrossOver, in Overwatch, on the home page (the Frame rates section), /performance/#overwatch, /compare/ and the Overwatch page: “61% more frames per second”, “8.5× higher 1% lows” and “0 stutters over 50 ms per minute” against 52, with the medians, the Mac (MacBook Pro, M5 Max, 48 GB, macOS 27.0), the date (22 October 2026), the run counts (5 maps on Malbec, 3 on CrossOver 26.2 set to D3DMetal), every compared map’s numbers and its frame times. The limits are stated on the page: the maps of each side were played in one block, not alternated; the benchmark map plays a random rotation, so the two sides didn’t play the same maps; Malbec’s maps were cut at the tester’s key presses, CrossOver’s at the loading screens between maps because the key presses weren’t recorded; the preset was set by the tester on both sides and its name wasn’t recorded; both sides had played earlier that day, and some shader building in CrossOver’s session can’t be ruled out; we measured CrossOver 26.2, while 26.3 is newer; we set CrossOver to D3DMetal and haven’t checked which setting it picks for Overwatch by itself; its DXMT setting isn’t measured yet; each side’s sessions at other settings (Malbec with its performance settings off, CrossOver’s first session) are left out and not published. Is this comparative advertising allowed under Directive 2006/114/EC Article 4 and the Danish Marketing Practices Act (objective, verifiable, representative, comparing like with like, not misleading), and is the wording of the headline numbers acceptable? Does naming CrossOver and its version need more than the trademark line above (nominative use)? Do CodeWeavers’ license terms, or Apple’s for D3DMetal inside CrossOver, limit publishing benchmark results? Must we re-measure against the current CrossOver, alternating the runs, before the comparison is public? (README question 33)

Rosetta and future macOS versions

Malbec needs Rosetta 2. macOS 27 is the last version with full Rosetta. We are working on an engine that doesn’t need it and will say before macOS 28 ships what Malbec needs there. We can’t promise games will run on macOS 28 today.

DirectX 12

Malbec’s engine runs DirectX 10 and 11 graphics on Metal. Many games ship both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12; Malbec hides DirectX 12 so they choose DirectX 11. Games that only support DirectX 12 don’t start. We’ll say so here when that changes, not before.