Can you play Hogwarts Legacy on Mac? In short – no…

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You’re probably wondering if you can play Hogwarts Legacy on Mac. Unfortunately, the short answer is that you can’t. Mac’s are renowned for not really being able to run any PC games, and Hogwarts Legacy is no different. The game, at the moment, is only playable on PC and Console, though we’re not sure what plans there are for Hogwarts Legacy arriving on Mac.

Hogwarts Legacy has seen a hugely successful launch, though there’s been a few issues concerning drivers, crashing, frame-drops, and black screens on launch. If we were to see any movement bringing Hogwarts Legacy to Mac, it likely won’t happen until these issues are tidied up.

Can you run Hogwarts Legacy on Mac?

It’s not possible to natively run Hogwarts Legacy on Mac as games are nearly always designed to run as executables on the NT Kernel (the kernel is, on a base level, the operating software’s architecture). Mac and Macbooks instead run on the Unix kernel, which is a derivative of Linux. Due to the incompatibility between these architectures, software running on Windows is often incompatible with Mac and Linux.

That said, there’s one possible solution you can try, though it will likely only be possible on the highest end Mac devices.

We haven’t tested this method out yet, so we can’t reliably say whether or not it will work, though you might be able to load Hogwarts Legacy using a Windows Virtual Machine, or parallel boot-loading Windows onto OS/X.

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You’d have to really tinker around with installing graphics drivers and DirectX12, which would honestly be a huge hassle on a virtual machine, though theoretically it is possible to run the Hogwarts Legacy software. For example, some people have managed to get GTA V running on Macbook before, which is an impressive feat.

There’s a few pieces of software you can do this with – including Parallels and Onecast.

Will Hogwarts Legacy be on Mac or Macbook?

Unless there was a huge demand for Hogwarts Legacy to run on Mac, the developers would likely not consider a port of the game. Even if they did, the graphics on the Mac might not be able to handle Hogwarts Legacy’s demands, especially considering the potential memory leak.

Despite Hogwarts Legacy’s huge demand and player-base, it does just seem unlikely that the game will ever be ported over to Mac.


Ultimately, you can’t play Hogwarts Legacy on Mac just yet. In fact, ‘just yet’ will likely give you a lot of false hope. Mac’s just aren’t designed for gaming, and the likelihood that they’ll ever be considered by game developers is incredibly low.

We’re going to be keeping an eye out for updates on whether or not Hogwarts Legacy will ever make it to Mac, though our honest prediction is that it won’t. In the meantime, you might be interested in whether you can use a controller with Hogwarts Legacy on PC, or if 16GB Ram is enough memory for PC gaming. Make sure to check back in with us periodically for the latest updates on Hogwarts Legacy and laptop gaming.

About the Author

Amaar Chowdhury

Amaar is a gaming journalist with an interest in covering the industry's corporations. Aside from that, he has a hankering interest in retro games that few people care about anymore.