Automatically port Unity games for macOS or Windows to Linux

Games based on the Unity engine can be deployed and run on multiple platforms, including Linux. The platform-specific engine files are mostly generic, so we take the official game files and run them with Unity's Linux binaries. This way we get a native Linux version of the game without the need of compatibility layers, such as Wine.

This method can work as long as the game was exported with OpenGL renderer enabled. Windows versions usually default to DirectX and only rarely have OpenGL enabled, but macOS versions mostly have OpenGL enabled and chances are high to get them to run.

Many Unity titles are officially available for Linux, but there are also some cases where this method can create a missing Linux port. I have tested all the Unity games from Epic Games that I collected for free. Since Epic Games does not support Linux game versions, you can also benefit from this method to play your Unity games that you may have collected on that platform.

Take the compatibility status list as reference if you are only interested in games that are known to be playable.

To determine which games are based on Unity, you can check out steamdb.

You can download games with Legendary, the free and open-source Epic Games Launcher alternative.

List all your titles for macOS or Windows

legendary list --platform <Mac|Windows>

Install the macOS or Windows version of game with

legendary install --platform <Mac|Windows> <App name>

You can download Steam games for a specific platform with steamcmd. To download macOS versions, use the following command:

steamcmd +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType macos

Inside steamcmd run the following:

login <account_name>
app_update <app_id>

If the game has a _Data directory prefixed with the game title (e.g. The Last Campfire_Data), you should rename it to just Data. Then run the script with the path of the Unity game as argument

./unify.sh <game dir>

The script probes the game for the Unity version and OpenGL renderer, then downloads the relevant engine files and copies them into the game directory. If it succeeded, try to start the game via the LinuxPlayer binary. If it does not run, make sure to check the logs usually in ~/.config/unity3d/<vendor>/<title>. In most cases, the game misses some native libraries that need to be replaced. For Steam games it might work to just copy an arbitrary .so file to the place of the expected libsteam_api64.so.

The script will cache the downloaded and extracted unity files by default in the folder ~/Unity/Hub/Editor, but you can override this location using the UNITY_REPO environment variable.

If the script is not successful, the game may not be a Unity game or it may have a different structure. The script in its current state is very basic and does not cover all cases.