That depends on what you want to play and what other things that suck that you’re willing to tolerate.
The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Steam Deck can run then that’s about what you can expect to run on a newer Mac.
Installing Steam or GOG Galaxy with something like Whiskey.app (which leverages the game porting toolkit) opens up a large number of games on macOS. Games that need Windows root kits are probably a pain point, and you’re probably not going to push all those video setting sliders to the far right for Ultra graphics on a 4K screen, but there’s a lot of games that are very playable on macOS and M chips.
Wow, had no idea this worked as well as it does. I remember the initial hype when this showed up but didn't follow along. Looks like I don't have to regard my Steam library as entirely gone.
Steam Deck-level performance is quite fine, I mainly just want to replay the older FromSoft games and my favorite indies every now and then.
Fair warning, I haven't dug that deep into compatibility issues or 32 bit gaming compatibility but it's definitely something to experiment with and for the most part you can find out for free before making a purchasing decision.
First and foremost, it's just worth checking if your game has a native port: https://store.steampowered.com/macos People might be surprised what's already available.
With Wine syscall and Rosetta x86 code translation, issues do pop up from time to time though, like games that have cutscenes that are encoded as Windows Media Player specific formats, or any other media codecs which aren't immediately available since it's not like games advertise those technology requirements anywhere and you may encounter video stuttering or artifacts since the hardware is obviously dramatically different than what the game developers were originally developing against and there's things happening in the background that an x86 Windows system never does. This isn't stuff that's overly Mac specific since it usually impacts Linux equally but it's a hurdle to jump that you don't have to deal with in native Windows. Like I said, playing Windows games outside of Windows is just a different set of pain points and you have to be able to tolerate it. Some people think it's worth it and some people would rather have higher game availability and keep the pain of Windows. Kudos to Valve with creating a linux based handheld and the Wine and Proton projects for improving this situation dramatically though.
Besides the Game Porting Toolkit (which was originally intended for game developers to create native application bundles that could be put on the App Store), there's also Crossover for Mac that does their own work towards resolving a lot of these issues and they have a compatibility list you can view on their site: https://www.codeweavers.com/ and alternatively, some games run acceptably inside virtualization if you're willing to still deal with Windows in a sandboxed way. Parallels is able to run many games with better compatibility since you're actually running Windows, though last I checked DX12 was a problem.
In addition to Whisky, it seems to not be well known that VMWare Fusion is free for personal use and can run the ARM version of Windows 11 with GPU acceleration. I tried it on my M1 Pro MBP and mid-range Steam games ran surprisingly well; an M4 should be even better.
The GPUs in previous M chips aren’t beating AMD or NVidia’s top offerings on anything except VRAM but you can definitely play games with them. Apple has released their Game Porting Toolkit a couple years ago which is basically like Wine/Proton in Linux and if you’re comfortable with Wine and approximately what a Steam Deck can run then that’s about what you can expect to run on a newer Mac.
Installing Steam or GOG Galaxy with something like Whiskey.app (which leverages the game porting toolkit) opens up a large number of games on macOS. Games that need Windows root kits are probably a pain point, and you’re probably not going to push all those video setting sliders to the far right for Ultra graphics on a 4K screen, but there’s a lot of games that are very playable on macOS and M chips.