Whisky, a popular open-source front-end for Wine that made Windows gaming on Mac more accessible, has ceased development. The project's 18-year-old creator, Isaac Marovitz, announced the shutdown and encouraged users to switch to the paid CrossOver app instead.
In offering the reasons for his decision, Marovitz expressed concern that Whisky was potentially harming the Wine ecosystem by competing with CrossOver, a commercial product from CodeWeavers that helps fund Wine development.
"Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," he wrote on the project's website. He said that Whisky contributed "practically zero" to Wine development while potentially threatening CrossOver's financial viability.
Marovitz is also a full-time student currently attending Northeastern University, and so he has had to balance the increasing demands of the project with his academic responsibilities. "I lost interest in the project," he admitted. "And as I'm still a student and also not being paid for work on Whisky, it becomes hard to justify working on it if I no longer enjoy it." He said that occasional updates to Whisky may still come if macOS "fundamentally breaks the main app," which happened with macOS Sequoia 15.4.
Writing on the Codeweavers blog, CEO James B. Ramey said in response that he appreciated Marovitz's work. "We 'tip our cap' to Isaac and the impact he made to macOS gaming," Ramey wrote, acknowledging that Whisky, like CrossOver, was "a labor of love built by people who care deeply about giving users more choices."
During its run, Whisky gained popularity for its user-friendly interface that simplified running Windows games on macOS. The project highlighted the potential of Apple's own Game Porting Toolkit, which is based on the same Wine technology that powered both Whisky and CrossOver.
Despite stepping away from Whisky, Marovitz told Ars Technica he isn't done with Mac gaming: "Right now I'm working on the recompilation of Sonic Unleashed and bringing it fully to Mac."
