Is it legal to use WINE to play PC games on Mac?
Solution 1:
I take issue with your premise: NO BIG GAMES (with the exception of Portal 2 and Starcraft 2) have been released for Mac this far.)
Evidently, you're unfamiliar with Steam. I don't know what your definition of "big games" is, but in my mind Civilization V, Counter-Strike, Assassin's Creed 2, etc. qualify. Best part about Steam is that if you buy a game, you can download it for Windows and/or Macintosh.
Yes, if you want to play Windows PC games the best option is to use Boot Camp. And yes, you have to buy Windows to install in Boot Camp. Of course, if you were to purchase a Windows PC you would also have to buy Windows.
So, I'm not sure what you expect here… Apple should throw in a copy of Windows for free? Apple should spend money and resources to incorporate Wine or Cider into the OS and go through the tremendous support and legal headache while simultaneously cutting its developers off at the knees by allowing Windows applications to flood the ecosystem? — not that it would ever happen… ;)
Apple's last OS update, 10.6 was a $30 upgrade. 10.7 Lion will also be a $30 upgrade. Seems to me your beef should be with Microsoft's pricing of Windows. (Oh, and lazy/cheap game developers of course. heh.)
To answer the central question: Wine and Cider are both legal, since they use no code or binary data from Microsoft's implementation of Windows.
Solution 2:
In no way playing game under Wine/WineX/Cider running under MacOS or linux could be considered illegal.
Solution 3:
Here are some big games too:
- all games from Blizzard (for example World of Warcraft)
- Sims
- Call of Duty
- and more others (check for example Amazon.com - Mac games)
Running games under Wine is not a "legal" problem.
I know one old case, where someone got a game-ban because he played WoW under Wine and the Warden (wow build-in antihacking watcher) report this as illegal activity. But this is an old case, now playing Wow under Linux and Wine is pretty common, so probably will not be any problem with other games too.
As @Robert told, here is another problem. Performance issues. Some games will run fine under emulators, some others not. You need check forums or google for reports.
For some games you can use VirtualBox too (what is like Parallels or VmWare), but im not sure about its DirectX performance. (Parallels has good DirectX performance), but again as for your BootCamp, will need Windows.
At least - Wine is legal platform - if the game run with it - you can use it.