Can I run my game shop or esports cafe from a Mac?

Short answer: yes, if it is an Apple Silicon Mac.

Longer answer, because the question usually hides a second one. People asking this are rarely asking only about the Mac. They are asking whether their whole setup is going to work. The counter machine is the part that matters least.

What runs where

There are two pieces of software and they get confused constantly.

The server is your management station. It is the machine you sit at to watch the floor, bill sessions, control the PCs and pull reports. That is the one your Mac would be.

The client runs on each customer-facing PC and connects to the server over your local network. That is a different question, answered further down.

The Mac answer, precisely

The server runs on macOS 12 Monterey or newer, on Apple Silicon. Your MacBook or Mac mini can absolutely be the counter machine.

Now the part worth reading twice: Intel Macs are not supported. The release matrix covers Windows x64, Apple Silicon macOS on arm64 and Linux x64. Intel macOS on x86_64 sits outside it. If the Mac you were planning to use is an older Intel model, that plan does not work. Much better to know now than after you have built the room around it.

Everything else on the requirements list is modest, because a management station is not a gaming machine:

Any Apple Silicon Mac made in the last few years clears this without noticing. The one line to watch is disk. That only matters if you record sessions: an hour of MP4 runs roughly 50 to 200 MB depending on quality, which adds up faster than owners expect.

Your customer PCs are a separate decision

The client runs on the same three platforms as the server: Windows, Apple Silicon macOS 12+ or Linux.

In practice, though, your gaming stations will be Windows. Not because of us. Because that is where the games are. If you are building an esports room, the machines your customers sit at are Windows machines and that is not really a choice you get to make.

Mac clients make sense in a room that is not primarily about games: a study space, a design or editing shop, somewhere the customer is paying for the machine rather than the titles on it. A game shop with a few Mac stations for something else is a normal setup and it works.

The useful part is that this mix does not care. A Mac at the counter running the server, Windows machines on the floor running the client. Nobody has to standardise on one operating system to make the room work.

What actually decides your setup

Not the counter's operating system. The network.

Every machine, the server and every client, has to be on the same local network. HandyCafe uses TCP 5001 for commands and responses, TCP 5002 for file transfers, TCP 5003 for the remote management control channel and UDP 5004 for screen streaming. If those are open on your LAN and everything is on the same network, you are done. If you are on Linux instead, note that the app needs the libwebkit2gtk-4.1 runtime installed first.

That is genuinely the whole story. The Mac question turns out to be a small question wearing a big coat.

And you do not have to sit at it

Once the Mac is running the cafe, the Manager app puts the live view on your phone: sessions, the day's figures, members, reports, from anywhere. The Mac stays at the counter doing the work. You do not have to be next to it to know how the night is going.

If you are still at the planning stage, the practical guide to opening a cafe covers the decisions that will actually cost you money. The operating system of your counter machine is not on that list.