Steam for Mac officially announced

[Blink]

So its been rumoured for a while but just now Valve have made it official, Steam is coming to the Mac:

As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."

Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.

I use a MacBook and a PC so the chance to play some Steam games when on the move will be a treat!

EDIT: Both L4D games have been confirmed. Extra information can be found on the Left 4 Dead blog.

[source-maps]

For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac

nice way to promote slackers

[Surfa]

For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac

nice way to promote slackers

Ha sounds like me except I would do it the other way round. Play at work on the mac then at home on the pc.

[Major Banter]

I see this as another kick in the teeth for PlayStation. Seriously Valve, grow the fuck up and develop for it.

Arrogant git is Gabe.

[MayheM]

I see this as another kick in the teeth for PlayStation. Seriously Valve, grow the fuck up and develop for it.

Arrogant git is Gabe.

To me, I honestly do not care if they develop for PS3. I have a PC and a PS3 and play different kinds of games on each. Valve games, or FPS games in my opinion have no place on a console. There is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard when playing FPS games.

Anyway, I am curious to know what games will actually be available on the Mac Steam. Will they actually open up all games to be available on Macs? That seems unlikely since the majority of gamers do not use Macs...

[Major Banter]

To me, I honestly do not care if they develop for PS3. I have a PC and a PS3 and play different kinds of games on each. Valve games, or FPS games in my opinion have no place on a console. There is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard when playing FPS games.

I agree (not with the keyboard thing, clearly RTS' are for PC, FPS' are for console, but that's another argument for another thread) - but I can't run L4D on PC. And it'd take costly card upgrades rather than £40 of game console to play it on console. Just a pain in the arse really. Ah well.

I'm also curious as to how the Macs will handle the games. They weren't really engineered with this in mind, so it'll be interesting.

[Surfa]

Well if my beast at work is anything to go by it will do just fine. Although I am sure I will get laid off again before this is released.

[KommanderK]

I see this as another kick in the teeth for PlayStation. Seriously Valve, grow the fuck up and develop for it.

Arrogant git is Gabe.

why do they need to? the only do anything on 360 because its so similar to a pc, if it wasn't 360 would get jack shit as well.

How is it not equally Sonys fault for making such difficult hardware?

Valves games already take awhile to come out, how much time do you think they will tac on to release time if they have to get things working on ps3 as well?

[Mess]

I'm getting a macbook soon, and this will be a slightly unwelcome distraction for when i am working

[904]

Interesting, So not too long ago Steve Jobs finally turned around and acknowledged that the iphone and ipad have huge potential as gaming platforms and now Valve comes along and pulls the macs into play as well.
& Just when I replaced my outdated windows PC with an imac, nice.

[nub]

I don't care if they don't develop on the PS3. Any Valve game is always better on PC.

Don't get me wrong, I love the PS3, and it would be cool if Valve actually did develop games for it, but either way it doesn't make a difference to me since I'd buy Valve's games on the PC any day.


Anyway, I think this is a huge step forward for Valve and Steam. Good on them for finally opening up to the Mac.

[Dionysos]

I see this as another kick in the teeth for PlayStation. Seriously Valve, grow the fuck up and develop for it.

Arrogant git is Gabe.

To me, I honestly do not care if they develop for PS3. I have a PC and a PS3 and play different kinds of games on each. Valve games, or FPS games in my opinion have no place on a console. There is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard when playing FPS games.

Anyway, I am curious to know what games will actually be available on the Mac Steam. Will they actually open up all games to be available on Macs? That seems unlikely since the majority of gamers do not use Macs...

Completely agree. Also, if you don't buy a ps3 you have more money to spend on a pc

On another note...



no linux? sob
Well at least they seem to be integrating opengl which should make it easier for linux.

[Angry Beaver]

Valve games are better on PC because then you can actually get your free updates free, often, and on time. Bandwidth costs you on the PSN, so if you do a patch, its costing you on a PS3; whereas, on 360 MS will claim it's not worth it yet and backlog 20 updates and try convince you to charge the players for them. Pick your poison.

[Psy]

I see this as another kick in the teeth for PlayStation. Seriously Valve, grow the fuck up and develop for it.

Arrogant git is Gabe.

Except the hardware in a Mac is identical to a PC nowadays whilst the PS3 only has a Nvidia GPU in common with a PC. So you could run the OpenGL render path through it but there's the complications with the CPU.

no linux? sob
Well at least they seem to be integrating opengl which should make it easier for linux.

Let's hope so and let's also hope that other developers (*cough* Epic *cough) jump on the multi-platform bandwagon as well.

[cashed]

If they are coding for OpenGL, why not make a linux version??