You’ll have seen the teasers by now, but it’s official. Steam is coming to Mac. Titles such as Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead 2 will be winging their way to your Mac this April via Valve’s highly successful download-delivery platform, which has served millions of PC gamers to date, along with Valve’s powerful Source engine. “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.
Counter-strike is one of the most influential shooters on the industry
It’s not just the kick-ass games though, as the announcement heralds in a new version of Steamworks for Mac which features all the publishing, development and matchmaking tools present on the PC version along with a new feature called Steam Play, which as Jason explains, “allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge.” Imagine you’re in the middle of a game at work. When you’re done, just save it to the Steam Cloud and pick up right where you left off on your Mac when you get back home. That is just flat out awesome.
“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.”
Portal, the highly successful 3D puzzler, is getting a sequel later this year
Valve have decided that they’re treating the Mac as a serious gaming platform, and they assure us that all of their future games will be released on Windows, Xbox 360 and Mac on the same day, along with their title updates. It gets better than that though, with the commitment that both Mac and Windows players will be able to share cross-platform multiplayer games. “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, the sequel to Valve’s surprise hit puzzler, releases this winter alongside PC and Xbox 360 versions. “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.”
“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.”
