Valve Brings Source and Steam to Mac
Macs are great – pretty much every single person on the 4cr staff uses them religiously. Unfortunately, they still fall short in one key area (again, especially for the 4cr staff). The games just aren’t there, and booting into Windows to play them is at best a major annoyance.
Well, Valve may just be the key to changing the face of Mac gaming forever. Yes, the same company famous for their PS3 putdowns has officially confirmed that their entire catalog of Source Engine games will arrive on the Mac this April, complete with a Mac-compatible version of Steam. The ability to play Left 4 Dead 2 without rebooting my computer is enough to make my day, but this news gets even more exciting when you dig into the details.
Mac gamers are used to the awful emulation-based ports of games like Civilization 4, and Valve is fully aware of this. These are real, honest-to-goodness ports, running natively in OpenGL. All of Valve’s future games (and updates to those games), starting with Portal 2 will launch simultaneously on Windows and Mac. Additionally, all of Valve’s multiplayer games will be cross-platform, allowing games to compete regardless of operating system.
All of that is incredible, but where Valve could truly revolutionize gaming on the Mac is through the port of their Steamworks APIs. Every single one of the existing tools has made it over to the new platform, along with one new feature – Steam Play. Building on the Steam Cloud, Steam Play allows a gamer on their PC to save their game to Valve’s servers and pick up exactly where they left off on their Mac.
The sum total of this? Any developer using Valve’s tools (and that is a significant number of them) can put out a game on both platforms that is truly cross-compatible, sharing saved games and putting players on both platforms in the same multiplayer games. If that doesn’t get you excited, you probably don’t have a pulse. If they can get those Mac versions running on Linux, I’ll really be a happy gamer.
source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Gregory Gay - March 9th, 2010 - 
babble on March 9, 2010 at 10:17 am
Yes, this made my day!
Gratz to Vavle and Apple for bringing this to us.
Carlo on March 9, 2010 at 4:30 pm
If this didn’t happen I would have had to hope for a PS3 Portal 2 port.
quicksilver on March 9, 2010 at 5:46 pm
YAY! If I only had a larger hard drive on my Mac…
This will inevitably lead to a linux version of Steam at some point and maybe even ports to consoles (even the PS3/Wii use (heavily) modified OpenGL). It would be amazing if the Wii2 just used steam for multiplayer IDs since Nintendo is obviously having a hard time figuring it out.
While this was a few years ago, Newell has at least stated his personal liking of the Wii.
The biggest thing we could gain here is the attitude that services like Steam Play should be a given for the good of the industry as a whole, instead of the attitude that most publishers have with trying to cash in on us as many times as they can (not to mention the music industry).
peshue on March 10, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Now if only macs had better hardware for such things…
I’ve long ago given up on mac gaming. Yeah, booting into Windows was a minor annoyance, but there’s so much available for windows that isn’t for macs that I rarely use my osx partition anymore. Sure XP was a far cry from osx, but I find that 7 makes osx look antiquated in many ways.
quicksilver on March 10, 2010 at 11:01 pm
@Peshue, I generally agree, but lots of the games we spend much of our time on are not graphically intensive…
Tho if I had access to ALL of my games on my laptop, I’d never get anything done. So, I suppose it’s a curse and a blessing.