
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