Valve to Deliver Steam & Source on the Mac

[Amit]

March 8, 2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

"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."

So...still laughing Aerowyn?

[InnerGoat]

Gabe likes macs... Big Macs :realsmug:


This is great news though. Most of Apple's lineup have decent GPUs that can actually play these games quite well. :) :)

[Cortexian]

Why? Bootcamp + Windows = Same Result.

[StankBacon]

not having to restart into windows...

[ThePlague]

Needs more Linux compatibility.

Macs aren't gaming computers...

[English Mobster]

But there's no right-clicking! How do we fire the orange portal? :ohdear:

[Amit]

But there's no right-clicking! How do we fire the orange portal? :ohdear:

Precisely what I just realized!

[Cortexian]

Needs more Linux compatibility.

Macs aren't gaming computers...
Neither are Linux computers....

[Rook]

But there's no right-clicking! How do we fire the orange portal? :ohdear:

You can use right clicking by plugging in regular windows mouses. Web design class @ school had macs and regular dell optical mouse works with it.

Macs are undesirable to begin with, but the keyboard/mouse that comes with them are horrible.

[Good_Apollo]

Thus proving once again that Valve and Steam are the future of PC gaming.

Who else would offer you to switch between platforms for free?

[flibitijibibo]

If there was anything that could have been done to possibly make me happy about having to use Macs for work, this was it.

Thank you, Valve.

[Llama Juice]

My macbook is happy.

Macs are decent little machines usually. I'm glad they're supporting us.

Also...

But there's no right-clicking! How do we fire the orange portal? :ohdear:

I'm going to assume you're trying to be funny or something.... and that you know better.

[DEElekgolo]

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.Hopefully it will supply servers with info of the user's operating system.
B& all mac fags.

Also, in-game mac vs pc wars here we come.

[Rook]

http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=3570

[Dwood]

Neither are Linux computers....

You're kidding, right? Linux computers can be 10x more powerful and have more performance than a mac. In fact, with Linux, at least we have support for REAL gfx cards like ATi not just 9400 GTs on the high end etc etc.

[Warsaw]

I might actually consider an iMac if they'd add at least the HD5770 as a graphics option.

[Bodzilla]

you see this is why Valve is the best video game company on the panet, bar none.

They just fucking get it.
They understand the community, provide for the community, things we want and things we could want..... Why on earth would you bother going anywhere else.

[Kornman00]

They understand the economics of supply and demand. Plus I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had a little push in this movement.

also; nvidia needs to get off their asses and port fucking PhysX to Mac. Hurry the fuck up.

[Cortexian]

You're kidding, right? Linux computers can be 10x more powerful and have more performance than a mac. In fact, with Linux, at least we have support for REAL gfx cards like ATi not just 9400 GTs on the high end etc etc.
Not kidding at all, if you want to build a gaming computer you install Windows. It's that simple. And when you say "Linux computers' you're really just talking about PC's running different operating systems, and when it comes to gaming, more limited operating systems. So you're still comparing "PC's" to "Macs", since Macs use completely different hardware (with the exception of some of the newer Intel based Macs)...

Oh and you can get Nvidia GTX 285's (see: the most powerful single GPU video card from Nvidia) for Macs. (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX24954%28ME%29.aspx)

[paladin]

nifty eh

[Dwood]

Not kidding at all, if you want to build a gaming computer you install Windows. It's that simple. And when you say "Linux computers' you're really just talking about PC's running different operating systems, and when it comes to gaming, more limited operating systems. So you're still comparing "PC's" to "Macs", since Macs use completely different hardware (with the exception of some of the newer Intel based Macs)...

Oh and you can get Nvidia GTX 285's (see: the most powerful single GPU video card from Nvidia) for Macs. (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX24954%28ME%29.aspx)

Macs do not use completely different hardware than normal PCs, I have no idea what you're talking about unless you want to go back 4+ years in Apple's history. The only thing different between a Mac and PC is that Apple builds the computer and the Operating system... It's not just some of the new Intel-based macs, it's all the Intel-based macs... using the same hardware. And not only that, the card you linked me to has two flaws.


Calgary NE: Limited Quantities
Calgary NW: Out of Stock
Calgary SE: Out of Stock
Edmonton North: Limited Quantities
Edmonton South: Limited Quantities
Winnipeg West: Out of Stock


And the card only works//fits in the macs that are the normal towers. If you want it in a mactop (Laptop lol) it just won't happen. I'd say 90% of Apple's desktop market is the iMac... and you can't even fit that card in them. This isn't to say that mac makes bad computer, per say, but the Mac has half as much gaming capability possible//available as a PC. And yes, I do distinguish between PC and Mac because they are both completely different models for making computers. One (on the pc end) Has a company or open software group producing the OS and letting the user basically use any set of hardware that has drivers for the OS, and then on the Other, Mac end, Apple builds the computers, and the OS, with limited customization possible.

[Bhamid]

If Valve make decent amounts of money from the Mac side of business, perhaps they might consider a Linux port - they already have Open GL and Webkit, so porting wouldn't be as huge a task. Also, when will 3rd party devs start selling their work on it (id, Blizzard etc)?

[flibitijibibo]

Your Mac Questions Answered
http://www.teamfortress.com/images/posts/mailstorm_large
Yesterday, we announced that Steam and all our Source engine games will be coming to the Mac. Sound too good to be true? Well, guess what: It is true! There are no catches! Sometimes life actually works like that. The bad news is that we've just truth bombed your hard-earned lie detector back to the stone age, and you'll probably lose all your money to the next international lottery scam that sneaks through your spam filter. Still, Steam on the Mac!

Since we're getting a lot of email asking the same basic questions, we figured we'd just answer them here:

Q: I own TF2 on the PC. Do I have to buy it again on the Mac?
A: No. If you own TF2 on the PC, you own TF2 on the Mac (and vice versa). You don't have to buy the game twice. In addition, the Steam Cloud will automatically propagate your configuration settings and custom sprays to your Mac for you.

Q: Is it just some crappy emulated version of TF2?
A: No! Also: How dare you! Mac users aren't getting a crappy emulated version of the game. TF2 will run natively on OSX, like an actual big boy game for adults.

Q: Hmm, that all sounds pretty good. But I'll bet I can't play with my friends who own Macs if I'm on my PC.
A: Mac and PC users will all play together, on the same servers. We're not creating two separate universes. We're all going to be one big, happy family with guns locked in a bloody, never-ending struggle for cap points.Again, this'll be great if I'm ever forced to move to Macs. (Hopefully not though, Pro Tools is Windows capable...)

[DEElekgolo]

Buying a mac is like having your mommy pick out PC parts for you and forcing you to keep that setup for the next 2 generations of computer hardware. Also seeing something like hammer on a mac brings bad images of the kind of content a mac user will have.

Though I enjoy the approuch they had to make sure that Mac nor PC get anything exclusive in the porting.

[flibitijibibo]

Implying that the Mac user you're imagining will be able to wrap their head around Hammer/server hosting?

Nah dude, it'll be fine. Occasional elitist, but nothing a kick won't fix.

[Atty]

Can't wait to see similar hardware configuration benchmark tests between OS X and Windows 7.

[Warsaw]

It can go both ways. It can either run comparably on the two platforms with the same hardware because they don't feel they need to do better...or it can be better optimized under OSX since there are less variables with Mac hardware options than with PC options.