Steam and Source coming to Mac's

[=ST=DusK]

I'm fairly excited about this, although I am probably the only one here that this would impact. I use a MacBook for work. Fortunately I only live about 5 minutes away from work - so I usually drive home for lunch. After eating lunch, I typically have about 20 or 30 minutes left to play before I have to head back to the office. Usually, when I do play something, I push it to 35...40 minutes and I tend to be late returning to work. Now I'm sure my MacBook wouldn't be able to play the newer games. I will probably even have to dumb down graphics on the older games. But I bet I will be able to play some TF 2 or L4D on it. If so, I could bring my lunch and get a lot more game time in. It will be interesting to see which all games get released for the Mac. I am glad that they are doing that "Steam Play" feature where I can get the PC versions that I already own free for the Mac. It would suck if I had to buy them over again!

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.”

[=ST=Phantom III]

gaming on a mac?!?! Say it ain't so! Mac is only for cool creative things... like web development, and artistic things, and looking sleek and shiny and cool-like.

[=ST=DusK]

i do web programming on it. I still would prefer to do web programming on a Windows PC though. Mac is ok though. And if I can do a little bit of decent gaming during lunch without driving home and burning that extra time then it will all be good to me.