Monday, March 8th 2010
Valve to Deliver Steam and Source on Mac
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."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately.
Source:
Steam
"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."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately.
92 Comments on Valve to Deliver Steam and Source on Mac
You see... you cant even read. i said VALVE games. not steam games. They are NOT porting steam games, they are porting valve games.. and not one single valve game is DX10 yet.
oh and btw, lost planet is DX10
now mac fanboys are going to argue that macs are better for games, even though they clearly aren't and won't ever be :/
But Counter Strike, Half-Life 2, Fortress and the zombie game all run in OpenGL also I think...Maybe this is what they intended for Mac...
I hope Valve adds mice to their monthly hardware/software poll because it would be interesting to see how (un)popular the "Apple Mouse" is for gaming.
Video cards were already mentioned as being a major issue on the gaming front. Just checking them out here are about all the options Apple offers across all products:
-GeForce 9400M
-GeForce 9600M
-1x GeForce GT 120 (9500 GT)
-2x GeForce GT 120 (9500 GT)
-3x GeForce GT 120 (9500 GT)
-4x GeForce GT 120 (9500 GT) -- this is the most "high end" offering by Apple on any system
-Radeon HD 4870
Those cards (not so much the 4870) are going to strain to play any of the newer Valve titles at 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 resolutions. It really doesn't matter how many GT 120s you stick in a computer, they (and the 9400M) are intended for 2D work, not 3D. The 9600M passes as barely more than mediocre and the HD 4870 is dated (by HD 58## series). Not good...
And a 4870 is good enough for 1920x1200 on most Valve games.
But, what I'm hoping overall is, this move by Steam and Valve will see Apple getting more graphics hardware, and more up to date hardware. Would be nice to have a second viable gaming platform.
I can't see Valve/Steam causing that sort of migration. Actually, I think Valve is taking a very big, expensive risk in doing this. Not so much for porting Steam but for porting the games to work on Mac OS X but, they have to in order to give Steam the best possible chance of surviving on Apple computers. We'll have to wait and see if it booms or goes bust.
It's generally the older ADC cards that had the larger than PC BIOS on them, btw.
I've never heard of a PC videocard that doesn't need to flash a different BIOS in order to work in a Mac.
Still not that good, is it?
/ O/T