Wednesday, May 12th 2010
![Steam](https://tpucdn.com/images/news/steam-v1723816949774.png)
Steam for Mac Available, Valve Gives Away Copies of Portal
Valve today officially introduced the Steam for Mac. The popular game content distribution and multiplayer game networking platform will bring a wealth of casual games as well as games developed by Valve to Mac users. To celebrate this launch, Valve is giving away a free copy of Portal to anyone who downloads Steam between today and May 24, 2010. Existing steam users who don't have the game yet can simply click on the install button on the game's Store page.
"The Mac is a great platform for developers," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. "And it's also great that we now have the ability to connect with Mac gamers via Steam. This is the beginning of a groundswell of games coming out for and fully utilizing the openness and power of the Mac." Each Wednesday a new group of games highlighting an area of Steam functionality will be released. This week's titles, which show off Steam Play, include:
And Yet It Moves
Atlantis Sky Patrol
Bejeweled 2 Deluxe
Bob Came in Pieces
Bookworm Deluxe
Braid
Brainpipe
Chocolatier: Decadence by Design
Chuzzle Deluxe
City of Heroes: Architect Edition
Civilization IV: The Complete Edition
Cooking Dash
Diaper Dash
The Dig
Diner Dash: Hometown Hero
DinerTown Detective Agency
DinerTown Tycoon
Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child
Escape Rosecliff Island
Fairway Solitaire
Fitness Dash
Football Manager 10
Galcon Fusion
Gemini Lost
Guns of Icarus
Hotel Dash Suite Success
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
KrissX
Loom
Luxor
Luxor 3
Luxor: Mahjong
Machinarium
Mahjong Roadshow
Max and the Magic Marker
My Tribe
The Nightshift Code
Nightshift Legacy: The Jaguar's Eye
Parking Dash
Peggle Deluxe
Peggle Nights
Portal
Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery
Quantz
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse
Tales of Monkey Island Season 1
Toki Tori
Torchlight
Trijinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery
Unwell Mel
Valarie Porter and the Scarlett Scandal
Wandering Willows
Wedding Dash 2: Rings Around the World
World of Goo
Zenerchi
Zuma Deluxe
"The Mac is a great platform for developers," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. "And it's also great that we now have the ability to connect with Mac gamers via Steam. This is the beginning of a groundswell of games coming out for and fully utilizing the openness and power of the Mac." Each Wednesday a new group of games highlighting an area of Steam functionality will be released. This week's titles, which show off Steam Play, include:
And Yet It Moves
Atlantis Sky Patrol
Bejeweled 2 Deluxe
Bob Came in Pieces
Bookworm Deluxe
Braid
Brainpipe
Chocolatier: Decadence by Design
Chuzzle Deluxe
City of Heroes: Architect Edition
Civilization IV: The Complete Edition
Cooking Dash
Diaper Dash
The Dig
Diner Dash: Hometown Hero
DinerTown Detective Agency
DinerTown Tycoon
Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child
Escape Rosecliff Island
Fairway Solitaire
Fitness Dash
Football Manager 10
Galcon Fusion
Gemini Lost
Guns of Icarus
Hotel Dash Suite Success
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
KrissX
Loom
Luxor
Luxor 3
Luxor: Mahjong
Machinarium
Mahjong Roadshow
Max and the Magic Marker
My Tribe
The Nightshift Code
Nightshift Legacy: The Jaguar's Eye
Parking Dash
Peggle Deluxe
Peggle Nights
Portal
Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery
Quantz
Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse
Tales of Monkey Island Season 1
Toki Tori
Torchlight
Trijinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery
Unwell Mel
Valarie Porter and the Scarlett Scandal
Wandering Willows
Wedding Dash 2: Rings Around the World
World of Goo
Zenerchi
Zuma Deluxe
62 Comments on Steam for Mac Available, Valve Gives Away Copies of Portal
@Eva01Master: There are more people with Macs than there are with Linux installed on their home machines (if the surveys and web traffic analysis are all correct). Steam already has parts of it that are coded for Linux, I imagine they're just going by whatever platform has more market share first. Steam is probably eventually going to be the defacto "app store" for full-sized computers once it goes totally cross-platform.
Steam Play is definitely a big advantage, do not want to be buying games all over again, even if it does mean I can play them on my MBP, rather than booting into Windows every time.
@a_ump: Funny you should mention multi-core usage, OS X has Grand Central Dispatch, which makes it easier for applications to use multiple processor cores efficiently. I wonder if Valve have taken advantage of this, or just made something of their own (quite likely).
@EastCoasthandle: I would have guessed Steam for 360 would just be shot down by Microsoft, since you've got the Live service for gaming, you have Messenger for chatting, and you've got the games themselves on DVD, there is also already a game download service too, but also you have multimedia stuff otherwise.
The only advantage I could see is if they brought Steam Play, Steam Cloud and a few other things to the table. Steam Play so you only have to buy a game once (I think if this happened, I could justify spending £10 more per game, rather than £50 for the 360 version, and £40 for the PC version, you just buy the multi-platform version, with a DVD in the case that works for the 360, and a download voucher for PC). Steam Cloud saves all of your preferences, game settings, and saved games on Valve's servers, so if you reinstall, or your HDD goes kablooee, you've not lost those small, annoying bits and pieces.
Haven't installed this yet, as I have exams, but I must say I love Valve as much as i love my Companion Cube <3
There was a time in the past when there were some awesome Mac games. I mean Bungie started out making (Exclusively) Mac games. Marathon anyone?
Starcraft, Diablo, Starcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft.
They are the biggest titles ever if you ask me!
With CS they have all the most popular games in history!
Edit: Valve also working on linux ports, and steam client there, mac and linux shares large amount of shared libaries, they run opengl, and X11.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11
I'm sure they both share way much more! but anyways, even fancy mac can use it!(x11)
So my point here is really that the way from Mac to linux is short. since the DX->Opengl is the hardest.
less stuff = less complicated = less to go wrong = "it just works"
Downloading Portal now, and bought and downloading Torchlight now too.
Really hope they release HL2 next week, wouldn't mind playing through it again. Potentially without cheating this time...
This is cool, if we have backed-up are games from steam can we just install them over or do we have to re download them?
Rant:
By the way i have a macbook and i hate it, simple as that it freeze's up i got the gsod, and i get error all the time, it also over heats! i would much rather have a 7 laptop. This laptop was free brand new so i don't really mind the bad stuff as much, but if i had to pay $1000 for this i would be angry.
some files may work copied over, and save you some bandwidth at least.
ya apparently macs dont crash they crash differetly also ive heard tons of things.
edit: nvm, i'll do it