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Valve Confirms Mac Versions of Steam, Valve Games

Posted by Soulskill on from the branching-out-to-the-apple-tree dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Gamasutra: "Valve will release a version of its Steam digital distribution service for Mac next month, along with Mac-native versions of its own games, the company confirmed today after days of hints — and owners of Valve games will have access to both platform versions. The Source engine, which Valve uses to develop all its internal titles and also licenses to third-party developers, will incorporate OpenGL in addition to DirectX, to allow Mac support for all Source developers. ... '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,' said Cook. 'Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates.'"

5 of 541 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The first thing to come to my mind... by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Part of the announcement was that, yes, you will be able to play online with PC users.

  2. Steam has an offline mode by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unlike Ubisoft's system, Steam has an offline mode. Steam requires access to the DRM server when you install the game, not every time you play.

  3. Re:wow... by Reason58 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just to let people know, Blizzard also allows for unlimited downloading of the Windows and OS X version of any game you have ever purchased. Even if you bought the game in a store you can still register the CD key online at battle.net and it will be available to download in the future.

  4. Re:The first thing to come to my mind... by agrif · · Score: 5, Informative

    Erm... Cocoa is for the UI layer, like toolbars, buttons etc., when did you ever see a standard toolbar in a game? Almost every game uses custom UI, so if steam games are using OpenGL(which is the only accelerated graphics API on the Mac), it should be easy to port it to Linux/BSD.

    It should be easier to port to Linux (et al.) than it was before they made a Mac version, but not easy exactly.

    As noted before, basically every user-facing program on OS X uses a ton of Cocoa calls. Cocoa is used for more than just the UI layer: it provides a generous standard library of data types, os calls, and other useful things. Think of cocoa as an Objective C / OS X friendly libc. Objective C itself does not easily translate from the Mac to other systems, as well. Last I checked, GNUstep didn't have a working Objective C 2.0 runtime yet.

  5. Re:Woohoo! by Petrushka · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suspect a fairly substantial library of games will become available, probably fairly swiftly. Someone's already compiled a list of Steam games that already have Mac ports. There's ... quite a lot.

    Probably a lot of people have already seen the lovely series of pictures that Valve released last week to hint at this announcement in advance, but in case you haven't, here's a compilation, in the correct sequence (and note the iPhone motif at the bottom of each image):
    image 1 (1980s Mac classic theme)
    image 2 (Gordon Freeman with shiny Mac hazard suit)
    image 3 (turrets)
    image 4 (Team Fortress 2 -- "take a bite out of the ... sandwich")
    image 5 (Left 4 Dead -- "I hate different")
    image 6 (HL2 + 1984 Mac commercial)