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MacOSX gets ports of several-year-old games!
March 9th, 2010 by Dave

Ever since the Webkit-enabled, Mac-icon-containing Steam beta went online a short while ago, people have been pretty convinced a version of Steam was coming for Mac. Then Valve “leaked” (which now means “distributed via official channels to legitimate news outlets”) various humorous parodies of past Apple ad campaigns, with Valve characters inserted. My favourite was the “Hello” parody. The copy was pretty funny.

All this lacked details however, but now Valve have kindly supplied some:

  1. A native Steam client is coming to Mac in April.
  2. They’ve added OpenGL and Mac options to Source, so games can be simultaneously built for Windows and Mac using Source.
  3. Steam Play is their fancy name for buying a game once and playing on Mac or PC.
  4. Valve are bringing their library (HL, TF2, Portal, etc) to Mac in April, all Steam Play-enabled.
  5. Mac and PC players will play on the same servers.
  6. Portal 2, with co-op, will be released simultaneously for Mac and PC.
  7. Umm.. woot?

Basically the best (realistic) situation Valve could have announced, they’ve announced. Very pleasing. I guess I’ll be preloading Portal 2 when the time comes.


5 Responses  
  • Jeffo writes:
    March 9th, 2010 at 3:17 pm

    Woo, now Macs are also good for decreasing productivity!

           
  • Dave writes:
    March 9th, 2010 at 5:56 pm

    I think that ship sailed November 23, 2004. As convenient as WoW has become to pick up and play however, it’ll be nice to replace some of that dungeon crawling with TF2. The ability to just launch it, instead of having to jump over to Windows in order to do so (which I will still have to do when I want to finish off my perfect Shepard in prep for Mass Effect 3, darn you EA).

    I’m sure whenever Half Life 2 Episode 3 Electric Boogaloo 4 comes out it will be just as dull and dreary as its predecessors, regardless of the platform. This might prompt me to pick up Left 4 Dead 2 some time though, hopefully on discount some time.

    I do like the setup Valve is proposing though. Hopefully others pick it up and offer similar (or better) alternatives. Playing WoW all this time it’s easy to take for granted Valve’s proposal of gaming as a service rather than a product. Yes I do still wish they’d let me sell on or at least transfer my licenses, but I don’t see that happening. Still, combining Steam Play and Steam Cloud so that (like WoW and other MMOs) wherever you are you could potentially log in and play ‘your’ game is nice.

    They use DRM, and they use it to take away some of the things people could do before, but they’re not complete cunts about it, and really these days thats saying a lot.

           
    • Matt writes:
      March 10th, 2010 at 6:46 pm

      The HL2 series was neither dull nor dreary. Let’s have an internet biff about it.

             
      • Dave writes:
        March 10th, 2010 at 7:13 pm

        Certainly!

               
  • Gibbles writes:
    March 10th, 2010 at 11:24 pm

    Oh hey Billy Zane

           


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