Valve’s Steam games delivery service coming to OS X?

John Brownlee ()

Valve’s Steam games delivery service coming to OS X?

Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.

The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.

The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.

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Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in Gaming, News, OS X, Software |

  • francis

    I have no problem playing games on bootcamp.

  • fred edison

    Steam mostly works with CrossOver for Mac (Wine). There seems to be a problem with Flash, however.

  • Knightlie

    This might spark interest for more developers, though, if Steam makes it easier for them to distribute products. This would be good, Steam turns games into an impulse-buy for me.

  • MMNW

    I know that steam works quite well with CrossOver. Although not all games. Would it be possible to have some integrated Steam/Wine package? Kind of like the cider ports?

  • Brat

    First and Foremost, Apple has to allow gamers to completely remove the mouse-curve/acceleration or disable it completely. This is essential for any serious or mildly serious gamer. And you simply can not do it in OSX, it’s been a requested feature for a long time esp. by artists since it affects them too. But Apple just ignores that, like most things. You’ll never attract the serious gaming crowd until it’s fixed.