More Details About Steam for Mac

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of Steam for Mac since it was first announced back in early March, but Valve has continued to be mum about their games delivery platform’s Mac-specific details. An informative thread on the official Steam forums, though, has a lot of information about what Mac gamers can expect when Steam for Mac lands in May.

The biggest news here is that you won’t have to purchase separate versions of Windows and Mac games on Steam for Mac: one license key will work across multiple operating systems for games marked as “Steam Play” capable. This is pretty much the way I’ve always prayed that cross-platform compatibility on Steam would work, and it will hopefully provide an incentive to developers to release native OS X ports in time with the Windows 7 versions.

Additional good news is that Mac and Windows users will all play on the same servers and join the same lobbies…. pretty much what we expected, but great news none the less. Steam and Source games will also run natively and not through translation layers, although it’s doubtful Valve will impose the same restriction on third-party developers.

Now for the bad news: don’t expect to play any Source games like Portal or Left 4 Dead II on Macs without discrete GPUs. That’s as expected, but given the age of some of the games in question (Half-Life 2 is almost five years old), it’s a bit disappointing: some of these earlier games should be able to run half-decently.

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Overall, it’s looking like Steam for Mac is everything I’ve dreamt it would be. The big question, though, is whether it’s going to galvanize third-party developers to stop looking at Mac gamers as second-class citizens. If anything can do that short of a push by Apple itself, it’s Steam.

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