Steam For Mac Will Arrive On May 12th

John Brownlee ()

Steam For Mac Will Arrive On May 12th

Want to know when you’ll be sliding through the orange hued inkwell of a counter-gravitational portal on your Mac? Eager to know the date when you can start the fight against the insidious Combine under OS X? Fanatic about headshotting bile-spitting zombie after zombie within the safehouse of Snow Leopard? Keen to whack a bald, minigun-toting fat man in the back of the head with a baseball bat while cracking wise to him in a Brooklyn accent?

Sure you are, and when Valve gets around to releasing Steam for Mac, you can do just that through native Source-engine ports of games like Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal just by downloading them through their games delivery service. And just when are they planning on releasing Steam for Mac to good gamers across the world? We now have a date: May 12th.

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Keep in mind you’ll need to be on an Intel iMac with a discrete GPU running OS X 10.5 or higher… but either way, this is a date to look forward to. Mac gamers are finally going to be given their due… and the Source engine games on Steam for Mac should be just for starters. Who’s up for a Cult of Mac Team Fortress 2 night come May 12th?

9 comments »

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 |

  • Chris

    While this is fantastic news, my brother is rather peeved at the fact you need a discrete CPU. His MBP is circa 2006, and can’t see why it works fine under bootcamp but wont under OSX.

  • http://ihbs.co.uk Ben

    Wish id known about this sooner, unfortunately a handful of months ago i bought the orange box from steam for the xbox. gives you all the installments of half-life (not 1 interestingly) portal, and TF2. Sad to say that the performance of these games will be better on the xbox than on my mac, but at least others can enjoy them now!

    Team fortress 2 was a pretty poor game, dodgy controls, awkward gameplay, but the half life series is everything thats great about computer gaming!

  • Chris

    Of course, i meant GPU not CPU.

  • Ed

    So I’m guessing this will work on the late 2009 iMacs. Is that right?

  • Greg

    isn’t “you’ll need to be on an Intel iMac with a discrete GPU” a typo? why would they limit it just to imacs? wouldn’t it be any intel mac?

  • BoxMac

    About the “discrete GPU” thing.

    It is — nonsense.
    *ahem*

    I play Valve games all the time using my MacBook with the Intel GMA X3100 GPU.
    It works perfectly fine.
    Is it “Crysis 2″-level graphics?
    No.
    But let’s say it’s 75/100 — and that’s *way* more than “just OK”.

  • http://brunmarde.com dale.

    Do we know if 3rd party mods will work on Steam for Mac?
    I’m especially thinking of NEOTOKYO by STUDIO RADI-8 which is just INSANELY well done (and free).

  • http://themactrack.com Richard

    What exactly does a discreet GPU mean? My iMac has an ATI Radeon chip, will that do?

  • John

    A discreet GPU is any graphics chip that isn’t integrated into the main chipset of the system and has its own graphics memory (doesn’t share it with the main memory). An example of a discreet GPU would be the ATI Radeon X1600 in my MacBook Pro. An example of a system without a discreet GPU would be a MacBook using Intel GMA X3100 graphics. So, Richard, your iMac will be fine. Also, Chris, if your brother has a MacBook Pro (not just a MacBook), he’ll be fine. Until the 13-inch MacBook Pro, all MacBook Pros had a discreet GPU.