Valve gives more details about Steam for Mac

By John Brownlee (9:13 am, Mar. 09, 2010)

Yesterday, Valve yawned open its PR orifice and finally confirmed the huge Mac gaming development that everyone already knew was coming: they’re bringing the Steam digital delivery service to OS X. Today, from that same orifice, we have more details, including the games we can expect to see released next month.

“Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April,” the company has confirmed.

Even better? As hinted, you’ll be able to use the same product key to download and play both PC and Mac versions of the same title.

“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge,” says the company.

A small bit, this, but almost totally unprecedented in Mac gaming, where ports of PC titles inevitably require a separate purchase. Also nearly unprecedented: Mac and Windows players will both be part of the same multiplayer universe, which means they’ll be able to play on the same servers.

Even better news? Valve has said that they’re treating the Mac as a “Tier 1″ platform, which means that, from now on, the company will release its own games at the same time as on the PC and Xbox 360. Portal 2 will be the first game to be released simultaneously on the Mac, PC and 360.

Of course, there’s a lot up in the air here… Steam’s not just about Valve games, and if other companies don’t start releasing native ports for OS X (as opposed to the cheap and sluggish practice of dropping them in DirectX wrappers and slapping a $50 price tag on the resulting .DMG), Steam for Mac will never get more traction. Let’s hope Valve’s investment into OS X finally convinces game developers to embrace the fastest growing home computing market out there.

Posted by John Brownlee in Gaming, News | Comment on this article

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About the author

John Brownlee

John Brownlee has 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 Berlin with a charming girlfriend against whom he is currently enjoying a thirteen game cribbage winning streak, and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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5 comments

    I’m looking forward on this! And I’m sure I’ll get some games when it comes to mac! Not I can say bye-bye to my bootcamp partition! =D (I hope!)

    Celso Dantas, on March 9th, 2010 at 10:17 am

    Hopefully other devs can license the Source engine for creating Mac games, making the whole “porting” thing unnecessary. Steam Play is total awesomeness.

    Knightlie, on March 9th, 2010 at 10:36 am

    Let’s be honest ….

    There’re “ways” to play HalfLife 2 & Portal on Macintosh.
    But not Team Fortress 2 — BootCamp *yeccchhh* notwithstanding.

    But now an official built-from-the-ground-up Macintosh version is coming in a matter of *weeks* ….
    This is nothing short of FANTASTIC news ….

    CaryMG, on March 9th, 2010 at 11:25 am

    Fantastic news, really excited about this!

    One thing though…

    “…Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge… A small bit, this, but almost totally unprecedented in Mac gaming…”

    Umm, no. Blizzard does the same thing with the new Battle.net, register your game and you can download either the PC or Mac versions.

    Eli, on March 10th, 2010 at 2:53 am

    @Eli

    There’s a reason he said “almost” totally unprecedented.

    Stefan, on May 7th, 2010 at 5:58 pm

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