Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

The Significance of Steam and Valve's Games for Mac

Voidness said:
Unless OnLive is able to achieve quantum entanglement communication, their service will remain a niche.
Click to expand...

What someday will be a niche will be playing games on local hardware where gamers are confronted with the double scourge of 1) wild variations in performance (i.e. your $1,000 gaming rig against your competitor's $5,000 gaming rig) and 2) cheaters/hackers/modders.
 
What does "port" mean? Is that just some cheap way to bring PC games over to Mac?

If porting is what they did to the Mac version of COD4, then in terms of my experience, "porting" sucks! The PC version ran much smoother for me in my Win Vista Bootcamp.
 
Reaktor5 said:
CS and DOD Source, PLEASE!!
I was just going to fire up Boot Camp to play this weekend but I might wait. This is awesome news.
Click to expand...

Screw the Source I want the originals! Do you think the Half Life 1 engine be supported, or is it just too old and no body cares enough to make it compatible...

The only game I play is the original DOD, great and simple game play :)
 
Big news, big potential

First of all, if Valve has truly ported Source over to run on Mac OS X then it has done a potentially great thing. Right off the bat, it means fans of these games that like Mac can actually play them without a separate machine or running Windows on their Mac.

Down the road, these Source games, which are extremely popular, will hopefully attract a largely untapped Mac gaming market. This builds momentum: as the market for Mac games grows (demand rises), other firms want to get in on the action. This means more companies seriously considering releasing and actually releasing their games on the Mac platform.

The lack of a variety of popular games on the Mac has has been a vicious cycle; game companies don't see a big market and don't develop Mac versions, Graphics hardware manufacturers who sell a significant portion of their hardware to gamers see the small market and don't make many Mac-compatible cards--this pushes up prices, high prices means gamers are priced out of the Mac market in favor of PCs and consoles, which continues to shrink the demand for games on the Mac, which continues to shrink the supply of games released for Mac, which continues to shrink the graphics cards available and raises prices, which ...

This could be a turning point in the cycle, providing current Mac users with some very popular games immediately, and provide incentive for other producers to offer content to the Mac via Steam.

I, for one, am very excited to see what games will be available for the Mac and where this will go!
 
Freis968 said:
What does "port" mean? Is that just some cheap way to bring PC games over to Mac?

If porting is what they did to the Mac version of COD4, then in terms of my experience, "porting" sucks! The PC version ran much smoother for me in my Win Vista Bootcamp.
Click to expand...

Yes, but it depends how good the port is. A good port will run almost as good as the Windows version.
 
LagunaSol said:
What someday will be a niche will be playing games on local hardware where gamers are confronted with the double scourge of 1) wild variations in performance (i.e. your $1,000 gaming rig against your competitor's $5,000 gaming rig) and 2) cheaters/hackers/modders.
Click to expand...
Look, I really like the idea of OnLive, but you can't get around the laws of physics. You just can't eliminate the latency of the signals going back and forth between your device and their servers. You must be physically near one of their server centers to get a decent service. So unless they plan to build server centers every few hundred kilometers (or they figure out how to do faster-than-light communication) it will remain a niche to those who live near by one of their servers.
 
*LTD* said:
So will all this stuff be native OS X, or just a port?
Click to expand...

That's not an either/or question. If it's ported, then it is native OS X. The only thing that's not native is something like Cider, which isn't a port at all, it's the Windows app running through a translation layer.

NeverhadaPC said:
I don't get it. Aren't ported game clunky and overly cpu-intensive (i.e Civ4)?
Click to expand...

Only if they're badly done. Look at nearly all of Feral's ports: not clunky at all.

--Eric
 
roocka said:
I didn't know what steam or valve was. This is great news. Maybe Apple should buy this company so that google doesn't buy it and port it to android. This is precisely the kind of company that google would buy to deliberately kill just so apple couldn't have it and dominate the gaming industry.

Apple needs to invent a way to use you iPhone like a joystick to control whAt happens on your television screen.
Click to expand...

Google buy Steam or Valve? Google wouldn't pour billions into getting into an industry they have no interest in just to spite Apple, that is just plain retarded. And I doubt Apple would dream about buying Steam or Valve.
 
Are a lot of Mac users really holding out for this? These games have been out for a long time and most interested gamers have already played these on their PCs or consoles.

Don't get me wrong, this is great news because I won't have to rely on bootcamp anymore but there are other issues that need to be addressed. What will the Mac keyboard/mouse be like for gaming? You will need a clickable mouse I'm sure. How about online gaming communities, can Mac players play with/against PC players? I doubt the Mac community will be as strong as the PC one, ever.

It's great to have Steam spread to new platforms but as a gamer, I'm sticking to PC.
 
chairguru22 said:
Are a lot of Mac users really holding out for this? These games have been out for a long time and most interested gamers have already played these on their PCs or consoles.

Don't get me wrong, this is great news because I won't have to rely on bootcamp anymore but there are other issues that need to be addressed. What will the Mac keyboard/mouse be like for gaming? You will need a clickable mouse I'm sure. How about online gaming communities, can Mac players play with/against PC players? I doubt the Mac community will be as strong as the PC one, ever.

It's great to have Steam spread to new platforms but as a gamer, I'm sticking to PC.
Click to expand...

How can you say you'll be sticking to PC when it hasn't even been announced yet?
 
chairguru22 said:
Are a lot of Mac users really holding out for this? These games have been out for a long time and most interested gamers have already played these on their PCs or consoles.

Don't get me wrong, this is great news because I won't have to rely on bootcamp anymore but there are other issues that need to be addressed. What will the Mac keyboard/mouse be like for gaming? You will need a clickable mouse I'm sure. How about online gaming communities, can Mac players play with/against PC players? I doubt the Mac community will be as strong as the PC one, ever.

It's great to have Steam spread to new platforms but as a gamer, I'm sticking to PC.
Click to expand...

Apple keyboard is fine for gaming, mouse isn't but I just use some Logitech Laptop mouse for it. Of course Mac and PC users will be able to play together.
 
OnLive sucks. Here's why:

1) Lag. You can't get around it, there is lag. Lag is bad, in case you didn't know.
2) In order to reduce lag to marginally acceptable levels (can't be eliminated, remember), say goodbye to beyond-HD pixel perfect graphics, and say hello to low-res, compression-artifact-filled graphics. Now that's progress....
3) You don't own any games. You want to revisit your favorite game a few years later, but it's been deleted/censored/retired? Too bad, it's gone and there's nothing you can do about it.
4) Everything is controlled by one company. That's fine for the App Store, but the App Store is only tied to a few devices made by Apple, not everybody's computer.

--Eric
 
I'm excited, but I'm holding my breath. Most Mac versions are significantly worse then the PC versions.. even more importantly they don't run as well.. this is even more critical considering that so much of the Mac lineup now and in the past years have had pretty underpowered graphics chips in them.

Hopefully Valve does the right thing and allows people who bought the games already (IE, Orange Box) to play them on the Mac, rather then having to pay for a special "Mac version" that will probably be nothing more then a souped up cider port.
 
I knew this was a good thing. Arn didnt mention that one of the major gripes about the mac platform over the years was the lack of a significant gaming presence. Apparently that is now done.
 
Cider Ports

As long as these aren't all ****** slow ass Cider ports and actual NATIVE apps, I'm all for it. Otherwise they can kiss off.
 
I find it funny that people think Apple will buy Valve... lol

Valve is a company who likes to think for themselves in my opinion.

Valve has made their own eco system so why in the world would they let some hardware company buy them?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back