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Valve Officially Announces Steam and Game Library Coming to Mac in April

DougB541 said:
Little known fact.

The beta dev kits for the xbox360 were G5 PowerMacs.
xdk.jpg


Seeing the 360 is powered by a PowerPC itself.


Of course now the Dev kit is this sexy beast right here:
GDC-2009-Microsoft-Unveils-New-Xbox-360-SDK-And-Avatar-Capabilities-In-XNA-Game-Studio-31.jpg


Its funny this is probably the first good looking dev kit in a long time. PS3's current kit is this monster:
ps3_dev_kit_qjpreviewth.jpg
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Except who cares what a dev kit looks like. Plus I want to see what it looks like in full light, not a stylized photoshoot.

As long as it has diagnostic capabilties why else should you care. You should be looking at code, not the console. :rolleyes:
 
Dagless said:
We know this already but its been reconfirmed-

http://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=3578

Valve games will be cross compatible in online play, and if you own one version you also own the other. Steam Cloud will sync settings too like custom sprays.

It's probably the 4th time I've mentioned my adoration for Valve but really. These guys don't do things by halves, what an awesome step they're taking. I hope every other studio is watching.
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Know what the genius part of Valve is?

They leveraged their game sales to become the largest digital games publisher.

They make money without even making games.

And they also sell their games right there next to competiting games, yet no game developer is talking ill of Steam.


They are really doing some good things here.
 
DougB541 said:
Know what the genius part of Valve is?

They leveraged their game sales to become the largest digital games publisher.

They make money without even making games.

And they also sell their games right there next to competiting games, yet no game developer is talking ill of Steam.


They are really doing some good things here.
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That, and the kick arse comics and humour they have with it all. It's really inspirational stuff. Selling your addictive multiplayer FPS for £3 and then giving people a fake war (the winning side got an extra weapon)... just brilliant.
 
I hope this includes all the older HL games too, like Blue Shift and OpFor. I also hope my iBook doesn't get left out and it's not just intel only!
 
Dagless said:
That, and the kick arse comics and humour they have with it all. It's really inspirational stuff. Selling your addictive multiplayer FPS for £3 and then giving people a fake war (the winning side got an extra weapon)... just brilliant.
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I never really paid much attention to Steam until Left 4 Dead came out. It was just an installation method for Half Life 2 and Counter Strike until that point.
 
MorphingDragon said:
Except who cares what a dev kit looks like. Plus I want to see what it looks like in full light, not a stylized photoshoot.
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But, a lot of Apple users - from the Great Turtleneck on down -
care a lot about what the insides of their computers look like. ;)

Of course they'd look for a pretty dev kit!
 
blackpond said:
I have some questions for self-proclaimed "hard core gamers."

How many times a year do you purchase a new computer or new GPU to stay on the bleeding edge of gaming? Do you purchase on the day of each new hardware release?
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Currently the graphical progress of PC games (or at least action games) has slowed down to a crawl thanks to consoles, so currently you don't need to upgrade more often than every two years or so
 
akadmon said:
I don't know why you foilks are getting so excited about this :confused: Computer gaming is dying. People are abandoning PCs in favor of consoles en masse! All Steam is trying to do by getting into the Mac market is buy time.
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Steam revenues are growing by about 150-200% annualy..each single year since the store opened. yeah, they sure must be veeery afraid :rolleyes:
 
Gen said:
Sweet, can't wait to get rid of bootcamp.
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Doesn't mean Valve can fix Mac gaming.

I would love to play Civ 4 as the mac version....

However I can buy ALL four parts of CIV4 (base plus three expansions) for $40 or pay almost a $100 for the Mac parts I can buy and then put up with a lackluster port (civfanatics forum people all say - bootcamp or don't play)


CIV4 is one of two games I keep Windows for. I recently ended my business needs for windows with Office for Mac plus Mocha 5250
 
mixel said:
It arguably was in the Marathon days. :) Back when most platforms had their unique libraries of good stuff, really.
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I wonder now that Bungie is independent if they may make a game concurrently with Mac development in mind.
 
Shivetya said:
Doesn't mean Valve can fix Mac gaming.

I would love to play Civ 4 as the mac version....

However I can buy ALL four parts of CIV4 (base plus three expansions) for $40 or pay almost a $100 for the Mac parts I can buy and then put up with a lackluster port (civfanatics forum people all say - bootcamp or don't play)


CIV4 is one of two games I keep Windows for. I recently ended my business needs for windows with Office for Mac plus Mocha 5250
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With companies using 'Steam Play,' that will make Mac games the same price as their couterparts, sales and all, since you could just by the Windows version if the Mac version is too expensive. If Steam manages to reinvigorate Mac gaming, then Mac ports won't need to be marked up so high, and might actually become a priority for studios. You'd think that if they can release PC, 360, and ps3 versions all at once, they'd be able to release Mac build too. Especially since everything seems to use a 3rd party engine nowadays that runs on pretty much anything.
 
How is it that the people that marked this as negative see this as a bad thing, one would figure that this is a positive thing, And it is very positive to see gaming devs taking a leap onto the Mac platform (since the Mac has long had a x86 CPU), hope that others follow suit. This should help drive sales but yet its a negative thing ? It must be MS/PC fanboys marking this as negative since they are starting to loose more and more PC only exclusives.
 
akadmon said:
I don't know why you foilks are getting so excited about this :confused: Computer gaming is dying. People are abandoning PCs in favor of consoles en masse! All Steam is trying to do by getting into the Mac market is buy time.
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You must be living under a rock. Steam has a massive ammount of accounts.
 
Gas Powered Games To Include Mac Development Going Forward

Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games said that he loves Valve's announcement that they are bringing Steam to Apple's Mac platform.

Having just released Supreme Commander 2 on Valve's Steam service last week for the PC, Chris Taylor knows how important digital distribution is. I asked him at GDC 2010 what he thought of Valve's announcement that they will be supporting Macs. Taylor's short answer: "I love it."

"I heard that Apple's market share was 10 or 11% and that last year that grew by 30%," Taylor said. "So taking a 10 or 11% slice of the pie and making that a 14 or a 15% slice of the pie, that is awesome growth. It shows that the OS X platform is really picking up speed. That's super exciting, we need that in the world. We need that kind of balance in our market."

Taylor was quick to point out that although Apple has a different operating system, Mac computers run on the same hardware as PCs running Windows. "They're both using Intel chips. So that doesn't propose a lot of cost in changes, they're both using ATi and nVidia graphics hardware. You're talking about a very easy platform to bring PC games over to."

Taylor went so far as to state that Gas Powered Games would be behind Mac support on Steam from now on: "We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward. We're in 100% support of it. Absolutely."

"Kudos to Valve," Taylor said. Bringing Steam to the Mac platform is "a great, great move."
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Congratulations Mac users. Looks like the flood gates are opening thanks to Valve.
 
I'm pretty curious to know how the Mac and Windows versions will run too.

Everyone here talks about how Blizzard is the only big company to code games in both OpenGL and Direct3D allowing it to run natively in both Windows and OS X. However I have tried playing Warcraft 3 on both my Pentium 4 computer and my iMac G4. The Pentium 4 pretty much beat the G4 hands down, so my bet is that it'll still run faster on Windows.

I'll wait till the actual OS X port comes out first before commenting further though. (and yes, I do know that it's a native port.)

iggibiggi said:
I agree with you. I have a MBP 15" with the 9600M-GT card and I can factually say that the graphics while playing call of duty 4 are so much better and crisper than that of my Xbox-360 playing the same game in 1080p! Someone who makes a statement that all macs suck at gaming clearly has never tried them! I am WAY more than happy with the performance of my MBP, it's 11 months old and it runs like the first day I got it…I couldn't say the same thing for all my other "REGULAR" PC's!:apple::)
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I understand that everyone is different, but here's just my own experience. Basically, I used to own a crappy Pentium 4 desktop with an outdated ATI 9600 card and used it all the way up to early 2008, before purchasing my Macbook Pro. Initially I was really happy with it, as I could finally play new games without having to set everything to low, and still achieving a pretty decent FPS (30 - 50). I thought that my Macbook Pro was the best investment ever.

That was until I finally decided to replace my desktop 2 months ago. Since I didn't think I'd be using it much I decided to go with cheaper parts. I replaced it with a Core 2 Quad processor with an ATI 5770 graphics card, and the cost of the whole rig totalled up to about US$600 without the monitor. Ever since then, I never wanted to game on my MBP again. Why would I, when my desktop runs every single game at max settings and still achieves 60 fps. Furthermore, these parts aren't particularly top of the line either. (as compared to a Core i7 860 + ATI 5870)

Bottom line, yes, most Macs are able to run games at decent settings while achieving decent FPS. However, PCs will still be the king in PC gaming as they will always be able to provide a far superior gaming experience at a much cheaper price.
 
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