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

MadGoat said:
My only issue is that I don't want to see Cider ports of these games, I want to see them developed natively for OS X.

Cider just stinks of developper laziness.

Cider isn't my friend and I really hate it.
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Well you wont see any Ciders for any of the source engine games.

(Counter Strike Source, Half Life, Half Life 2, Half Life Source, L4D(and 2), Portal, Portal 2, DOD:S, DOD, and others I am probably missing.) [Note: not all those were source games but you get the idea]
 
MadGoat said:
My only issue is that I don't want to see Cider ports of these games, I want to see them developed natively for OS X.

Cider just stinks of developper laziness.

Cider isn't my friend and I really hate it.
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The article mentions native ports, so it isn't Cider. Which is good. Very good.
 
Perfect timing! Just as my release candidate of Windows 7 has run out. I was seriously debating going out and purchasing Windows 7, but not anymore.
 
DirtWarden said:
I read the press release on Valve's website and the paragraph on Steam Play makes me slightly nervous:

"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. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

The last sentence makes it sound like Steam Play is a feature that must be selected by the developers. Am I being paranoid, or will developers have the ability to choose whether or not to charge for multiple platform support with an individual user?

In an ideal world, I could log in to my Steam account on my iMac 27" and all of my Source games would be available to me immediately. Am I dreaming? Their wording is slightly ambiguous.

DirtWarden
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I guess that means Wil Shipley is full of ****.
 
MadGoat,

"Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Portal 2 lead developer Josh Weier. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac."

Anyways, this is great news. I own most of Valve's titles on the PC, so I like that I now have an option to play them on my Mac if on vacation as an example.

I'm pretty sure that anyone interested in STEAM on their Mac, aren't one of those Mac users that cry whenever their fan kicks on. :p
 
Also, just for the people here who have not used Steam before.

Steam lets you re-download games an infinite amount of times.

Install, uninstall, reinstall at a later date, etc. Just so you know, not sure if that's been mentioned yet.
 
DirtWarden said:
The last sentence makes it sound like Steam Play is a feature that must be selected by the developers. Am I being paranoid, or will developers have the ability to choose whether or not to charge for multiple platform support with an individual user?
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Of course they will have the ability to choose. Vast majority of games avaible on Steam have no Mac versions and those which did were often ported by 3rd parties, which kind of expect to get paid for their work. Even for devs who do it inhouse...it takes money and resources to port the game to OSX, especially if you want to do it properly. A huge dev like Valve can do it for free and soak the costs solely as a way to promote their digital distribution service to Mac userbase, but there hardly are any PC devs left who are as big and rich as Valve is.
 
Good god I hope "SteamPlay" is retroactive. Having dumped 100$ + on various big valve titles, I'd love to be able to download them to the mac without having to buy again.
 
victorc26 said:
Also, just for the people here who have not used Steam before.

Steam lets you re-download games an infinite amount of times.

Install, uninstall, reinstall at a later date, etc. Just so you know, not sure if that's been mentioned yet.
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Indeed. And you can play your games off-line, meaning you don't need to be connected to the Internet all the time to verify you're playing a legal game.

Plus, you can backup your Steam games to a CD-R or DVD-R. It's a built-in feature.
 
DougB541 said:
:rolleyes:

Good news Valve...obviously they see an untapped market there and want to take advantage of it. I'm also guessing they were able to port the Source engine over easy enough that it made sense.

I'm assuming based on the reception of this...that will dictate how gaming is viewed on Mac's moving forward.


Playstation 3 fans let out a cry of anger. ha
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I'm not sure what the PS3 has to do with this announcement? Care to enlighten me?

TheSpaz said:
Can't wait to get my L4D2 on!!! I'm super excited for this. I might have to put down my PS3 soon.
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Ya, can't wait to play L4D (1 and 2). I'll install Steam just for that. I'm also wondering if having a PS3 makes sense now... I have so little time to game, and Steam should give me enough choices to fill that time up... hmmm.
 
SPUY767 said:
Good god I hope "SteamPlay" is retroactive. Having dumped 100$ + on various big valve titles, I'd love to be able to download them to the mac without having to buy again.
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Read the OP.

Also included in the announcement is the addition of a new "Steam Play" feature for Steam, allowing purchasers of either the Mac or PC versions of Valve's games to play on the other system free of charge.
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AdrianWerner said:
A huge dev like Valve can do it for free and soak the costs solely as a way to promote their digital distribution service to Mac userbase, but there hardly are any PC devs left who are as big and rich as Valve is.
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I disagree that only big, wealthy companies do this. Telltale Games, makers of Sam and Max, Monkey Island, and others, offer both PC and Mac versions under a single license.

Machinarium is made by even a smaller team, a small independent studio, and they also offer PC and Mac versions (and even a Linux version!) under one license (20 bucks! Go get it, it's a great game!).

I know that within the Mac community people find it very normal to pay for literally everything, but as you can see there's also companies that don't try to screw you over.
 
Axeon said:
I guess that means Wil Shipley is full of ****.
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I was just thinking that. I like reading the guy's blog, but he really is full of himself.

BRLawyer said:
LTD, if it's "native" it's not a "port", by definition...the two terms are mutually exclusive ;)
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No they're not. A port just means it was written for one platform first, then ported to another (whether using emulation, automatic translation, or hand coding subroutine-by-subroutine).
 
cmaier said:
No they're not. A port just means it was written for one platform first, then ported to another (whether using emulation, automatic translation, or hand coding subroutine-by-subroutine).
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It was my understanding that Native was written from the ground up (ok maybe not from Machine Code) for the specific platform it is intended to be used, and port, was existing code adapted to work with a different, or upgraded platform.

However, I am new to programming so could be 100% wrong.
 
pdjudd said:
Read the OP.
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Read my post, it's been, I think, cleared up by my reading Valve's website, but I was asking if the steam play feature applied only to new purchases, or purchases already made as I bought most of those steam games two or more years ago.
 
Erwin-Br said:
I disagree that only big, wealthy companies do this. Telltale Games, makers of Sam and Max, Monkey Island, and others, offer both PC and Mac versions under a single license.

Machinarium is made by even a smaller team, a small independent studio, and they also offer PC and Mac versions (and even a Linux version!) under one license (20 bucks! Go get it, it's a great game!).

I know that within the Mac community people find it very normal to pay for literally everything, but as you can see there's also companies that don't try to screw you over.
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There are exceptions of course, but let's not kid ourselves. Devs and publishers had an option to includee Mac version in PC boxes since forever and few are actualy doing that (not that I blame them, they rarely even have enough resources to properly finish PC version alone), it's not like Steam will affect that.
 
840quadra said:
It was my understanding that Native was written from the ground up (ok maybe not from Machine Code) for the specific platform it is intended to be used, and port, was existing code adapted to work with a different, or upgraded platform.

However, I am new to programming so could be 100% wrong.
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cmaier is correct. "Native" traditionally refers to it not being emulated (or otherwise abstracted). Not whether it was originally written for the platform or not.

arn
 
BRLawyer said:
LTD, if it's "native" it's not a "port", by definition...the two terms are mutually exclusive ;)
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He means that if they "port" it to the Mac, he wants a "native" application instead of just a Cider wrapper on the PC version of the game. There's porting the "real way" and re-writing the code to optimize it for the Mac and then there's the Cider way of just sticking the PC game files in a wrapper that transcodes the PC files. Cider games run like dog crap.
 
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