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

BRLawyer said:
Once more I have to say: MS IS DEAD. AND SO ARE WINDOWS PCs.
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Not any time soon. Once Apple decides to release a mid-range system then, maybe, it will dent Windows. I'm not going to pay $1200 for what is essentially a laptop with a fancy display. You can buy a Quad Core for less or an i7 for a couple hundred dollars more. A lot more bang for your buck the PC or Hackintosh route.

When Apple starts listening to what their customers want then they have a much greater chance of putting a dent into Microsoft's business.
 
This is perfect timing! I spent the last 7 days using the Crossover Games demo to play Counter Strike source on my mac mini(with fairly impressive results!) and was getting ready to plunk down the money to purchase it.

A native steam implementation will be awesome!
 
arn said:
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
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He seems to be confusing the way a company like Blizzard does things, i.e. write both clients from the ground up with their respective platform in mind, a la WoW, versus the way that a company lie EA does things. Write the Windows version and then change just enough code to get it to play on another platform with little regard for how well it actually runs.
 
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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Sorry, this is wrong.

If a software is "ported" it's NOT written from the scratch, and this is exactly what I meant...NATIVE software is written specifically for the platform concerned from its very first line of code.

From Wikipedia:

"Software is portable when the cost of porting it to a new platform is less than the cost of writing it from scratch."

Conclusion? There is no such thing as a "native port"...:rolleyes:
 
AdrianWerner said:
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.
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I think it could. The 5% market share myth is bandied about as gospel. The number includes countless corporate boxes that can't play games.

It will be interesting to see if the demographics at Valve show the number of Mac gamers in greater proportion than the market share club that Windows' users like to clobber us Mac users with.
 
TheSpaz said:
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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oh man, this whole conversation is a train wreck. it's like reading posts on the skull candy forums about sound quality. my favorite part so far is "transcodes the pc files".

please, continue.
 
BRLawyer said:
Thank you for the link...this just confirms what most sensible people ALREADY knew...MOST PC users (including gamers) have machines that are WAY inferior to modern Macs.

That's what always amazes me when Winblows trolls come to populate this forum and brag about PC gaming advantages - UNLESS you're in the 0.5% of customers who really care about upgrading GFX cards, Macs are MUCH better on average than most PCs out there. A quick visit to places like MediaMarkt or BestBuy will show you that.

SLI GFX users: less than 2 per cent...average RAM, 2Gb. 'Nuff said.
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You are assuming that Mac users all have modern Macs. I was of course joking about the iBook, but my Intel Mac won't run these games either, having a crappy Intel GMA 950. And I think the survey shows that those gamers have RAM and processors at least on a par with modern Macs (newest iMacs aside, how many Mac owners have those?). A high percentage have quad cores, and most of them will have discrete, desktop version GPUs, not mobile versions as exist in any Mac other than the Pro.
 
Awesome! This is the best news I've read for quite a while.

I'm so looking forward to playing Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2 again. I haven't played the properly since not long after changing platform to Mac. I very quickly got over rebooting into windows to play these games.

This is yet another thing I won't be needing windows for. It's getting less and less relevant for me. In fact when Microsoft release their newest version of office, if it is good enough, I will have no reason to use windows at all again, as that is the last program keeping copies of windows in vmware.

jimmyjoemccrow said:
You are assuming that Mac users all have modern Macs. I was of course joking about the iBook, but my Intel Mac won't run these games either, having a crappy Intel GMA 950. And I think the survey shows that those gamers have RAM and processors at least on a par with modern Macs (newest iMacs aside, how many Mac owners have those?). A high percentage have quad cores, and most of them will have discrete, desktop version GPUs, not mobile versions as exist in any Mac other than the Pro.
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Considering the increase in mac users most likely being the driver for bringing these games over to the mac platform, and that most of this increase is a fairly recent thing, such as myself. I'd say there are plenty of uses out there with decent video capabilities. Between our 5 macs we have video cards from 2600xt and 9400M all the way up to 8800gt and gtx 285. All of our macs will capable of playing at least some if not most of those steam games listed. In fact when I was last playing counter strike source on a PC it was on a 6600gt video. All of our macs are a least as capable if not more so than that.

I have a number of friends who play steam games a lot and have video no more powerful than a 7600gt card.

It's all about numbers, and these companies obviously feel there are enough numbers out there to warrant to cost to create the products.
 
TheSpaz said:
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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I know. Even TODAY games like Need for Speed and HOMMV cause sound distortions with my USB X-Fi module...Cider is absolute crap.
 
Does anyone know how well I'll be able to play Portal on my Early-2009 white MacBook? It's got an nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics card. I'm sure that's not great, but I'd be happy sacrificing the graphics if I could still play the game smoothly.
 
gorbok said:
Does anyone know how well I'll be able to play Portal on my Early-2009 white MacBook? It's got an nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics card. I'm sure that's not great, but I'd be happy sacrificing the graphics if I could still play the game smoothly.
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native resolution, all graphics on high. no aa or af. 50fps.

heres a mac mini with the same specs running it at 1080p max settings no aa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rie04C2VyE0

this is assuming it performs the same in OS X as it does in windows which is unlikely.
 
kresh said:
I think it could. The 5% market share myth is bandied about as gospel. The number includes countless corporate boxes that can't play games.

It will be interesting to see if the demographics at Valve show the number of Mac gamers in greater proportion than the market share club that Windows' users like to clobber us Mac users with.
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It will be interesting to see the stats. Altough one has to remember another factor: Macs are practically popular mostly in US, in other countries they don;t hold as much market share as in america. And for the last decade pcgaming market in US hs been doing worse and worse with each year. Since a large part of mac fanbase is US based I wonder what would they do: start to play Mac versions of PCgames, thus strenghtening the US PCgaming market...or ignore it and go to play games on their consoles like they did in the past.
 
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BRLawyer said:
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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Sorry, this is wrong.



If a software is "ported" it's NOT written from the scratch, and this is exactly what I meant...NATIVE software is written specifically for the platform concerned from its very first line of code.



From Wikipedia:



"Software is portable when the cost of porting it to a new platform is less than the cost of writing it from scratch."



Conclusion? There is no such thing as a "native port"...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Where you post falls apart is not using the word "native" correctly. You seem to belive it's opposite of port. Instead it's closer to opposite of emulated.


 
BRLawyer said:
Sorry, this is wrong.

If a software is "ported" it's NOT written from the scratch, and this is exactly what I meant...NATIVE software is written specifically for the platform concerned from its very first line of code.

From Wikipedia:

"Software is portable when the cost of porting it to a new platform is less than the cost of writing it from scratch."

Conclusion? There is no such thing as a "native port"...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

No, you are wrong. Port simply refers to the fact that it has been written for a second platform, based on a first. You are using the wikipedia definition of a different word ("portable") to support your point.

For example, the old text-based star trek game has been ported to every platform known to man. In each case it is native. Native refers to the fact that it utilizes the resources and sdk's of the platform to which it has been ported, as opposed to running on a full or partial emulator, or run through a bloat-producing automatic translation, or run in a virtual machine (e.g. java or flash).
 
AdrianWerner said:
It will be interesting to see the stats. Altough one has to remember another factor: Macs are practically popular mostly in US, in other countries they don;t hold as much market share as in america. And for the last decade pcgaming market in US hs been doing worse and worse with each year. Since a large part of mac fanbase is US based I wonder what would they do: start to play Mac versions of PCgames, thus strenghtening the US PCgaming market...or ignore it and go to play games on their consoles like they did in the past.
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Actually in places like France and Switzerland, the Mac market share is on a par with the US one or even higher...
 
gorbok said:
Does anyone know how well I'll be able to play Portal on my Early-2009 white MacBook? It's got an nVidia GeForce 9400M graphics card. I'm sure that's not great, but I'd be happy sacrificing the graphics if I could still play the game smoothly.
Click to expand...

You should be fine. Portal is not very demanding, and a few years old.
 
kresh said:
I think it could. The 5% market share myth is bandied about as gospel. The number includes countless corporate boxes that can't play games.

It will be interesting to see if the demographics at Valve show the number of Mac gamers in greater proportion than the market share club that Windows' users like to clobber us Mac users with.
Click to expand...

I think what's also a factor is Mac fans are very vocal and can provide excellent exposure/advertising if used right. Valve just released a few jpegs last week and probably received millions worth of news/blogs coverage because of it.
 
BRLawyer said:
Actually in places like France and Switzerland, the Mac market share is on a par with the US one or even higher...
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Well...even if that's true the problem remains the same...those are countries of Europe when US gamign situation once again repeats: console gaming dominates PC close to the point of oblivion. So the question remains. So far Mac games have been selling on pretty absymal levels on average, regardless to what actual market share is, leading me to believe that even if the market share is there, gamers who own macs simply prefer to play on their consoles instead of Apple made computers.

Altough....even if wide adoption of Steam for Mac would merely cause few percent of sales increase, it would still be a huge victory for both PCgamers and Mac users. OSX and Macs are bassicaly identical to PCs/Windows when it comes to how a certain game plays on them, so there's no negative impact mac versions could have on Pc ones, as opposed to games that are developed for both PC and consoles at the same time (those always suffer greatly because of consoles). The more money pc devs can make without going console route the better for us :)
 
cmaier said:
No, you are wrong. Port simply refers to the fact that it has been written for a second platform, based on a first. You are using the wikipedia definition of a different word ("portable") to support your point.

For example, the old text-based star trek game has been ported to every platform known to man. In each case it is native. Native refers to the fact that it utilizes the resources and sdk's of the platform to which it has been ported, as opposed to running on a full or partial emulator, or run through a bloat-producing automatic translation, or run in a virtual machine (e.g. java or flash).
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It's fine, I accept your definition...I am more picky about the terminology used, though.

In my view, "porting" is not simply linked to the fact that a game existed before in a different platform, it HAS to use programming elements from the previous version...so in the definition I am using, the term "native port" would be a contradiction in itself. If you wrote software from the scratch using purely native technologies, APIs and the like, you have released a NATIVE piece of code, nothing else.

Porting would then be used for wrapping, emulating and partial/total code pasting, not on-the-metal/assembly native coding (I must concede that this concept was clearer in the times of multiple, totally incompatible platforms like in the 80s)...
 
This is awesome news. As someone who owns the HL games, Portal, TF2, L4D 1 and 2 for the PC, having them available in OSX for no additional charge makes me extremely happy.

So this means the two biggest names in computer games, Valve and Blizzard, are co-developing Mac games alongside PC releases.

If the decline of PC gaming is a dark cloud, then this is absolutely the silver lining.
 
Gabe Newell is the ****! That guy is one of the most under-recognized geniuses in the industry. This is fantastic, market-changing news. I love it! I seriously love it. And I cannot wait for watt they do next (Half-Life 3)

:)
 
Oh- and thanks to Valve's announcement, I will be buying the upgraded version of the iMac with the faster processor and graphics.

Gabe- keep up the awesome work! I cannot wait for Half-Life 3!
 
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