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Valve to Expand Steam Store Beyond Games on September 5

samcolson4 said:
This is nice, but, Steam on my 2011 MBP barely runs. Locks my whole laptop up and uses up about 50% of my i7 just idling.
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FWIW I was running Steam and Portal on my 2Ghz 4Gb-RAM '08 MacBook with Snow Leopard and it ran fine. Took a bit to load but the game itself never missed a beat.
 
striker33 said:
I'd rather they give us an actual Mac app instead of the horrific lazy ass port which currently exists on OS X.
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Steam is the only reason I run a native windows installation (purely for gaming), and as weird as it sounds, I far prefer the OS X port. On the same computer, the windows version will occasionally sit there not responding for 20 seconds as it does whatever its doing on start up, or when starting a game download.

Steam isnt perfect, but I am in love with it, and absolutely addicted to steam sales. The entire system just suits me better in every way than the current Mac App Store implementation. Infact I bought a few games I already owned on MAS during the recent steam sale, just for the convenience.

If they start selling apps, and can offer something a little more flexible than the "I can only run it on one computer at a time" limitation, I think they'd do quite well.
 
JoeG4 said:
you have to be logged into your steam account
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Why do people say that ? Steam runs fine in offline mode for me. As long as I have a game installed, it will launch and run.

Anyway, this is great news. I like Steam because unlike the Mac App Store, when you buy a game, you get to install it on any OS (Windows or Mac or eventually Linux) it is available for. Not to mention there's no restrictions on the type of application allowed on it and no forced sandboxing.
 
Nvm, misread. For doubters in case 2 posts isn't enough.
 

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This is great! I can buy an app and use it on osx and Windows :D

However, nobody wants to have to open steam and then use it to open the app, or only use it on one computer at a time, so they will need to adress that.
 
JoeG4 said:
As much as I like steam, there are some things that would keep me from 'purchasing' an expensive app through it :\ For example, you don't own what you buy, you only have the agreement to be able to use it -
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I believe that's the same agreement with most software any more, even the stuff you buy on disk. You don't own it, you have a license to use it.

JoeG4 said:
and you have to be logged into your steam account, and only 1 computer at a time can actually run something from the steam account. I dunno.. :(
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That could be a serious annoyance. I don't run into it often with games but if they start selling Office or Photoshop, or AutoCad (to pull three packages out of the air) they will need to come up with some mechanism to allow simultaneous use.
 
This is good, competition is always good, but to me Steam is about the games! So I don't know if I'd actually buy apps from them, but if the price is right I'd buy anything!

Also Steam for some reason runs like crap on my Mid 2010 MBP... Though in bootcamp it runs brilliantly. So if auto updates and/or using the app bought/attained through steam required steam to be open then I most certainly wouldn't use it on my current Mac :/
 
Uh Oh, they are in trouble..

They used the word "store" in there store, and apple has that word patented.
 
JoeG4 said:
and you have to be logged into your steam account, and only 1 computer at a time can actually run something from the steam account. I dunno.. :(
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If you put steam in offline mode you can run it on other computers simultaneously.
When it comes to games this is perfect for lan gaming. It prevents 2 copies of the same game going online at the same time.. Offline use they have no problem with.

I assume software will probably work differently as you don't really need to go online.
 
mduser63 said:
Apple doesn't set prices on the Mac App Store, developers do. As a developer myself, with an app sold both inside and outside the Mac App Store, I wouldn't charge less on Steam. I'd also refuse to use it if they demanded lower pricing, at least if/until they took over the market making that the only viable way to sell (I don't think that's going to happen).
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You're missing the part where Apple takes a larger cut from sales than their competitors, forcing developers to raise their prices in order to ensure the same profits under the Apple App Store.
 
nagromme said:
I can’t think of any examples where a Mac app has moved to the App Store and gone up in price; and I can think of many examples where they’ve gone down (though that might have happened anyway with the passage of time). And I see many desktop apps (games and utilities) now being $1-$5 on the App Store, which would have been $10 to $50 in the past.

What apps have gone up in price due the App Store? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, I’m just curious because I’ve never noticed.

Also, it’s the developers who set their product pricing, not Apple. So if there’s a problem of software costing too much, the solution is not about price competition between Apple and Valve, but about price competition between individual software developers. But we've always had that.
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Call of Duty 4: $39.99 Mac App Store, $19.99 Steam
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: $14.99 Mac App Store, $9.99 Steam
Bioshock 2: $24.99 Mac App Store, $19.99 Steam

That's just 3 very quick examples, there's plenty more if you look for yourself.
 
Excellent!

As a developer, I'm looking forward to splitting my app into two versions*, one for the Mac App Store and one for Steam. On the MAS version, it'll say something to the extent of "If you'd like features XYZ, go get the version off of Steam!" - no more lousy customer service where the best thing I can tell people is "Sorry, Apple wouldn't allow such a feature in a Mac App Store app."

*It's not the actual splitting I'm looking forward to, but the ability to better deliver to my customers what they want... and the ability to stop holding back the reigns on my apps just because, for example, Apple doesn't have an autolaunch method that is App Store approved that doesn't break the app under 10.6.

I'm hoping that I can also slap Apple across the face for all the times they ignored my feature requests. (IE, an app specific, rather than user specific, directory that MAS apps may store persistent data in.)
 
Mundty said:
Call of Duty 4: $39.99 Mac App Store, $19.99 Steam
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic: $14.99 Mac App Store, $9.99 Steam
Bioshock 2: $24.99 Mac App Store, $19.99 Steam

That's just 3 very quick examples, there's plenty more if you look for yourself.
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That isn't quite accurate, as Call of Duty 4 and BioShock 2 do not have Mac-compatible versions on Steam. Of course the PC version will be cheaper here.
 
cgk.emu said:
It is sluggish at times for me, that's for sure. But I wouldn't say I'm having nearly the same severity issues you are. That's odd. I'm running a 2008 uMPB, 8GB RAM, 2.4GHz C2D
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Ive got a 2008 C2D 2GB Macbook Pro and Steam is a mess on it. Tried installing TF2 on it, locked up my whole macbook then TF2 failed to properly uninstall.

Cleaned the whole hard drive to get rid of it, wont be going back to it.

Before people say 2008 Mac? Get a new one! My C2D windows running pc runs Steam and about 30 games on it fine. Apples and Steam don't mix well imo.
 
I see the explosion of stores coming. In the future you'll have to have accounts on 15 different stores to get your games and apps. Sigh. But competition is good.
 
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