Monday, March 8th 2010
Valve to Deliver Steam and Source on Mac
Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac. Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April. "As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. "The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "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."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "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 Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "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."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately.
Source:
Steam
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "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."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "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 Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "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."
Support for the Mac in Source and Steamworks is available to third parties immediately.
92 Comments on Valve to Deliver Steam and Source on Mac
That is only true for Valve games and some games that were released on OS X, but most of the 3rd party games do not offer OpenGL as a option. If Steam/Valve is serious about this, they will either have to start some serious negotiations or force DX10/9 games to run as OpenGL and that is what is going to take some doing. Otherwise, just rebuilding the plateform to offer Valve games on Mac OSX would not take that much work, since as you stated, all Valve games will run in DX and OpenGL.
I guess we just have to admit it now. This will only bring Valve games to Mac. Most other 3rd party games from the older library will be a no go, most of the cool indie titles are OpenGL anyway, so we get those, but the bulk of their library are DX platform only and 95% of them will not recode a damn thing to expand their market into a quote "small portion of the computer community and even smaller segment of the gaming sub-community."
They will simply claim redevelopment and maintenance will cost too much to do with current titles, but may consider it in the future depending on how Valve does with this. It is a dick move, but it is safe to let Valve test the waters before jumping in head first.
I also think Valve should wait and launch this with a new title like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 or Team Fortress 3 or Portal 2: Epic Awesomeness, because launching the platform with nothing new or fresh is just a bad idea.
companies building games in opengl will probably port for mac so as to become more popular and what not..
however, the big companies may or may not bite.. i think blizzard might venture into the mac market.. since they have like wow for mac etc..
one thing is for sure however.. with the steam distribution platform expanding to cover macs, we will be seeing more multi-platform games coming out soon..
But then again they are a business, and businesses are evil sometimes.
I mean, I still don't get your question, but yes this will be a special version of Steam for Mac users. The games installed will, for the most part not be the special version; however, games that will not run in OpenGL as the graphical software interface will not run on Mac OSX. Valve games already run in DX and OpenGL so it will be the exact same file system as currently in place. Other companies like EA, THQ, and 2K games will need to restructure some of the game to get it to run on OpenGL.
Actually altering the code properly will take time and money and I personally don't see any company volunteering to do that out the gate (as seen in discussion above); however, implementing a translator to just convert DX commands to OpenGL works, but at the cost of performance. I can see the second wave of companies that decide to join Valve in this using this path for current and older single player games.
Sorry, wishful thinking. Lets just leave this as Win for Mac, win for PC gaming (since someone still cares, thank you Valve), and hope others will jump on board with this whole heartedly in the near future.
This still seems wrong to me. I mean OpenGL future development die some time ago. Will this revitalize the effort to improve it and bring it up to date so to speak. Mac uses OpenGL for games to an extent, but isn't their default graphics API something else?
Surely they would have to be other wise illegal copies of left 4 dead( and other games) would be playable on mac?
Its not just the DX/open GL etc I'm pretty sure OS-X doesn't even use .exe files.
( don't quote me on that, been years since I've used one )
also there is no way to get the same graphics level of DirectX on OpenGL.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common ( assuming your on a 64bit os)
Then go into one of your game folders :toast:
Steam games function just like all other PC games, so I'm fairly sure steam will have to make separate steam client/steam games for Macs.
But as I said I've not used one in years and years and have no idea what sort of file types they can handle these days.
So could be completely wrong :laugh: