Steam for Mac Available, Valve Gives Away Copies of Portal

[btarunr]

Valve today officially introduced the Steam for Mac. The popular game content distribution and multiplayer game networking platform will bring a wealth of casual games as well as games developed by Valve to Mac users. To celebrate this launch, Valve is giving away a free copy of Portal to anyone who downloads Steam between today and May 24, 2010. Existing steam users who don't have the game yet can simply click on the install button on the game's Store page.

"The Mac is a great platform for developers," said Gabe Newell, president of Valve. "And it's also great that we now have the ability to connect with Mac gamers via Steam. This is the beginning of a groundswell of games coming out for and fully utilizing the openness and power of the Mac." Each Wednesday a new group of games highlighting an area of Steam functionality will be released. This week's titles, which show off Steam Play, include:

And Yet It Moves

Atlantis Sky Patrol

Bejeweled 2 Deluxe

Bob Came in Pieces

Bookworm Deluxe

Braid

Brainpipe

Chocolatier: Decadence by Design

Chuzzle Deluxe

City of Heroes: Architect Edition

Civilization IV: The Complete Edition

Cooking Dash

Diaper Dash

The Dig

Diner Dash: Hometown Hero

DinerTown Detective Agency

DinerTown Tycoon

Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child

Escape Rosecliff Island


Fairway Solitaire

Fitness Dash

Football Manager 10

Galcon Fusion

Gemini Lost

Guns of Icarus

Hotel Dash Suite Success

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

KrissX

Loom

Luxor

Luxor 3

Luxor: Mahjong

Machinarium

Mahjong Roadshow

Max and the Magic Marker

My Tribe

The Nightshift Code


Nightshift Legacy: The Jaguar's Eye

Parking Dash

Peggle Deluxe

Peggle Nights

Portal

Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery

Quantz

Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse

Tales of Monkey Island Season 1

Toki Tori

Torchlight

Trijinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery

Unwell Mel

Valarie Porter and the Scarlett Scandal

Wandering Willows

Wedding Dash 2: Rings Around the World

World of Goo

Zenerchi

Zuma Deluxe

[TheMailMan78]

L4D2 and NOW!

[EastCoasthandle]

What happened to having Steam on xbox 360? (rumored)

[a_ump]

interesting. i wonder how long steam will release games each wednesday for mac's. i don't own one but i wonder if they're going to get all their major titles like: CSS, TF2, L4d1+2, etc running on the mac. valve is simply amazing imo. i love their games and what they do with them, especially how they've been doing multi-core usage in recent games like tf2 and l4d.

[LAN_deRf_HA]

What would be the point of steam on the 360? None of the games you had on the account would be installable on the 360 so there's no carry over. You can already buy games, both full and arcade, with the live service. There'd be no benefit...

[Eva01Master]

Steam on Mac? For which purpose? Mac users are not avid gamers nor computer enthusiasts, if they were, they wouldn't be using an Apple produced electronic...

[Wrigleyvillain]

Originally Posted by Eva01Master

Steam on Mac? For which purpose? Mac users are not avid gamers nor computer enthusiasts, if they were, they wouldn't be using an Apple produced electronic...

This is pretty short sighted. It will be a huge success just watch. There are plenty of casual games after all. My mom is getting a Mac soon and she is an avid Bewjewled-type gamer and has been for years on various PCs. I will without a doubt show her Steam to keep things simpler.

[Mussels]

short list... i guess its because they figure macs cant run the high end games?

[Ripper3]

The weekly releases are to display certain technologies of Steam. Steam Play is this week's Steam tech, whereby you can buy a game for the PC version of Steam, and you're able to play it on any Steam activated PC or Mac, you just purchase once. This shows they're really looking into multi-platform.

@Eva01Master: There are more people with Macs than there are with Linux installed on their home machines (if the surveys and web traffic analysis are all correct). Steam already has parts of it that are coded for Linux, I imagine they're just going by whatever platform has more market share first. Steam is probably eventually going to be the defacto "app store" for full-sized computers once it goes totally cross-platform.

Steam Play is definitely a big advantage, do not want to be buying games all over again, even if it does mean I can play them on my MBP, rather than booting into Windows every time.

@a_ump: Funny you should mention multi-core usage, OS X has Grand Central Dispatch, which makes it easier for applications to use multiple processor cores efficiently. I wonder if Valve have taken advantage of this, or just made something of their own (quite likely).

@EastCoasthandle: I would have guessed Steam for 360 would just be shot down by Microsoft, since you've got the Live service for gaming, you have Messenger for chatting, and you've got the games themselves on DVD, there is also already a game download service too, but also you have multimedia stuff otherwise.
The only advantage I could see is if they brought Steam Play, Steam Cloud and a few other things to the table. Steam Play so you only have to buy a game once (I think if this happened, I could justify spending £10 more per game, rather than £50 for the 360 version, and £40 for the PC version, you just buy the multi-platform version, with a DVD in the case that works for the 360, and a download voucher for PC). Steam Cloud saves all of your preferences, game settings, and saved games on Valve's servers, so if you reinstall, or your HDD goes kablooee, you've not lost those small, annoying bits and pieces.

Haven't installed this yet, as I have exams, but I must say I love Valve as much as i love my Companion Cube <3

[timta2]

The truth of the matter is that there is a huge untapped market for Steam and they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make financial sense. Hopefully this will increase demand for Mac systems that are more gaming friendly.

There was a time in the past when there were some awesome Mac games. I mean Bungie started out making (Exclusively) Mac games. Marathon anyone?

[Imsochobo]

Originally Posted by timta2

The truth of the matter is that there is a huge untapped market for Steam and they wouldn't be doing this if it didn't make financial sense. Hopefully this will increase demand for Mac systems that are more gaming friendly.

There was a time in the past when there were some awesome Mac games. I mean Bungie started out making (Exclusively) Mac games. Marathon anyone?

Blizzard makes their games for MAC aswell.

Starcraft, Diablo, Starcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft.

They are the biggest titles ever if you ask me!

With CS they have all the most popular games in history!

Edit: Valve also working on linux ports, and steam client there, mac and linux shares large amount of shared libaries, they run opengl, and X11.

[a_ump]

Originally Posted by Imsochobo

Blizzard makes their games for MAC aswell.

Starcraft, Diablo, Starcraft II, Warcraft III, World of Warcraft.

They are the biggest titles ever if you ask me!

With CS they have all the most popular games in history!

Edit: Valve also working on linux ports, and steam client there, mac and linux shares large amount of shared libaries, they run opengl, and X11.

what's x11? u don't mean dx11 do u? cause i don't believe either of those OS's support it lol

[Imsochobo]

Originally Posted by a_ump

what's x11? u don't mean dx11 do u? cause i don't believe either of those OS's support it lol

X11 is the graphical GUI system, not how windows look, behave, how menu's and all that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11

I'm sure they both share way much more! but anyways, even fancy mac can use it!(x11)

So my point here is really that the way from Mac to linux is short. since the DX->Opengl is the hardest.

[Tartaros]

And 6 years later... mac users get a crippled version of steam...

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by Tartaros

And 6 years later... mac users get a crippled version of steam...

just the way they like it.

less stuff = less complicated = less to go wrong = "it just works"

[Ripper3]

It's actually full-on Steam, the games that work with it meanwhile are not quite the same. Obviously, DirectX support within them was removed, since it's not needed, and it's proprietary from Microsoft, so it's not able to be implemented without something like Wine.
Downloading Portal now, and bought and downloading Torchlight now too.
Really hope they release HL2 next week, wouldn't mind playing through it again. Potentially without cheating this time...

[Delta6326]

Originally Posted by Mussels

just the way they like it.

less stuff = less complicated = less to go wrong = "it just works"

I love starting my day with a good laugh!

This is cool, if we have backed-up are games from steam can we just install them over or do we have to re download them?

Rant:
By the way i have a macbook and i hate it, simple as that it freeze's up i got the gsod, and i get error all the time, it also over heats! i would much rather have a 7 laptop. This laptop was free brand new so i don't really mind the bad stuff as much, but if i had to pay $1000 for this i would be angry.

[Mussels]

i assume it would take a redownload, since they had to convert them to work on the other OS.

some files may work copied over, and save you some bandwidth at least.

[Delta6326]

Dang

[Mussels]

oh well, time to shoot yourself... your mac doesnt "just work"

[epicfail]

Originally Posted by Mussels

just the way they like it.

less stuff = less complicated = less to go wrong = "it just works"

lmao, made my day.

ya apparently macs dont crash they crash differetly also ive heard tons of things.

[monte84]

[Mussels]

use IMG tags mon, thats worth seeing

edit: nvm, i'll do it

[entropy13]

Originally Posted by monte84

http://i.imgur.com/EFOH6.jpg

OHNOES WRONG MOUSE!

[Delta6326]

hahahahahhahahaha its so true!!