Valve to Deliver Steam & Source on the Mac - CONFIRMED

From Valve itself:

Source: http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/


One concern I have is this part: "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".
With Valve releasing games for more and more platforms, that means they focus less on Windows gaming, ultimately lowering quality. Or they have to spend a great deal more time developing games. Either option isn't great.

What I do think is great is the fact that "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".

 

Hopefully people get into gaming, then buy a PC to support ALL games.

 

Well, I can just boot into bootcamp when I want to game, and back to OS X when I want to do real work. No probs there.

 

But not every Mac user does, nor wants to to have Windows on their Mac. I'm glad to see Mac getting more game support, as Bill Gates and MS need a good swift kick in the face when it comes to PC gaming and their desperate desire to get everyone on the 360 where everything is so controlled and in the end makes more money for MS.

 

It'll be interesting to see how the Valve games will perform across the Macintosh line. There are a lot of models in the OSX camp that have fairly weak graphic cards/chips. I have a Mac Mini for instance with a mere nVidia 9400m gpu. Great little computer that I use for 3D design, iPhone App development, and the occassional WoW or EVE Online session. I'm not sure how it will fair with the Half-Life 2 series or even the much anticipated Portal 2 when released.

 

should be fine, not on max settings of course, though.

as far as lowering the quality of the windows versions of the games, i wouldn't worry about it.

it's definitely added time over reduced quality. however, a lot of that time is fixed cost time, and it doesn't matter that much. content creation takes up the bulk of the time cost, and that is platform agnostic. porting the engine to openGL only really has to be done once.

 

It'll be the Intel GMA Macs that <strike>might</strike> will struggle with the games - the 9400M G is actually quite the capable IGP in comparison.

 

Good for all you Mac owners. Now what about Linux

 

Makes perfect sense. Casual Mactards (People who actually don't need OSX but get Macs because they are "cool"/"hip"/etc) seem to have a lot of money to blow. Exploit, exploit, exploit!

 

They probably already have thier engine ported to OGL. They probably have a toolset that lets them develop a code base against 2 different underlying engines simultaneously with little or no change at the per game level. I'd bet they have an OGL/Mac engine and a DX/Win engine that have virtually identical APIs, so they'll have a team developing each engine, then teams doing platform agnostic game development.

 

The wait time to start a game each time and the glorious performance must be great.

 

Don't look forward to seeing Episode 3 for HL2 anytime soon with this announcement. Simultaneous development for different Operating Systems isn't exactly cheap or efficient.

 

GoldSource usually run OpenGL, and now that Valve have confirmed that they will make their Source games OpenGL too.

Free cake for the developers.

 

Hmm... good luck to Valve. Just wouldn't hold my breath as if it is a success, I wouldn't be surprised if Steve Jobs releases his own version and announces Valve's Steam is unstable and destroys his OS.

Of course I scratch my head thinking, Mac is going to start releasing gaming machines now? Wouldn't that go against their image of thin and quiet?

And of course lastly, just because Valve is moving over, doesn't mean EA/Ubisoft are going to do this also. Why spend millions recoding games for such a small population of Mac users and then even smaller population of Mac Gamers? I can't imagine it's just a simple port. Separate OS and have to do it in OpenGL

But wait, if they do this, maybe they will offer OpenGL to PC users again? Hmm, that might be nice.

Also is it coincidence that every Mac user I know personally is a girl who doesn't play games?

 

I think some people here are making it sound more complicated than it is. Macs are just any old IBM PC under the hood these days. Once they get an OpenGL renderer up to snuff the rest of the stuff wouldn't be to hard to do. Not sure about the steam client, but they've removed their Microsoft centric pieces of that for the new version for likely exactly this reason. I'm sure there will be some growing pains, but with Microsoft's GFWL attempting to horn in on their territory it is smart for Valve to divest themselves from Microsoft centric stuff and move to a more flexible position.

The OpenGL renderer should allow them to run "DirectX 10" features on Windows XP as well.

 

Did you make up that term yourself? Nice. Good luck with getting rep.

 

I gave him rep.

 

He's got plenty of luck getting rep for me, I thought it was funny.

Anyway, I'm happy for the gamers among the Apple crowd (all 5 of them), but I think Valve have some seriously misplaced priorities. I mean, the whole point of episodic Half-Life 2 expansions was to have less time between installments than full-blown sequels...and yet it's been over two years since Episode Two, and in the meantime they created Left 4 Dead and a full sequel within a year, huge amounts of content updates for Team Fortress 2, some DLC for L4D and another one in the works for L4D2, a full sequel to Portal, and now OS X support?

I'm not a business major, but I think it would just make more sense to finish up the games they're supposed to be finishing, and then worry about porting it all over to OS X.

 

I repped him too.

It's a good thing IMO, to give the mac users some games to play with, to finally realize how bad they are ripped off on their 2 years old technology when their game starts to lag bad.

 

"Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth", well if they're really gonna do this, at least they're doing it right.

I wonder how much time/money/effort they are going to need to put into this to live up to these big promises.

Is one company treating macs as a tier-1 platform really going to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things though? Won't mac users still need dual boot or virtual machine solutions to have access to a good selection of games? Will any other developers follow suit? If not, vanilla mac users will still be limited to pretty much WoW, the Orange Box, and a few others like Dragon Age.

How is Valve going to reach out to casual mac users? I know a lot of people with shiny new macbook pros that would make pretty respectable gaming machines, but even if there was a huge library of mac games suddenly available I don't think any of them would actually play any games besides WoW and farmville.

 

My guess is that Valve, in making Source dual platform, with start a marketing push to get Source to overtake Unreal Engine and push Cryengine out of the market by saying "hey, look, you can do relatively easy development for Xbox, PC, AND Mac all at once with this engine." If they get that to stick, there probably will be a fair number of Mac games hitting shelves.

 

Something about this doesn't feel right. Bah, I don't know, but maybe some people will start to realize their can-do-no-wrong macs won't run circles around my pc, not when it's struggling to put out a reasonable frame rate, if more modern games get ported/developed for the mac. Well not every piece of apple hardware, but certainly many.

 

That' what I already do Can't wait for my real PC though...

 

Realistically, any MBP with the 9400M GT and a Core 2 Duo will handle Source games just fine.

 

Doubtful considering how much they have to underclock the 9400 so it runs silent with barely any fans.

 

I have an 8600m in my MBP, and it can run L4D2 on medium at native res 1600x900. Probably on par with 9400? It only runs new WoW content in medium (low at the most intense parts).

Idk, but I think valve is trying to sell sports coupes and Hummers to elderly people here. Mac users generally dont game. Because Gamers understand what a ripoff Macs are. (Mine came through my company and were originally owned by other employees, I wouldnt buy one myself ).

 

How is the cooling in the MBP? Did Nvidia just make high temp mobile for PC and made a good one with low temp for MBP? Or do the fans actually go on high on MBP?

 

There's a grand total of what, twelve Mac games in existence?

 

There are quite a few Mac owners I'm sure who would be more than happy to game on their Mac if the games were available in the first place. I know quite a few dedicated Mac owners that have consoles that I'm sure wouldn't mind playing games on them if they could (we all know how much of a travesty playing HL2 on a console is - it pretty much sucks having to use a controller for it). As for buying Macs for gaming only, yes it's a dumb idea, however for everything else they are quite excellent at what they do, offering a stable and secure computing platform that happens to have quite a vast repertroire of creative software, much of it exclusive to the Apple platform. The Source Engine games are pretty popular, and extending the audience to the Mac where the experience, like on a Windows machine, should be the same assuming the hardware is up to par. It'll be even more endearing if Source will be made to run on pre-Intel machines. That would be pretty cool of Valve. I must also note how convenient it would be to have more mainstream games on the Mac. Those of us who would like a Mac would have another reason to get one, as we could enjoy many games on the machine we might prefer to do normal computing work on, no need to switch OS or machine to do so.

 

Ok, this is confusing. When people bring up a "gaming" netbook, people scoff and laugh at the idea. But if you look at a Mac while its CPU is generally decent, its GPU isn't much better than a netbook with ION or HD 3200.

If they just plan on porting older games to Mac, then that's fine with me. But if they intend on designing games with a Mac in mind, then we're taking a huge step backwards using Mac as the least common denominator for a PC that will run a game.

Not only that, but any die-hard Mac user I've talked to say it's "dumb" to game on your laptop. That's not what it was intended for.

 

most source games / call of duty / others can run at high framerate low settings on the 9400m. thats all there is to it.

 

So they'll design a game so that it can run at low settings? That doesn't make sense.

 

Not really, they are thinking about the future, a Mac that is refreshed 2-3 times in 1-2 years time would be able to play it at nice frame rate - in medium settings.

 

are we talking about new games or old games?

valve games can run on almost anything, as can blizzard games. they are highly scalable. are we talking about the same thing?

half life 2 ran on literally 6 or 7 generations of graphics cards back at the time of its release. the geforce 6 series was basically out and it ran on the original geforce cards, and even older cards than that!

the 9400m should have no problem with half life 2 based games.

obviously, any macs with intel graphics cards won't be able to join the party.

as of today, all macs ship with at least a 9400m. some have more powerful graphics cards as well. does that make more sense?

 

I don't know what their intent is, do you? If it's to port over older games, then great, have at it. I'm just surprised they're willing to spend resources on a limited market. I just don't think Mac users are as apt to play any mainstream FPS type games. Yet, Half-Life 2 Episode 3 sits in limbo that would capture a huge market without a doubt.

I dunno. I'm just speculating and seems like awkward business sense. But Valve has been quite successful, so I'm sure they know what they're doing. Perhaps its a quick way to garner more income especially if they add a lot of the older Mac games that exist to the catalog right away.

 

Well as of right now only Valve has publicly announced that they're porting their games over to Mac. The Source engine is extremely scalable, so their games should run fine on Mac hardware.

 

A Mac refreshed 2-3 times in a year or 2? What world are you living in? Their "high end" notebook is still featuring a mid range GPU from 3 (probably soon to be 4) generations ago and CPUs from at least a generation ago. They were running on even older stuff for at least a year or 2 before refreshing to tech that was already old when they first released machines with it. Quick, iterative development of product lines is not the Mac business model.

 

Well, that, and the Source engine is a lot more CPU dependant so it should do well with the Mac hardware.

What kind of 3D API does Mac use anyhow? OpenGL?

 

Does the average Apple user use any software that isn't Apple other than maybe pirated Photoshop?

Considering Steam is free, and if successful, anyone doubt Apple won't view that as a cash cow they can tap into and force Apple users to pay for it?

I scratch my head wondering why Valve would risk it. If Apple is giving Adobe crap about Flash because people can view free movies, free flash games etc. competing with paid for iTunes, why would Valve think Apple won't try to take over if it ends up being successful?

I know Vegas, Sound Forge, FL Studio etc and more software used to be available on Mac and since Apple decided to create their own pro software, they are no longer available. Apple seems to me demonstrates over and over, anything successful/profitable they want to take that cash opportunity for themselves.

 

OpenGL indeed.

 

I'm sure it'll be designed to run on a range of systems. I wouldn't be surprised if HL2 will be easily playable on X3100 equiped Macs. 9400M performance with it should be very good, and well the 9600M GT should be able to blow it out of the water. I know my friends Macbook Pro with a 9600M GT blew the first Left 4 Dead out of the water using WinXP.

 

Maybe I'll delete my bootcamp partition now.