Posts tagged steam
The cake is a lie: Steam comes to the Mac
May 14th
If you consider yourself a gamer and a Mac user, your world became instantaneously better on Wednesday. Valve officially released the Steam client for Mac. Through today, you can actually get Portal for free. Portal is Valve’s unique and challenging first-person puzzel shooter: it’s a great way to introduce yourself to the Steam platform. We spent a couple hours and hammered our way through Portal so we could get back to our achievements. Most of the more modern games have been updated with Cloud syncing (game progress is saved no matter what computer you’re on) but it had been so long since we’ve played Portal that there was no record of our saved games. Our achievements were thankfully still there.
Portal, Peggle Deluxe, World of Goo — those are just some of the titles that we purchased a while back on one of the PCs in the house. They are guaranteed to work with a new feature called “Steam Play.” If you purchase it on one platform it will be free for you on any other platform as long as the game is compatible. We picked up the Indie pack of games, a great buy for $20… we also picked up Braid (a completely unique platformer).
Things haven’t been completely smooth with the software: we have noticed a few weird glitches with overlays, some strange browser-like errors, a few crashes and a game install error that had us restarting our machine and trying again. Not too shabby for Valve’s very first release on the Mac. Most of it, we’re guessing, is the fact that Valve’s moved everything over to a webkit-based system… one that probably hasn’t been tested rigorously. Either way, it’s not stopping us from playing our games — the games have been completely flawless. We’ve spent several hours playing Braid, Portal, World of Goo, and Galcon Fusion… none of the games have glitched at all.
Each Wednesday, Valve will be releasing new games into the Mac-compatible section. If you don’t see something you want right away, give it a few days… it just might show up. We can’t wait to get some of the other Valve software ported over: the Half-Life series, Team Fortress… gaming on the Mac just took a u-turn on the road to perdition.
If you do end up playing Portal, just remember that the cake is a lie.
Let the Steamy speculation begin
Mar 3rd
Great news for the Mac gaming world today… Valve has scattered images around the mac blogosphere teasing us with Mac-like artwork with a caption that says “In anticipation of an upcoming announcement from Valve.”
This. Is. Huge.
We talked about the possibility of a Mac version of Steam (Valve’s distribution platform) last week. We didn’t have much go on, just a few Mac user interface pictures within the latest beta version of Steam. Today, Valve threw caution to the wind and gave us all images to drool over. It appears as though the feud between Apple and Steam is over. Sweet.
Valve is coming to the Mac. There is not doubt about it. That means Steam is coming to the Mac. That’s the only way Valve distributes its software. No more World of Warcraft for us, we might actually see real gaming titles come to our platform of choice. We’re not say that WoW isn’t a real game, but we can only spend a certain amount of time playing the same game over and over again.
There is no estimated release date, but considering the effort poured into these images, we’d expect it to be soon. Very soon.
- Steam for Mac
- Half Life for Mac
- Portal for Mac
- Team Fortress for Mac
- Left 4 Dead 4 Mac
- Half Life 2 for Mac
Steam: coming to a Mac near you… eventually.
Feb 25th
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Steam, it’s a game distribution platform that has revolutionized the way PC users purchase, play and share games. Each user has an account that can be accessed from any machine, and thus you can play any of your games on any machine. By machine, we mean PC. The titles are always current, and the Steam platform streamlines the shopping process for you. I’ve actually purchased games I had never seen at the store because they were featured on Steam and they looked great.
My gaming days are nearly behind me, but I still get caught up in a great game every now and then… and when I was a PC, Steam was my platform of choice. I grew up building, repairing and gaming on the PC… I eventually switched to Mac for my music endeavors about 6 years ago now. True gamers have always been disappointed with the gaming abilities of the Mac: unless you want to play older titles, World of Warcraft or niche games similar to PopCap’s offerings, there’s really nothing here for us. I’m the owner of a Mac repair shop (check it out in the sidebar) and I run a blog devoted to Apple products… but I still game on the PC, using Steam’s distribution platform.
Gizmodo reported this morning that a few members of the Steam forums found several references to OS X in the latest beta release of the software. They specifically found Mac icons related to the close, minimize, and maximize icons of OS X windows. There has also been discussion about the replacement of Valve’s web engine Trident with the very mac friendly WebKit. These two facts don’t mean that Steam is definitely coming to the Mac — WebKit can be used on any platform, and pictures are just pictures — but it’s still encouraging to deem it a possibility. Not too long ago, Steam and Apple discussed bringing their games to the Mac and it really wasn’t the result we were looking for… both parties went their different ways.
Even if we do see Steam come to the light, we probably won’t see the popular gaming titles follow suit right away. It is up to the developer to make their games OS-independent and not many of them have been so keen on that up to this point. Realistically, the Mac market share is still rather small compared to the PC counterpart… and the people who want to play these games know that the PC is the only way. We’re hoping that Steam’s inclusion of the Mac will give developers a better option for Mac distribution. In the end, gaming has never been a priority for the Mac. I’m sitting here with a brand new, awesome 27-inch iMac and it only has a 256MB video card. That’s pretty sad, and it definitely wouldn’t play Crysis at a decent FPS.
