Will Steam Open the Valve to Mac Gaming?

March 4, 2010 By Nick Mokey

A series of cryptic Apple-style advertisements from Valve and other clues suggest that some of the company's most popular titles will soon launch for Macs.

Even the most hopelessly deluded Macheads wouldn’t tell you otherwise: Macs suck for gaming. Despite capable hardware – including a dedicated GPU in every model on the market today – the complete vacuum of recent titles for Apple’s OS X operating system has left Mac owners with a lust for gaming high and dry. But the tide could be turning, as heavyweight developer Valve Software hinted that it might be giving the platform some much needed love in the future.

Valve distributed a series of mock advertisements for Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half-Life 2, all copping Apple’s signature style, hinting that all three titles might soon be making an appearance on OS X. They range from Half-Life’s Alyx Vance hurling a crowbar into a giant head on a screen ala Apple’s 1984 ad, to a Team Fortress 2 character done in the colorized silhouette style of iPod ads.

The argument gets even more compelling taking the timing into consideration. The annual Game Developer’s Conference begins March 9, giving Valve an ample world stage to make an announcement following this week’s teasers. Snooping game enthusiasts also managed to dig OS X elements – like icons and buttons – out of the source code for a recent Steam beta.

All three bits of evidence point to an imminent release of Valve’s most popular titles for Mac. Watch next week’s coverage of the Game Developer’s Conference for the official announcement, and more importantly, to find out when you can finally break out Gordon Freeman’s crowbar on your iMac.

Check out the actual text in the ad below for a subtle dose of Valve’s wry wit – and a virtual guarantee that Steam will arrive for OS X.

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Valve announces ‘big picture’ TV mode for Steam at 9:04am 1st March 2011 [...] announced that the PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2 will connect to Steam as well, allowing PC, Mac, and PS3 players to challenge one another.Steam is a cloud-based PC game platform and store. Like [...]
digitalroar at 1:43pm 7th March 2010 It seems like the question that comes up a lot is what non-casual games are on the Mac. Beyond the ports of AAA games that came to the Mac much later than their Windows counterparts, there have been some companies who do support Mac and PC right out of the box natively, Blizzard being one of the more notable.

Utilizing the power of the Unity game engine, you can quite easily port a game to both platforms without much “tweaking” at all. With Unity gaining popularity (http://unity3d.com/gallery/game-list/) you’re likely to see more cross platform titles being developed. For example, we are and indie developer, but we are making what we consider to be a AAA quality game that will be for Mac and PC right out of the box. You can check it out at www.ascensionwar.com or look us up on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ascensionwar