Popular online gaming service and marketplace Steam has officially launched on the Mac, bringing a surprising large of palette of 63 games to Mac OS X. And as an incentive, Mac games can try out the popular action title Portal for free through May 24 as a way to get into the service. And those 63 title are just the beginning: Valve is promising new games will go online for Macs every week.
Besides Portal, titles initially available via Steam on the Mac are Civilization 4, Torchlight, City of Heroes, Peggle, and a broad selection of LucasArts adventure games. Games who have previously purchased games via Steam will be able to play them via their account from a Macintosh as soon as they’re released for the platform. As with other Steam purchases, customers who buy games through Steam can play them on all supported platforms—the games are also automatically kept up to date.
Valve is also making its Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools available to the Mac platform, enabling game developers to integrate Steam functionality directly into their games.
The Steam client itself requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.5.8 or 10.6.3 or newer; pricing on individual games seems to run from $4.99 to $39.99.
