Gameinformer: Portal 2 confirmed for Mac, Steam on the way for May

I wonder about third party games. For example, I bought and played Bioshock over Steam when it first came out, but that is not a Valve game. It is out for Mac, however, so I'll be interested to see if I can download the Mac version free of charge over Steam given that I bought the PC version there.

This forum thread has been tracking the ARG that Valve has been releasing with regards to Portal 2 and they have links to hi-res scans of the article.

http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=904084

how the fuck does this even work

source runs on direct x, mac can't run direct x? so is source now open gl??..

@balls: I'd rather play a game in Mac OS X at a slightly lower framerate than have to have a separate partition dedicated to Windows, with the attendant Windows license cost and update / maintenance / anti-virus hassles. I suspect the vast majority of Mac owners would too. 'Good enough' is frequently enough to satisfy the vast majority. Provided the Mac version runs at decent framerates, who cares if you could get an extra 5-10fps from Windows?

Also, over time, as the Mac gets more credibility as a games platform (thanks in huge part to Steam, I suspect), things will get more and more optimised on the Mac side such that any differences cease to matter, at least as much.

For small shareware games I could see the license keys being dual platform. But for AAA games your PC key will definitely not work for the Mac version (if it exists) due to licensing as the PC and Mac license are owned often by different licensors.

Also the idea all Steam games will come to the Mac is not realistic, Steam is an online gaming store not a magic bullet that makes any PC game run on a Mac. :)

This is great for the casual games, like Peggle etc that I already own for the PC via steam that have mac counterparts, but for the hardcore games like MW2, BC2 etc that require real horsepower, Windows is still the way to go.

Reason: Nvidia/ATI release updated drivers for their cards so frequently to squeeze every bit of extra performance of their cards for new games. We don't get that on OS X. We're stuck with whatever Apple puts out in their OS updates.

Yeah I can play games on OS X, but tweaking, drivers, overclocks, etc, is a very PC experience, which is going to be hard to replicate on the OS X. For me, since I'll want to play all the best games I can, I'll still be BC'ing on the MBP.

Valve can port the Source engine all they want, but it's old and out dated. Look at Frostbite 1.5 or the Infinity Ward engine for the new hotness.

Keep Valve Time in mind when reading release dates...

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

If it's just a cider port then I don't care. These games runs terribly slow in OS X anyway and I already have Boot Camp installed for that. But if it is native, then we're talking.

If Valve ports the Source engine to the mac, they would be able to port all the Source engine based games (CSS, HL, HL2, Portals etc etc etc) to the mac with very little effort.

If they wanted to, they could even port the Source SDKs to allow mods of all kinds to port to Mac (given how pro-mod Valve is, doing such a thing makes sense for them)

Will portal two run on the upcoming iPad? Moreover, will the steam engine run on the ipad?