Valve on Mac piques interest from other game developers

I was pretty surprised as well when Valve announced Steam coming to OS X. I didn't expect the entire catalog available from day 1 and knowing Valve, they will have all of their 1st party titles available.

I really don't understand the approach other companies take regarding building games for the Mac. Blizzard has been making their games native on the Mac for years (even before OSX hit the map).

I have always wondered why if Blizzard could make it, other companies couldn't? Now even more, that Blizzard still has the crown for WoW being #1 MMO, other companies like NCSoft, should had followed suit. Even Mythic released a client much later for Warhammer on the Mac, Aeon would have had better success having a client for the mac for their game as well, and so on and so forth.

Maybe Valve is setting a stone for other people to follow. Like other viewers, I can't wait for this to happen (the release of the client) so I can blow away my Windows 7 partition... The best thing is whatever games I own (for now 1st party titles) I own on Steam fr PC I can use in the mac without re-bung them... Hopefully other companies that publish their games on Steam, will start natively porting their games too.

We will have to see what happens in the months that follow... How long it takes, it will be awesome.

The only reason we don't have tuned drivers at the moment is because there's no reason for the developers to make them. The more games that come over to Mac the more effort ATI/AMD and Nvidia will put towards the drivers.

You also seem to forget that unlike the billion different PC configurations Apple have only a few. Like a closed console environment this will allow developers (of drivers and games) to get as much performance as they can because they'll know what they're developing for, something that is impossible on PC's.

Valve have made a move and if this goes well the future should be very good for gaming on a Mac.

That's never seemed to be a problem with WoW. Which is a native game on OS X. It runs great on my Unibody Macbook Pro, and yes, it can be a pretty taxing game sometimes. That said, the OS X drivers are definitely way behind the Win 7 drivers.

What type of DRM are they going to use & how is this going to impact on the OS?

I can't help but think this has something to do with Onlive going live in June.

Come on, Relic, you know you want to bring the Dawn Of War love to the Mac...

Portal! Portal! Portal!

And now...Portal 2!

Valve is easily one of the most relevant PC gaming publishers of the past decade.

So it's a little more than exciting when they decide to not only fully support the Mac with their entire first party catalog and Steam, but to do it legitimately, not opting for a simple Cider wrapper or the like for their games, but really porting their games, integrating important cross-platform technologies like OpenGL and Webkit.

Not to mention the myriad other developers who use Source in their games, for which porting to OS X will shortly be a cinch. This is big news, make no mistake.

Wasn't this supposed to happen like two years ago when they marched all the major developers out on stage during a keynote? What did we get? Sims 3, Spore? The whole time showing their crappy CIDER ports. If they can do it right this time and not use emulation like in the past, It will be awesome. Valve already has the right idea, like always.

This would be a nice cold bottle of STFU to PC users who always mention gaming.