Valve: Coming to the Mac is "biggest event in Steam's history"

The origin of the mac/windows games divide goes way back. The real problem began when microsoft stopped supporting opengl (a standard that was updated and monitored by an independent organization.) It released directx to hardware manufacturers and game developers and then came out with the xbox to sell as a loss leader to promote development of games using directx instead of opengl.

opengl has and always will be just as good as directx and could do things natively that are only just being achieved with directx 10, but from a hardware and software development point of view it became cheaper to make directx games with a higher chance of getting sold well.

I agree that apple should talk to graphics manufacturers about better drivers, but this is an issue related to directx and the fact that its specifically designed to pull gamers away from the mac world and into the pc world.

mac hardware played opengl games better than a comparable pc, because of the optimized graphics-mobo-cpu integration. Likewise that applies to directx games in bootcamp - the hardware on a mac is solid.

At this point money is the only thing that is going to change the trend - spend your money on games that use opengl, ports to mac are great, but they're not perfect and can involve sloppy coding.

having said that, valve's addition of a mac connection will probably improve the porting quality of games so that the quality of all game ports improve.

utradar...I checked...and you are so spot on :)

It's not a joke, utradar. The availability of Mac GPU's is.

/Sigh...it must be exhausting for the people around you who have to put up with your attitude in person.

This joker NEVER has anything positive to say. It's always troll bait. Check out his other posts for the proof.

This is dumb. Games still won't play as well as they would on Windows. OS X's GPU drivers aren't even developed well enough to reach similar frame rates with Windows. For example, a game in Windows that gets 60FPS will probably get probably half that in OS X. I can get over 80FPS on MW2 in Windows playing with my MBP's 9600M GT. Would probably get half that in OS X (while also using the 9600M GT).

Fittingly, it's easily one of the biggest events in the Mac's history, too.

Steam on the Mac might single-handedly push Mac beyond anyones imagination.

I'd really like to see Apple pickup the ball and embrace 'games as a service' even further. Like integrating Steam into Front-row (or other dedicated app).

That would open up new doors for the (imho) 'usesless' Apple TV.

On the other hand Apple probably doesn't want to enter a market thats pretty seeded, like the console market is.

I hope Stardock hasn't frozen after crapping their pants, and are actually working on building a similar game distribution network for their "Impulse" platform. I prefer Impulse to Steam, and some of Stardock's games would be HUGE hits on the Mac.