Valve talks gaming on the Mac, says best is yet to come

Valve's Jason Holtman and Doug Lombardi recently sat down with GamesIndustry.biz to discuss their big release of Steam on the Mac, and not only do they reiterate that great stat that games released on the Mac see a nice bump in sales, but they say that the best days of Mac gaming are yet to come. They can't share numbers yet on just how many Mac vs. PC players there are (though they say the response has been great, and you can see Mac players in games often), but Holtman and Lombardi both say that from small game developers to big game publishers, Steam on Mac has helped everyone see just how active and important the Mac gaming scene is. There are international users on Macs, and the amount of player interest in games for the platform has made developers rethink their old plans of releasing a Mac port when they get to it rather than day and date with the PC title.

That is, in a word, awesome. And Lombardi says now that publishers are interested in the platform as whole, we'll see some "different types of experiment on pricing and promotion and all that stuff on Mac titles," as companies try to figure out how to make the most of this market they've been neglecting for so long.

Valve has already said that bringing Steam to the Mac was the most significant decision they've made with the service, but I'd argue that even this early in the process (even Valve admits that it doesn't have a lot of data yet on how people use the two platforms), it was a seismic event for Mac gaming as well.

View Tags

Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-08-04-valve-on-ma…

Categories

Gaming Mac

Valve's Jason Holtman and Doug Lombardi recently sat down with GamesIndustry.biz to discuss their big release of Steam on the Mac, and not...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

14 Comments

Filter by:

dorian

I'm waiting for Dragon Age: origin and Plants vs Zombies for macâ€¦ on steam.

August 08 2010 at 6:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Balatro

I'm really enjoying a regular TF2 night with friends. That being said, there are definitely some issues:

Firstly, the performance on Windows is MUCH better. WIth Boot Camp on my 2010 MBP 13", I'll get 20-30fps in OSX and 60-120fps in Windows.

Secondly, voice often simply fails to work with USB headsets. I still have to test analog. I've heard they've tracked down some clue to why its happening so I hope that gets patched soon.

Overall though I'm THRILLED to have Steam on OSX and I'm looking forward to more games. I see Lego Universe now is saying a simul Windows/Mac release.

August 07 2010 at 11:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

War Machine

I'm still waiting for an update for Team Fortress 2 for Mac that makes the game work because what we have right now is a goddam mess that hangs after every single movement. It doesn't crash, I'll give them that, but it's not playable.

August 07 2010 at 6:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jon

I put CounterStrike Source on my Mac Pro with NVIDIA 285GTX but I was only getting 20-25 FPS... maybe I should've stopped the blu Ray burning in the background, quit the two windows virtual machines, stopped my streaming MP3 server, logged out my two other users, stopped the Adobe Encore AVCHD->Mpeg2 conversion (that was using nine cores itself!!), and possibly set my resolution down to something sane like 1080p. But it's nice to be able to game while waiting for my renders, instead of having to reboot into Windows 7 to game and having to put off my deadlines...

August 07 2010 at 12:00 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

DasGimp

I'm still waiting for Half Life 2 death match for the mac, I'm getting tired of seeing all the PC versions on steam I've paid for that are not being ported over to the mac. I know the performance on the mac is slower I just don't care

Hey Steam/Valve wheres my HALF LIFE 2 DEATH MATCH ?!?!

August 06 2010 at 10:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

shaz

I cant even play my games on steam anymore because steam wont even open.

August 06 2010 at 8:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to shaz's comment

andrewpenick

i had a problem logging in with Steam on the first day. Had to do with double-clicking the game 'shortcut' on the desktop. but if you've never logged in... hm.

Steam is built with Flash so you need to have that enabled. If you're still not getting it to work, then do a couple simple tests:

1. install the latest version of Flash and then try to log in
2. change Users and try to log in. If you don't have a second user account, you should just in case something disastrous. Anyway, there's always a chance that there's something odd about your User that wouldn't be present in a new one. If it works in the new User account then you know the problem rests with your old one. if not, then the problem is external (flash, or your connection)
3. Steam games require an internet connection to run so if you have to connect to the Interwebs manually (dialup?) then be sure to be connected before logging in to Steam

I used to do a lot of beta testing for fun. habits die hard.

August 07 2010 at 10:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dvddesign

Where are Left 4 Dead 1 & 2?

I thought Francis hated different? Was this not the case?

August 06 2010 at 7:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

browndwarf79

I had a 9600gt with my old pc and it ran fantastic with valve games. Now I have same with a Mac and performance isn't always optimal... How about some driver updates maybe? Not blaming valve here but still.

August 06 2010 at 7:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

4 replies to browndwarf79's comment

Titolito

I'm sorry, what? I was busy killing combine soldiers using ant-lions.

August 06 2010 at 7:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply