Valve today announced the public release of Steam for the Mac is May 12. Please stay tuned for more information.
Eric Slivka reports for MacRumors, “Officially announced in early March, Steam will bring a major game distribution platform, including Valve’s library of popular games, to the Mac.”
“A closed beta of Steam for Mac has been ongoing with testers initially putting Valve’s Portal through its paces,” Slivka reports. “Through Valve’s ‘Steam Play’ feature, users will be able to play games on multiple operating systems while only having to purchase each title once.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “James W.” and “Andrew W.” for the heads up.]
The list of things for PC fanboys to bitch about is getting shorter. I mean, I’m sure they’ll find other stuff.. or maybe go back to the whole “Macs can’t right-click” thing again.
Macs can dumb down
oops ….Meant Macs can’t dumb down
Woohoo!
Now we just need a new Apple tower between an iMac and a Mac pro spec
Just in time to mark the end of the Mac. And, I say, good riddance – the very last thing we need is more damn games. No wonder Apple has given up on making computers.
So… I guess Steve approves of this? I mean… that would make these games… cross-platform.
Cross- dressing gamers.
Can’t wait! I love Steam for Windows, and now I wont have to open Boot Camp nearly as often.
@Finally
ugh, people like you are making me sick. Get off here. Sorry for feeding the trolls.
If they offer a wide selection of games it’s one less reason to install windows on your Mac.
@Finally: “No wonder Apple has given up on making computers.” Ummm, yeah. And last I heard, Nissan isn’t making cars anymore, and Nikon quit making cameras.
@mooLatte: (a) Macs are not iPhones /iPads, (b) Steam is a cross-platform environment created by Valve for Valve games, and (c) considering the excellence of their products, we can reasonably hope that Steam won’t be the system-crashing, resource-hogging nightmare that is Flash.
@Jimithy
“The list of things for PC fanboys to bitch about is getting shorter.”
You would think so, but human nature abhors a void of complaints that serve to reinforce the viewpoints of an individual or group.
“I mean, I’m sure they’ll find other stuff…”
They certainly will. For instance, you can’t grab the latest video card with 1GB of superfast video RAM and put it into a Mac mini, iMac, or even Mac Pro. Only certain video cards will work on Macs, and they are very seldom close to being cutting edge in terms of performance. So there will still be somewhat legitimate griping that the Mac is not as well suited for high-end games.
I am actually sympathetic to that viewpoint in terms of standards. Apple has done a great job of shedding most of its proprietary shackles (e.g., NuBus, ADB) or fostering them as industry standards (IEEE 1394, H.264, etc.) over the past fifteen years. Macs use standard memory and SATA hard drives, too. But video cards? That’s one area in which Macs are still tied to a limited set of options. That’s why I believe why the acquisition of NVidia by Apple would represent a critical step in ensuring access to high performance graphics hardware in the future. After all, ATI is now the property of AMD, and Apple is still an Intel-only company as far as desktops and portable computers are concerned.
Finally (pun intended), the news I’ve been waiting for.
Hopefully this will be the start of a trend, and we can get EA to port their titles. Get the rest of the battlefield series on the mac, along with Star Trek Online, and I will be done with the PC!
I welcome Steam to the Mac, Valve games are one of the only reasons I still have a Windows PC in my office (that, and proper Excel).
But KingMel is right … why can I use “standard” RAM, hard drives, printers, USB devices, for everything in a Mac Pro except the GPU?
I want the fastest GPU, not only for a bit of game playing but also to fully utilise the OpenCL element of my 64-bit Snow Leopard OS (and any CUDA related solutions).
So, how about it Steve Jobs … let us use any PCIe x16 GPU card from ATi or Nvidia on our Mac Pros.
None of the most successful people I know are heavily into gaming.
I have never understood why anyone would pay $3000(?) for a hopped up computer to play games at their desk/monitor when they can buy a PS3 and play them on their HDTV without any concerns about hardware issues is beyond me. Maybe Apple’s next big revolution will be a gaming console…
Don’t buy games on Steam!!!
Steam is DRM-heaven and it controlls everythig you can do with your Games… Don’t buy any other games on Steam than Valves own.
Don’t get yourself locked in. If you buy a game on Steam you will NEVER be able to get it put of Valves controll. The decide when and if you can play a certain game, and if their servers are down pr they feel like denying you access to YOUR game you will not be able to play it. You can’t transfer the game to another account, or another gaming service. You can’t give the game away to any one of you don’t want it any more…
DON’T BUY GAMES ON DRM-HEAVEN STEAM.
Please don’t let those mac people play on the same servers as us. I want to play against people who have real computers. They’re just going to slow the servers down.