Steam for Mac?

by Alex McLarty

I work for Valve. You should work for Valve.
REALLY looking for senior Linux + Mac engineers.
- Chris Green, Valve

My Steam account is nearing 40 titles. Many of them are Valve’s own: the entire Half Life series, L4D, Team Fortress 2. There’s no doubt that Valve have pioneered some of the best games of the last ten years. But perhaps the most interesting Valve creation is Steam, an online games delivery system that’s evolved to include networking, DRM and cloud storage. Best estimates are that Steam commands around 70% of the market. Simply put, it’s the de-facto standard for online game delivery.

Steam’s simplicity and reliability is curiously Mac-like. Unlike much of the Windows world, Steam just works. You buy a game and download it. It plays. Other developers like EA have complex online stores and rules for the length of time you can download a title, usually expiring after a couple years. Steam forgoes all that and allows you to get on with what you want.

The strength of Steam isn’t just it’s operation. Steam is a community of players, some forming groups or clans, each with profiles and a record of their gaming achievements and statistics. Steam isn’t something you forget, like the EA Store, it’s an integral part of your gaming experience. And it’s what the Mac needs: a nexus, a portal, a group of like minds.

What could Chris Green’s recent comments mean? Many sites have postulated that we’ll see games like Half Life finally make their way to the Mac. While that’d be a huge leap for the platform I think it’s unlikely. I think the real strength of Valve is in enabling other developers – both existing and new – to distribute and sell their titles. This could be the direction Valve is going when working with the Mac: Steam for Mac (and Linux). The sheer number of players using Steam is an a incredible opportunity, some are bound to be Mac users running BootCamp or CrossOver for Mac. Distribution will no longer be an issue and hopefully, with a bit of luck, Steam can reduce piracy. There are Mac developers out there who make high quality titles and/or ports of PC games. If they had a central, well known, third party developer with past experience in digital distribution, it could push Mac gaming into the spotlight.

Either that or Half Life: iPhone Edition.

What are your thoughts on digital distribution and the Mac? Have you used any of the current digital download stores/apps from Virtual Programming, Transgaming or the MacGameStore?

About Alex McLarty

Alex McLarty was the Editor of The Mac Gamer from it's launch until June 2011. His favourite videogames are Fallout, Deus Ex and most of Valve's catalogue. He has a cat named Cash.

2 Responses

  1. a Martin says:
    February 3, 2010 at 23:44

    I have good experience when buying Dragon Age from Direct2Drive: http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/ (I’m in Europe).

    I got a disc image (.dmg) that I can save if I need to re-install the game and it can also be burned onto a DVD if one want.

    I have also bought a few title from Steam in Windows, and it has worked fine, but I don’t think you get the game in the same sense, am I right? One requires to be connected to the internet and have the Steam running, right? I know there is some kind of off line mode, but that requires an Internet connection to be activated. Or? Like you probably understand I don’t have too much insight. :) But, like I said – it has been fine so far.

  2. a Martin says:
    February 3, 2010 at 23:59

    I also found that Direct2Drive allows you to re-download the purchases later! This means one don’t even need to save the game one download somewhere. Sounds like a good thing to me.

    ”Download Protection
    You will always have the option to re-download your games”

    http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/staticpage.aspx?topic=about