The biggest news for Mac gaming this year?
Valve’s announcement is making waves in Mac gaming. I can already see developers eyeing the platform like a mighty fine lady in a bar. Maybe Valve could start a new platform-agnostic games development movement? The Mac is suddenly a viable gaming platform (when the hell did that happen?), and anything is possible.
Let’s have a closer look at the details of Steam for Mac and what it could potentially mean for the future of Mac gaming.
“Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth.”
This is probably the most important part of Valve’s announcement: community. Mac gamers have long been stranded in limbo, scattered across forums, lost in clunky community apps. The ability to chat to other gamers, join their games, hunt achievements, live the endless torture of L4D match-making is something all other platforms have had for years.
To kickstart the Mac gaming community on Steam I’ve just created a Steam group for Mac gamers. Join up and we can get a decent group of Mac gamers together for things like Counter-Strike, Left4Dead2 and Team Fortress 2. Spread the word!
“Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge.”
Valve have lead the way in online game delivery and while this was expected, it’s great to see. I’ve purchased all of Valve’s games on Steam and I’m looking forward to playing them again on my Mac for not a penny more.
“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation…”
Thank God. I was slightly concerned that Valve might have used some sort of emulation/wrapper. Emulation/wrappers never work as advertised. And while we’ve yet to see a Source game running on Mac, as I’ve said previously Valve are committed to quality, so performance should be good.
“The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360.”
The current client of Steam for Windows uses Internet Explorer for viewing the Steam store, community and webpages from within the client. It’s a bit long in the tooth and it’s always frustrated me that I couldn’t use my default browser to render pages, well, properly and quickly.
A little over a week ago Valve announced that the beta for the new Steam client was ready to be tested by the community. While I’m not sure I rate the new look, they’re now using the open-source WebKit to render webpages. Instant cross-platform, cutting edge standards support.
Treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform is a sign Valve are here to stay. Is it possible that other developers could be persuaded to develop for the Mac by the availability of Steam for the platform? This is a question I’ll be asking developers soon.
I also found Valve taking the effort to redevelop the Source Engine and development tools to support OS X with the same source code as the PC and XBox 360 versions significant. Notably this will offer more consistent and better support than the PS3 versions which are ports on a different code base since the Source Engine can’t directly compile to the PS3.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I think it would be interesting getting a statement from Valve about what they hope to achieve with OpenGL support in the Source Engine. Is it only for Mac support? Currently the Source Engine doesn’t have a DX10 codepath and yet 49% of Steam users have a DX10 GPU and a DX10 OS with a further 27% of users having a DX10 GPU but running Windows XP and unable to run DX10 code. Given that the Source Engine has always been very scalable to give the best experience to the broadest audience, it seems possible that OpenGL 3.x support could be used to take full advantage of DX10 GPUs in all versions of Windows and as well as supporting Mac. Especially now that 10.6.3 is bringing OpenGL 3.x support. Valve could then cut down the codepaths in the Source Engine to SM3.0 DX9.0c for older GPUs in Windows and to support the XBox 360, OpenGL 2.x for Leopard and Macs with DX9 GPUs, and OpenGL 3.x for the future on PC and Mac.
I wonder if there is any interest between PC developers and Mac porting companies to work out a revenue sharing agreement to allow discounts of the Mac version of ported games if the consumer owns the PC version on Steam? I’m guessing that’ll be too complicated for existing games with existing agreements, but may be possible for future Mac ports. I also wonder if Valve doing native Mac versions of their games would tempt EA into doing native ports of their games or allowing Aspyr to do them again? Afterall, Virtual Programming did drop Cider in favor of native ports.
The HalfLife collection, Portal & TeamFortress are now on Macintosh computers.
This can only be a *good* thing.