Maximum PC

Yeah i know there is a blog post on it but I feel it's still necessary for someone to post this up and have a good ol' discussion about it. To be quite honest, I would much, much, MUCH rather have my games work on Linux however I can't blame them for making the move.


My only question is: what kind of incentive is Valve being given from Apple to make this move? Valve wouldn't just port over just because they want to as half the macs that come out can't run half life 2 at a decent speed I bet.

If there is an incentive, am I the only one who sees the irony in Apple asking Valve to port their games so they work on both platforms?

More customers I'd think. This is the second most popular suggestion thread in the steam forums.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... p?t=898493

The Mac is not for gaming.

And, Steam's main appeal (I think) is dirt cheap games. Mac games are NOT dirt cheap. Games I can get on the PC for $9.99 still sell for $39.99 on the Mac.

Also, what games will Steam on Mac offer? They can't obviously offer the entire Steam PC library.

I think they might just be adding the Steam client, and then to make it actually useful, they're putting TF2, maybe some other Valve games, on it.


Now, I just hope it comes to Linux, because if they're converting the game to OpenGL, it'll be a-okay. And if they're converting D3D to the Mac, they are doing an absurd amount of work that will let ANY game run on OSX, so it wouldn't just be TF2.

Its suppose to be native, so it has to be OpenGL. (Performance might not be so hot however). Also since there are Linux servers out there, I don't see why not Linux can't be throwing into the mix more directly.

This is just another way for Valve to make more money and also agreeing with the loads of people wanting Steam on Macs. So far only Valve games will be on Macs. So pretty much most of the library will have to be played some other way.

With this, it's only a matter of time then before someone figures out how to run Steam and Valve's games on *nix or even just BSD as that's what OSX came from.

Steam already runs on nix, or do you mean natively?

Native yup yup.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking you were saying. However, with all these games tied in with DirectX, I highly doubt they will come to nix. They'd have to be custom-ported to nix, DX removed or coded into nix, which won't happen. Basically the whole game would have to be re-written for a very small audience. Not saying it can't happen, just saying that the odds of it coming to light are very slim at this point in time.

I'm still kinda confused as to why they are making the client available on OSX, because the amount of Mac compatible games is relatively small.

Um...


That implies OpenGL, which Linux supports. But, then again, if you just read the thread first, you'd have already seen that.

But anyway, I'd say Dwood's right. Firstly, it's not all games, just Valve games, since they all use a similar engine, so porting one game is the hurdle, the rest can just follow quickly. So if they're making it OSX compatible, linux, like I said, shouldn't be some far-off dream at that point.

No, you need to read what I wrote. I did read the thread. Thanks for assuming things for me, love it when people think they know everything. I wasn't talking about just Valve's games, I was talking all the games that are listed on Steam.

Ok, so Valve is the only one committing to porting their games to OSX. Well, committing to one anyway. That's only TF2 plus another small handful of games that will work on a Mac. That still leaves every other developer in the world that doesn't, to do so.

The rest will follow quickly? Maybe from Valve, but certainly not from other developers. It wouldn't make sense to spend all that time and money on a port for a small audience like that. You can't just take a game written for Windows with OpenGL support and slap it on a Mac. It doesn't work like that. If you'd look into the subject, you'd know that though. Lots of work to be done period. With how small the audience is that will use their Mac for gaming, I still don't see this going very far very fast.

Now, if Valve's games turn out to be a success on the Mac, I can see some bigger developers jumping on board for a port to OSX. However, it seems to me like Valve is being the guinea pig here, and there is a rather large chance it won't go over very well.

Oh, okay, that interpretation makes a lot more sense. What threw me off is that you wrote:



when the reason Valve's putting the client on is because they are also porting their own games into OpenGL.


Anyway, it might as well be a baiting-the-hook sort of deal, where they say "play TF2, play L4D, look how awesome they are! Now look at Bioshock 2 and Assassin's Creed 2. Too bad you can't play them on OSX... If only you had Windows 7." Then once they jump that hurdle of Bootcamp, they get to play all the games they want

Also iirc EA games made a lot of OSX compatible games a few years back. So they could further entice gamers and lock them into Steam.

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If you go to the mac store, the wall of mac games would have to disagree. Sure, they're not nearly the number of games on Steam, and require an emulator, however they are at least half the games by ea in recent years. As I was musing up above, I think that Apple paid off Valve to do it, and is a mostly symbolic move, however in the end is a good idea.

I saw on one of the steam threads that there was a pop-up in the new Steam Ui that tells the user the game isn't compatible with Mac.

My friend has a Mac and saw me playing it on my computer. He's not much of a gamer as of late, but when he saw me playing it, he couldn't get over how sleek the graphics were for the game.

Anyone know when Valve will release Steam for Mac out of beta? Hehe, he's dying to know...