Macs Piping Steam in April
Valve today revealed that Steam will hit Macs in April, and that from here on out, the company will develop all its games for native Mac play - including Portal 2.
According to the press release, all of Valve's most high profile titles will be available to Mac users when the service goes live in April, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series.
Also, if you buy a Valve game after April, you'll be getting both the PC and the Mac version in what Valve is calling Steam Play. With server side cloud saves, you'll be able to pick up on one version from wherever you left off in the other. We don't know why you would ever do that, but hey, at least it's an option.
And now for a couple technical quotes from Valve's John Cook that mean almost nothing to me, but that might make sense to you:
"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. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Mac users in my multiplayer games? It's more likely than you think!
