Valve teasing forthcoming "fruity" announcement. The rumour is that they will announce Steam for Mac OS X at GDC next week, which is (coincidentally) being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco where Apple often make their big announcements. More from Joystiq here.
Well, it's confirmed. Most importantly, if you buy a game for your Windows PC you won't have to pay for it again for a Mac and vice versa. Valve's own games will run natively on Macs, they will not be emulated like many Mac gaming releases. In addition, Mac gamers will be able to play online against PC gamers. The Source engine is highly scaleable, meaning most people should be able to play the games just fine on any Mac with dedicated graphics.
Good news for Mac users I guess. I don't suppose they came up with some kind of workaround for all those non-Valve games on Steam? Am I the only one who despises the new Steam UI?
You can opt into (and out of, thankfully) the beta from within the existing client. It feels like a website, and not a particularly responsive one at that. But everyone else seems to like it, so what do I know?
I generally find the existing client quite slow and a bit of a memory hog. Pre-ordering games seems to be the worst problem - it downloads the games in advance, which you'd think is a very useful feature, but then it takes ages to decrypt them on launch day and then the game churns like crazy the first time you load it.
This will be good news for Linux users too, at least if they're going to be updating the Windows versions as well to include OpenGL support. Being able to use OpenGL instead of the shoddy, slow Direct3D support that comes with Wine will be great.
Reading the article linked in the first post might help you understand it. Francis is a character in Valve's Left 4 Dead who repeatedly announces "I hate...". Valve released a series of images with their characters appearing in well known Apple ads as a teaser for the announcement that their games and Steam would soon be available for Macs. One of these was a parody of Apple's "Think Different" ads with the caption "I Hate Different".
I'd already heard the news, so I didn't see the point. Oh yeah, I remember. Been a while since I played L4D. Ah. Fair enough.
This is great news. Even greater news is that my current Valve titles will transfer over and be playable on my Macbook!
This is a zombie thread I know (Zombies, in a thread about Valve ?) but I believe this qualifies under the "adding something new" rule. Half-Life 2 and the Episodes will be on Steam for Mac today... [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnF6Dr8BhKA[/yt]