For those of you who don’t know, Steam is one of the most popular gaming distributors for Windows PC’s. Gamers will be familiar with the program which lets you buy and download games directly from the program. There have been some hints and rumors floating around the web recently hinting at a release for the Mac, but only today have Valve themselves confirmed it.
Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”
And that’s not all, Steamworks for Mac also boasts a new feature called “Steam Play,” This will let you buy a game and play it on your PC at work. Then when you go home, you can play it on your Mac right from where you left off. This means that Mac and PC users will no longer have to buy two copies of a game.
Portal 2 will be the first game released by Steam both for the PC and Mac.
Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”
So gamers may rejoice, Mac users can finally get some decent games on their machines because at the moment the selection of games is quite poor. Maybe this could be the start of a new gaming revolution for the Mac, just like the App Store was for the iPod Touch and iPhone?
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