Steam, now also on Mac?

[PhatFreD]

It seems Mac users will soon be able to enjoy gaming on their shiny expensive gadgets. Valve apparently distributed a series of images hinting at this. Check them out here.
I assume this will only apply to Valve games right? And how enjoyable will gaming be on a Mac since their graphics cards are usually at least a few generations old?

The developer has released a series of images "in anticipation of an upcoming announcement from Valve," giving some of its most recognizable franchises the Apple treatment. That includes Gordon Freeman from Half-Life in an iMac colored HEV suit (complete with obscured Apple logo), Team Fortress 2's Heavy—and Sandvich—in iPod ad form, a pair of turrets from TF2 and Portal doing the "I'm a PC" thing, and Left 4 Dead's Francis expressing how much he hates "different."

[Drac]

A lot of non-valve games on Steam are already available on the Mac. Most OSX users know this, most PC users seems to think this is somehow against the laws of nature and in some way seems to personally offend them.

However, the Mac has no digital distribution service for games, all the current digital game services are PC only.

Current iMac models come with either HD 4670's or HD 4850 video cards. Hell even my 2 year old Macbook pro has an Nvidia 8600GT, more than enough to run TF2 and a lot of other games. Most people don't buy a Mac just to play games but that doesn't mean once they have one they won't play them. I'm actually surprised none of the other Digital Distribution services have gone after the Mac or Linux markets before now.

[PhatFreD]

Sorry for offending you Drac. I found a Mac person's view on the possible success of a Steam/Apple marriage: Will Valve revitalize Mac gaming with Steam for OS X?

He linked to a list of Steam games that already has a Mac port: Here is a list of games currently on Steam that already have a native mac port in existence | SavyGamer
There are quite a few games on there actually.

Regarding Linux... that would be awesomeness. Valve has been advertising to hire someone to port Windows games to Linux for a while now, but nothing has happened as far as I know.

[PhatFreD]

nm

[Unknown]

Originally Posted by PhatFreD

Regarding Linux... that would be awesomeness. Valve has been advertising to hire someone to port Windows games to Linux for a while now, but nothing has happened as far as I know.

My guess is because most Windows games tend to rely on DirectX APIs and behaviours whereas running on Linux would mean using OpenGL, or somehow creating some sort of DirectX-like interface. Certainly possible, but for one person who also has other day-to-day duties? Dunno...

[PhatFreD]

Originally Posted by Unknown

My guess is because most Windows games tend to rely on DirectX APIs and behaviours whereas running on Linux would mean using OpenGL, or somehow creating some sort of DirectX-like interface. Certainly possible, but for one person who also has other day-to-day duties? Dunno...

But does MacOS have DirectX? Hopefully OpenGL will become the new standard, enabling cross platform transitions more easily.

[madoldfart]

Originally Posted by Drac

I'm actually surprised none of the other Digital Distribution services have gone after the Mac or Linux markets before now.

Me too, and thanks Phat for the heads up with your initial post

[madoldfart]

you got my interest phat so i did a bit of googling and came up with this.

[Drac]

Crossover is basically just Wine, actually, it is exactly wine just re-packaged for the Mac and sadly a lot of "native" mac games sold on store shelves are actually not native at all, they're sneaky and run on an embedded version of Wine without ever showing you what's happening (unless you dig deeper into the processes it spawns when running).

There's an actual company that offers "porting" services for games to the Mac and all they do it wrap Wine around it. There are still a fair few truly native Mac games around but a fair chunk of off-the-shelf "mac version" games like Need For Speed and other EA games often just use an emulated environment which, as you can guess, doesn't run anywhere near as fast as the native PC version thus further promoting the concept that Macs are bad for gaming.

Most people I know that only have a Mac yet want to play games will simply install Bootcamp and dual boot to Windows when they want to play games.

[madoldfart]

interesting, thanks Drac, i do dual boot for some games, i normally play COD2 and 4 and have the Mac CD versions, are you saying that if i was to play these games on the windows side that i would have better performance, or are the Cod 2 and 4 mac versions one of those native games(not wine).