Welp, still can't wait. Until then though. Crossover Games will do it's job well, by providing me with CounterStrike Source and all the wonderful Source based mods to play every day.
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Rejoice, Steam is coming to OSX!
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I love Crossover games too but it's always had some serious rendering issues on my iMac (8800gs) .. Backs of people's heads missing textures in L4D, wacky textures in TF2.
Steam could be INCREDIBLY important to the Mac, if it does come out. I don't know what BRLawyer is on. Even if there aren't Source-based games on osX(yet?).
The community features (from a gaming perspective) surpass anything anywhere else. The platform for distributing indie or small scale games would give SO much more visibility than any of the little fish Mac-only stores. Steam is a recognised brand everyone in the games industry takes seriously. If we get Steam a lot of people would take the Mac a lot more seriously as a gaming platform (rightly or wrongly so)
I've never had any issues with Steam as a background process, even in the HL2 days it served me well.
I agree with crackintosh. Valve can't really ignore Apple anymore.
Steam could be INCREDIBLY important to the Mac, if it does come out. I don't know what BRLawyer is on. Even if there aren't Source-based games on osX(yet?).
The community features (from a gaming perspective) surpass anything anywhere else. The platform for distributing indie or small scale games would give SO much more visibility than any of the little fish Mac-only stores. Steam is a recognised brand everyone in the games industry takes seriously. If we get Steam a lot of people would take the Mac a lot more seriously as a gaming platform (rightly or wrongly so)
I've never had any issues with Steam as a background process, even in the HL2 days it served me well.
I agree with crackintosh. Valve can't really ignore Apple anymore.
Valve has never ignored Apple. They have tried many times to develop for the OS X platform and Apple never showed any interest in helping them out.
I wonder with the success of 'Crossover Games for Mac' whether they're actually making a native OSX frontend for Steam, but using the Crossover engine in the background for the actual games themselves to work.
Ridiculous idea perhaps, but Crossover Games actually makes Steam games work very well so far. I get great quality and speed on Snow Leopard with CSS, Half Life 2 etc....
You do have to laugh at the fact though that games like CSS and HL2 have been out since 2004 and (if the games coming out for the Mac story is true) are only just being developed for Mac 6 years later
Several things point against this.
First of all, Crossover is meant to be a consumer product. If they were going to do that, they'd probably run Cider instead. Cider and Cedega are TransGaming's fork of Wine, from back when it was licensed under X11 (it's now under LGPL which stops TransGaming from modifying the code without contributing back), so it's the same sort of thing.
Second, they have to be making a native version of Source for Postal III. Crossover and Cider are not emulators, just an implementation of all the Windows APIs. So in order to run them, you need to have an x86 processor. Postal III will run on the PlayStation 3 (with it's IBM POWER-based Cell processor), so they already have to be porting the engine. There's no reason for them not to do an OpenGL port and get all platforms supported at once.
In addition, the unsupported platform message would not make sense if it was running under a wineserver since the reimplementation is close enough that it can play most games. It only makes sense if they're doing a native port.
And finally, at this point it would be almost trivial to port Steam itself to Mac and Linux. The client itself does not use the OS components (it doesn't look like it fits into the platform, which means it doesn't- it's drawing itself) and they just switched the rendering over from Trident (Windows-only) to WebKit (which we already know runs perfectly well on Mac and Linux).
id Tech 5 is already going to support Mac (because they insist on their engines being cross platform). With Source running on Mac as well, you've got at least two good engines to use. Get the game engines to run on OS X and it becomes easier and cheaper for developers to make ports. Reduce the cost to port games to Mac and suddenly it becomes a reasonable business decision.
I really, REALLY hope this means that Valve has ported the Source engine to OS X as well, even if it's just a Cider-wrapped engine. I'd love to play Left 4 Dead without rebooting.
I've never been able to get Crossover working properly (or at least at a level of performance anywhere close to native), so this is awesome.
I've never been able to get Crossover working properly (or at least at a level of performance anywhere close to native), so this is awesome.
It really saddens me to say this, but the video game industry is losing site of the ENTIRE PC market, with most games being console ports now (Modern Warfare 2 fiasco, anyone?) and the decreasing number of PC exclusives over the past few years.
What makes you think they'll try extra hard for the Macintosh market, when they seem to flat out ignore anything that's not a console?
lies. Valve asked a lot of money. Usually software house didn't ask money for porting games themself. Apple is always very helpfull to developers, ask to Feral and other software houses. Valve is just lead by an idiot called Gabe, steam itself is good. But you can't blame apple for not giving tons of $$$ to port a game.
I*agree*partially*but*i*dont*think**most**games*are*console*ports..*Just*looking*on*Steam*shows*there's*a*hell*of*a*lot*of*middle to*high*profile*titles*always*coming*out*that*never*make*it*to*consoles*at*all,*let*alone*the*mac.*I*dont*think*the*number*of*exclusives*is*decreasing*if*you*consider*the*indie*and*small*studios*in*that*equation.*(a*lot*of*whom*bring*some*of*the*most*interesting*games*to*the*table*anyway)
Console*ports*only seem*inevitable*because*of*the*spiralling*development*costs*of*AAA*games. Most*stuff*is*still*much**much* nicer*on*the*PC.*(Even*the*"console*ports")..
Even*so, I agree and*I*think*it'd*take*most devs*a*LOT*of*persuasion*to*support*the*Mac.*I'd*love*to*see*Rockstar*onboard personally.*:/
I don't think consoles will ever get more popular than computer games. I hate consoles because they don't offer controls such as a MOUSE, they require you to connect them to your TV and it's all just really clumsy. I seriously prefer to use my keyboard and mouse the way I'm used to, and customise each key as I want. Consoles are just a big business because releasing a console game will automatically make people buy the super-expensive console. On the other hand, if the game is also available for PC, people will not buy the console but they'll just play it on their computer which they already have. So releasing a console-only game only happens because of ties between console manufacturers and game companies.
Indeed.
You can also create groups and schedule events of which every member of the groups will get a notification, it's really awesome
That's not true at all.
Dedicated servers are getting popular because developers/publishers retain full control over them. I don't like it at all and I'll never buy a game that doesn't allow 3rd party servers, but I can see why they would go down that route.
PC gaming is very much alive and well. Steam's membership jumped up 200% in the last year. Year on year more people than the last year are singing up, more games are being sold. I don't understand why people say PC gaming is dying when the evidence is stacked against it.
As for exclusivity; we're at a stage where consoles are almost on par with PC's. They can run the same games as PC's just in a lower resolution. In an age where studios are being shut down because they simply can't afford to carry on any more - exclusivity goes out the window. The same is happening in the console market.
The claim of losing "the ENTIRE PC market" is plainly inaccurate, if not nonsense.
Steam already has over over 25 million accounts & it's growing. Why would games developers ever completely abandon such a huge market? How could you ever play PC exclusives like "Empire Total War" & "Napoleon TW" on limited consoles?Steam user accounts hit over 25 million
Fact is, many gamers never play games without keyboard/mouse control, thus never buy consoles, which are already using old-tech compared to many gaming PCs & even high-end Macs.
Re for the Mac market: I don't think that they'll "try extra hard", but most games developers are losing money right now. If they can set up a viable distribution service for the growing Mac market & tap into an extra source of income, they probably will. I just don't expect the Mac platform to get anything like the wide selection of games that's available to PC gamers.
Note that MS initially lost some $20 billion on the Xbox franchise, Sony lost billions on PS3 too. In a struggling economy, can they take similar risks of that happening again? If we do see successors to either of today's consoles (I think we will), they may well be the last standard consoles we see. Financially at least, using Steam-like distribution in this market also makes much more sense in the long-term:
No future for consoles
Valve asked for about $1m, IIRC. Doesn't seem like much to me.
IMO, if Apple invested just a few million dollars of their estimated $40bn mountain of cash in getting more PC classics ported into native OS X, it could well regenerate the Mac gaming industry. Not least because Mac games don't lose value like PC games do & the Mac user base continues to grow impressively, even in recession.Apple are very helpful to developers generally, but MS happens to be even more helpful to games developers & allocate more resources into ongoing development of DirectX.
Valve asked for about $1m, IIRC. Doesn't seem like much to me.
Apple are very helpful to developers generally, but MS happens to be even more helpful to games developers & allocate more resources into ongoing development of DirectX.
But 1 million for one game (Half Life 2), probably seemed a lot. But looking back, it would have been a good idea. Half Life 2 was one of the biggest games at the time, still is popular, it might have gotten Steam ported then, and all other Steam games would have Mac versions. All for a million, seems worth it now.
Be careful
Microsoft might buy Valve, the same way they bought Bungie err Halo, after Apple showed off Halo running on a Mac. Then Steam will never come to Mac. I've been burned by the whole games to a Mac thing before, I think I'll wait until it happens before I get too excited.
Microsoft might buy Valve, the same way they bought Bungie err Halo, after Apple showed off Halo running on a Mac. Then Steam will never come to Mac. I've been burned by the whole games to a Mac thing before, I think I'll wait until it happens before I get too excited.
That would be AMAZING!!!
I doubt it will happen. Everything on their site says it's not going to happen plus the apps would need to be made for the Mac as well....unless someone knows a work around?
I doubt it will happen. Everything on their site says it's not going to happen plus the apps would need to be made for the Mac as well....unless someone knows a work around?
PC gaming has been happily dying since 1985.
Not at all sir. Maybe not as crazy as it was in 2000-2005, but still really strong.
Even if there was a Steam for Mac, Games that only use the Direct X API will probably not get ported over unless they actually will or include a way for you to run it virtually within OS X. Games that use openGL might get ported. but thats saying if steam does make it to the Mac and its not just a theme for steam.
Its a heck of allot harder to port a game that only uses the DirectX API then a game that uses the openGL API.
Its a heck of allot harder to port a game that only uses the DirectX API then a game that uses the openGL API.