Why doesnt apple help out steam?

[Arcadie]

Steam for all you that dont already know is basically the engine that runs Counter-strike, day of defeat, natural selection, etc. Its owned by a company named valve and they are they own the world best selling game of all time, CS.

Anyway, whenever a mac vs pc thread comes up on a neatral forum, their are always 2 reason a person will not buy a mac. Price and Games. And by games generally they mean Steam. The other good games (battlefield, COD, WOW) are already on the mac but not CS.

What i dont get is why valve is having such a hard time making a os x compatible game when their server engines were basically designed for a unix environment.. but thats another story..

But if Apple just takes one in the wallet and helps out steam buy maybe dedicating a couple developers to it, That would really take away 50% of the argument most people use to buy a PC over a mac. And really when you think about. Most people who buy macs ( people 18-30 ish ), not counting the industry professionals, are the same people who play games like CS...

 

[VoR]

Apple already have itunes and the app store etc, they could set up the same thing as steam in about 5 minutes I'm sure - it's just a content delivery app and has nothing to do with the games themselves.

While I don't believe there is much value for money in upgrading the gpu in systems for games (which plays a part in your price/games argument), some people want this. I'm not sure how this is changing as I can't think of any games that take advantage of powerful multi core cpus, and as long as they can pump enough data to your graphics card this is all that matters. Many games on the mac are lazy ports from the pc that have glitches and won't run to their full potential and many games on the pc are lazy ports from consoles, still upgrades and enthusiast components are a big market for computers - and gpu manufactures have discovered a new way to convince people to put multiple (and newer) chips in their machines! Not sure where I was going with this....

The server engines have nothing to do with how the games run themselves. They're often not 'basically designed for unix', but of course a game relying on a server in a data centre would be silly not to run on a linux machine. Your example of counterstrike, can fit a whole load of servers on an ancient machine without a graphics card, it's just centralising little packets of data.

A couple of developers working on steam? I'm sure it would be running within the day, but all this would do is show users what a small selection of games they have to choose from. The hardware is the same in all these machines, but put very simply - microsoft put huge amounts of effort into pushing devs onto their systems and making it very easy and desirable to make software.

ps. You can't play a fps game (properly) on a mac because of its mouse acceleration

 

[Theophany]

You can port HL2 and CS:S to Mac as native Intel binaries with Cider. It's been done, just not by the developers.

 

[FX120]

Firstly, the company is Valve. Steam is a media distribution and copy protection product developed and run by Valve.

Three reasons, personal, technical, and corporate.

Valve doesn't develop for OS X because Apple pissed off Gabe Newell a while back, and he has been pretty anti-mac ever since. They don't need to be "helped out", developing for Windows and consoles exclusively is a choice that Valve made, not becuase they lack the resources to do so if they wanted.

Secondly, the Source engine uses Direct-X API's, and frankly in the mind of many major game studios OpenGL just doesn't cut it. Since Direct-X is developed by Microsoft for use as part of Windows, games that use Direct-X API's aren't usually cross-platform.

And finally, Apple just doesn't have the market share yet to drag in major game studios (like Valve), especially when the market for PC-platform games is already experiencing tough competition from consoles. EA released a few older titles for OS X as kind of a probe in to the market, and haven't really released any new titles since (SPORE I suppose..), I am assuming because those titles which they did release didn't sell well. Apple's current line of computers aren't exactly targeted to gamers, as they tend to feature out of date low-to-mid range graphics solutions that quickly go out of date, and with the exception of the Mac Pro, once they do go out of date your stuck with it.

 

[yashiro]

they own the world best selling game of all time, CS

This is false information.

 

[cantthinkofone]

CS is no where close to being the best selling game.