DRM News

After several ads were launched last week hinting at Valve bringing its Steam application to the Mac platform (my personal favourite is the above image), the actual official announcement is almost a foregone conclusion at this point. Yes, Steam is coming to the Mac platform. And Valve is also bringing their first party catalogue (the Half Life series, Counter-Strike, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Portal and the upcoming Portal 2) with them.

All future Valve releases will get a simultaneous release, with PC and Mac versions being bundled. Also, Steam Cloud saves and the like will be transferrable between Mac and PC versions, and multiplayer Valve titles will share servers and allow Mac and PC players to play together. Finally, it seems that the Source engine itself is easily used for Mac development alongside working up titles for the PC.

From the news release :

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."

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."