iSteam

[toblix]

So Steam is coming to the Mac, and the teaser images are so God damn wonderful. This, together with the Portal stuff they're doing (plus all their awesome games) is why I love Valve so much despite all the lame crap they're pulling.

[Irishjohn]

Sweet. I never play TF2 but I love what they do with their characters. I should play the game.

Also, though I'm going back to PCs next year (I've had way too many hardware issues with Apple laptops) but I'm happy that a Mac Steam will exist.

[Jayel]

I'm excited by this news and I don't know why. That shitty intel GMA crap in my mac isn't even powerful enough to run a popcap game.

I GUESS I'M HAPPY FOR OTHER PEOPLE.

[Chuckpebble]

Wow, my head is spinning from this.

I have so many ideas in my head from my drive home after a wicked differential equations test.

Anyway, rewind to earlier today when this was developing, with the images popping up in various places. A fellow mac user asked: "Why would they do this?"

Well, I have a few ideas about that now and some are weird so stick with me.

-the mac is like a cross between a console and a PC

Like a console, its a very narrow band of target hardware. OK, close, but a console is nice because everyone is using the same exact hardware, move up to the hardware variance on the mac platform, and you have just a handful of machine types, contrast that with the hardware/driver variety in the PC market and you see what I'm getting at.

I say its like a PC, because at its heart, the mac is now the exact same architecture. There has to be some benefit to that when compared to PS3 and Xbox which are variants of the IBM power architecture.

-Mac users aren't shy about spending money

I hate the whole 'macs are expensive' debate, but I'll play devil's advocate for a moment. OK, macs cost more, so what? Well there's a whole untapped market that doesn't have entitlement issues about intellectual property and gladly pays for good stuff.

-The market is there and there's no competition

But its such a small market... or is it? Of all the computers in the world, how many are at home and used for entertainment? A lot, I'm sure, but how many are also used at work, in the office, at a point of sale, as servers? The mac is primarily a consumer device now. I don't know for sure, but I think VALVe knows how many mac users are playing their games right now. I'm pretty sure they can figure out who we are whether we're using crossover or booting into windows, after all, we all have a very similar hardware profile. There certianly seem to be a lot of us on SPUF.

So, as that one weird dude that has a Wii and a Mac, I'm about to asplode with all of the news as of late. Between the Nintendo Media Summit, then the Portal ARG craziness, a cool TF2 blog post yesterday that got me back into the game for 1.6 hours last night, and now this craziness today... well, just

I don't know what it is with valve, they seem to want happy customers much more than they want our money, and for that I love them and just want to give them more money. Maybe I'll finally get to see what all this half-life nonsense is about.

Edited March 4, 2010 by Chuckpebble

[BigJKO]

And it's official!

[SoulChicken]

This is the worst day of my life how could Valve betray us like this I blame it on that Chet Faliszek you can't write video games (not a real job!) that was how it started Gabe you broke my heart gargle gargle gargle gargle bleeargj

[Brannigan]

This is the worst day of my life how could Valve betray us like this I blame it on that Chet Faliszek you can't write video games (not a real job!) that was how it started Gabe you broke my heart gargle gargle gargle gargle bleeargj

I was perusing the dredge that is the l4d2 forums for some hilarity. There totally was a thread complaining about how they're bringing it to the mac instead of fixing bugs and they're just doing it because they're greedy bastards that want to milk everything for money. I was quite amazed.

[Nappi]

Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge.

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.

Oh wow! I wonder if that works for games I have purchased before this announcement. So will I get OS X version of the Orange Box free of (additional) charge?

On the other hand, this really sucks, since thus far I have been able to limit my PC gaming while I should be studying just because I usually can't be arsed to boot my computer up in Windows.

[toblix]

Oh wow! I wonder if that works for games I have purchased before this announcement. So will I get OS X version of the Orange Box free of (additional) charge?

I would be extremely surprised if this wasn't the case. It's not like they're giving you more games, as you can still play one of them at the time, being Steam and all.

[Nappi]

Yeah, makes perfect sense. I guess the only case where it doesn't work like that anymore is when you buy indie games on Steam and can't transfer the purchase to Mac version because of the different CD Key system or whatever. That has happened to me quite a lot and annoys the crap out of me.

I guess this could finally change that as well. So, yay.

[Grippage]

You won't have to pay extra, as the linked-to article states.

[elmuerte]

Considering the Mac is a PC, and it's a PC game, why would you even have to pay for that. It's not like you have to pay extra to play your game on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

[toblix]

Considering the Mac is a PC, and it's a PC game, why would you even have to pay for that. It's not like you have to pay extra to play your game on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

There's a much larger difference between Mac and PC than there is between Windows versions. You can run the same binaries on WinXP and Win7, but you have to compile separate files for Mac OS, especially since they're now doing separate OpenGL and DirectX versions. You could argue buying one entitles you to the other, but it's not crazy, and definitely not unheard of, to treat them as separate products.

[SoulChicken]

Move over Farmville, here comes Combineville. It's only a matter of time now it seems *snort*

(Seriously though, I would play a Facebook game where you managed a human harvesting plant to make Combine so I wouldn't mind if that happened.)

[Patters]

I think that there is going to be a pretty big resurgence of native mac gaming. With both Valve and Telltale making their libraries compatible, Dice are also looking at (maybe) putting Bad Company 2 on Macs. It's a good time for mac users.

[Chris]

Yeah, makes perfect sense. I guess the only case where it doesn't work like that anymore is when you buy indie games on Steam and can't transfer the purchase to Mac version because of the different CD Key system or whatever. That has happened to me quite a lot and annoys the crap out of me.

I guess this could finally change that as well. So, yay.

Not just indie games--any games that don't use Steamworks and this new Steam Play feature. There's no way for Valve to just give away a publisher's games. Even if the publisher already has a Mac version of the game available, some other publisher might have the Mac publishing rights (this happens very frequently with outsourced Mac ports), or it might not be covered under the same digital distribution contract they used to publish the PC version on Steam, or whatever. I'm sure that Valve started working with as many publishers as possible to get that stuff sorted out long before they made the announcement, but there's nothing about any aspect of this system that means games outside of Valve's direct control will inherently have Mac versions on Steam that tie into existing purchases.

[Chris]

Considering the Mac is a PC, and it's a PC game, why would you even have to pay for that. It's not like you have to pay extra to play your game on both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Because they are entirely separate executables. Someone had to develop that separate version--that is, spend time and money on it. If it were really as easy as you're making it out to be, then why would it be such a big deal that this whole thing is happening?

[Nappi]

Not just indie games--any games that don't use Steamworks and this new Steam Play feature. There's no way for Valve to just give away a publisher's games. Even if the publisher already has a Mac version of the game available, some other publisher might have the Mac publishing rights (this happens very frequently with outsourced Mac ports), or it might not be covered under the same digital distribution contract they used to publish the PC version on Steam, or whatever. I'm sure that Valve started working with as many publishers as possible to get that stuff sorted out long before they made the announcement, but there's nothing about any aspect of this system that means games outside of Valve's direct control will inherently have Mac versions on Steam that tie into existing purchases.

Yeah, looking back at it, my previous comment was a complete mess.

What I meant to say was that OS X versions of the (Orange box) games being "free" makes sense because a lot of developers already give you both Windows and OS X versions without any additional costs: many of the indie studios, Telltale Games, and as far as I can remember even Warcraft III had both versions on the disk. Until now, however, if I were to buy (most often an indie) game like for instance World of Goo on Steam, I couldn't transfer that purchase to my Mac even if that was possible with a version bought directly from the developers website. Of course, and unlike I wrote on the previous post, that is not the only case where you don't get both versions with the price of one, as there are a ton of games, such as Civilization IV and Sims and so on, that have to be purchased separately.

I was hoping this to solve the problem with games like World of Goo and Braid where you can't transfer your CD key to the OS X version only because Steam handles things differently. This obviously won't make the Mac version of Civilization IV free for those who already own the game on PC.

[elmuerte]

Ok, apparently my sarcasm wasn't obvious :/

Anyway, it's a nice step in the direction to free PC gaming from the clutches of Microsoft. I hope more developers follow, and maybe in a year or 10 we'd also see more gaming coming to Linux (considering it's a smaller step than going from Windows to MacOSX).

[gdf]

Cool for Mac gamers I guess (lolololol). I'll probably never buy one, but it can only be a good thing for the computer gaming market as a whole. Plus it'll encourage developers to incorporate Steam Cloud more often. I'll sure as hell never buy a Mac, but being able to keep my saves online to use on my netbook or someone else's PC is pretty rad.

[JonCole]

I have a feeling that this whole thing could be a massive success if executed perfectly.

I'm not exactly sure how the royalties of a purchase are paid out by Valve in Steam, but I was thinking the other day that it might be possible for them to offer a sort of... subsidy to indie developers who make Mac versions of their software. Similar to how Amazon offers a 70% royalty rather than their usual 30% if you build certain features into e-books sold over the Kindle store, they could spur a groundswell of smaller games to fill out what I'd imagine would be a pretty limited Mac games catalog. Since the competition in the space is practically just World of Warcraft, Valve could take this "new" market by storm if they play their cards right.

[mikemariano]

As a Mac zealot who hasn't owned a Windows computer since 2003, I have missed the entire Steam era. Half of the games mentioned on the podcast are ones I will never play. Finally my stubborn behavior will be rewarded!

I look forward to putting my Half-Life CD key from 1998 into Steam and seeing what happens. A thread on the Steam forums suggests it might work!

[lobotomy42]

As a (primarily) Mac user, this is great news, but I still have one question:

Will Steam let me install games to hard drives *other* than my primary hard drive? Because when I had Steam on PC, it definitely DID NOT, and this is why I stopped using it. I use external hard drives A LOT as my main hard drive is pretty full - if the Mac version still has this stupid requirement, I will not be a happy camper.

[Patters]

As a (primarily) Mac user, this is great news, but I still have one question:

Will Steam let me install games to hard drives *other* than my primary hard drive? Because when I had Steam on PC, it definitely DID NOT, and this is why I stopped using it. I use external hard drives A LOT as my main hard drive is pretty full - if the Mac version still has this stupid requirement, I will not be a happy camper.

Steam keeps everything on one HDD, I had no problem transferring from a 250gb to a 500gb other than the time it took. It doesn't have to be your equivalent of the c:// drive

[miffy495]

As a (primarily) Mac user, this is great news, but I still have one question:

Will Steam let me install games to hard drives *other* than my primary hard drive? Because when I had Steam on PC, it definitely DID NOT, and this is why I stopped using it. I use external hard drives A LOT as my main hard drive is pretty full - if the Mac version still has this stupid requirement, I will not be a happy camper.

Yeah, I have two hard drives on my laptop, and install everything to my secondary. Steam installs all its games to whatever drive you install Steam to. I have my primary drive C and my secondary D. I installed Steam to C at first and filled it up way too fast as it is the smaller of the two. So I uninstalled it and put Steam on D instead. Now everything installs to D without issue. Steam will only use one drive, but it doesn't need to be your primary. Just make sure you install the client to whichever drive you intend to use.

I look forward to putting my Half-Life CD key from 1998 into Steam and seeing what happens. A thread on the Steam forums suggests it might work!

Worked for me. In fact, putting in my key from vanilla Half Life made Steam think I had the GOTY bundle and gave my account all the expansions too, even though I never owned them before.