Apple Excitement and Steam for Mac

ByMike Moffit

As an Apple fan, I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited as I am now. If I could roll the clock ahead to April right now then I would, and woe be it to anyone who tried to stop me. Why am I so excited? Well, two things really.

First, obviously, is the iPad. Somehow in the last week I have gone from staunch iPad skeptic to literally “in a froth” to get my hands on one (thanks Penny Arcade for the excellent descriptor of my frenzied state). I’ll be the first to admit that as it was presented it is a fairly unassuming device. It doesn’t really do anything that you can’t do with an iPhone and a MacBook, and falls awkwardly somewhere between. But oh, the promise! The sheer potential of such a device is astounding. My intent is to purchase one as a statement, if nothing else. A statement to developers that I need them to develop great apps for it. But enough about the iPad.

What really has me excited for April is the announcement that Valve, creators of Half Life, Portal, and Left for Dead, will be bringing its steam delivery service to the Mac platform, and its Source engine along with it. If you’re a Mac gamer, or wish you were, then this is amazing news. It’s no secret that our platform of choice is routinely ignored by game developers.

Apple themselves have also ignored us by refusing to offer us more powerful graphics options (yes, I really do need 1GB of VRAM). Blizzard has really been the sole supporter of Macs in the game realm, steadily releasing their Mac versions simultaneously with their Windows counterparts… on the same discs even. For a company the size of Valve to start building Mac-native versions of their games and really support the platform should encourage other companies to follow suit.

It’s already panning out like I expected. Razer has already announced they will fully support Mac OS X with their line of gamer centric peripherals (I’m a huge fan of their mice). My guess is that next we’ll see some of the larger publishers such as EA and Ubisoft (though please leave your draconian DRM behind) start to pick up Mac knowledgeable programmers and start to build native versions of their games rather than the bogged down ports we receive now.

Even if other developers don’t jump on board immediately, I can’t express in words how excited I am to be able to download my already large library of Source games without launching bootcamp first. And when Portal 2 releases around the holidays, I’ll finally be able to consider myself a Mac gamer instead of a gamer who likes Macs.

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