http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/03/04/valve-teases-steam-for-mac-iphone/1 Valve has released some new images teasing a possible release of Steam on Apple products.
This doesn't solve the problem (I assume) that most of the games the Store sells still won't play on a Mac?
Brilliant! I love using steam on my pc, great deals and great games - about time the MAC or iphone had something similar. Im hating the large amount of crap iphone apps currently being released at the minute.
And you don't think they would have thought about that already? Clearly they will have a solution for that particular conundrum or else why bother releasing it there in the first place?
Well, at least the front page will be easy to navigate for Mac users. It certainly won't be cluttered up with games.
valve are pure legends atm., they certainly know how to get your attention with we puzzles and clues. Kinda keeps you excited about whats comming up more than a few words in some article. Muse have done things like this for album launches. TBH need more puzzel games out there.
I suspect they are going to release a native Mac client for Steam and provide game downloads via a Cider wrapper. Most of Valves games already work under Cider anyway.
sounds like a good idea to me. although when that G5 isnt pulling its weight anymore and you have to spend £3,000 on a system rather than £150 on a graphics card - ouch
Like what? The wrapper explanation is a good one, and so is the possibility that what we're going to see is just ten billion variations on Tap Tap Revenge, but here's the real crux of the problem. Most Macs have extremely basic graphics hardware - i.e., will struggle to play most of the recent games the Store sells at any decent setting/framerate - and that's not something Valve can fix with a neat downloadable solution. Is the store only going to sell you games it thinks you will be able to play? The profusion of Valve's own characters - particularly from the more modern games - in the adverts suggests to me that there's a wrapper-based solution for the Source engine being released here. That makes the most amount of sense - this way Valve maximizes profits by selling it's own games, and the Source engine isn't so demanding that nobody will be able to play them. It's got to be wrapper-based because the engine's now pretty old, so I doubt they'd go to the trouble of creating a Mac alternative purely to sell some disinterested Mac owners TF2. But I'll eat my hat, your hat, and anybody else's hat if they can sell you half of the games in the Store upon release to play on your Mac.
I have to say, you're right there. I know they will have a solution but how or what is not something I have worked out. Let's trust valve shall we? They usually come through in the end.
I hope so. I actually think this is a bit of a rearguard action by Valve; they recognise an increasing number of Mac buyers - and therefore a decreasing number of PC buyers. That means that unless they can find a way to start selling Mac buyers games, their target market is shrinking because Mac owners who want to game buy a console, not a PC. I also think this is not "we have games for you to play" so much as it's "we have a distribution platform for games" so developers will consider making Mac-native games that Valve can make a profit on selling on.
I wonder if we'll see the native versions of Bioshock, Call of Duty(s), Doom 3, X3 Terran Conflict, Rome Total War, Tales of Monkey Island, Quakewars, Prey etc or just PC versions running on Cider? I also hope it does well - it would be nice to see more titles making it to the mac (and ideally, linux!)
The Mac market is so miniscule compared to the PC market though this must be aimed at shifting their own catalogue. An increasing number of Macs doesn't mean there's a decreasing number of PCs. Just that the PC market may be growing slightly less quickly. When you check the latest Steam survey results and see the explosion in Win7 machines you'll realise that PC growth doesn't actually change that much, the size of the user base means it does not matter if it only increases 0.1%, that's still a metric f*ckton of hardware.
Why should this be any different on mac to how the pc steam works? It's not like all pc hardware is upto playing bioshock 2 at decent frame rates now is it?
The Mac percentage-of-market-share is increasing faster - much faster - at the expense of the PC. For example, Mac OS X’s share of the OS market increased from 7.31% in December 2007 to 9.63% in December 2008. If that trend can continue - and given the explosion in Apple product use, I don't see why it won't - they'll be a force to be reckoned with sooner or later. If you consider the number of games sold to iPhone users through the App Store, I think they'll even start to represent a part of the gaming market too. PC gaming is perpetually on the wane, it seems, and Valve is right to try and kickstart development for Mac games; who knows, maybe one day Apple will start to include more powerful graphics because of user demand. Seriously? Because Mac hardware is not upgradeable by 99% of Mac users. That's why. Not all Steam PCs can play BioShock, but almost all of them could with an easy and inexpensive graphics card upgrade. Steam, therefore, can in good conscience and in good business practice sell it's games and people can choose to upgrade their hardware if they want to play it more smoothly. Macs, by contrast, cannot play BioShock or any other number of new and demanding games, and never will be able to because Cupertino locks down it's hardware and software. So probably half the AAA-rated games (i.e., the popular and profitable ones) on the Store categorically cannot be played at decent settings by ANY Macintosh PC. So Steam is theoretically attempting to retail games that cannot be played, or can only be played at 800x600 on a 27" iMac. That is a bad business model.
Oh joy, now we're going to have to put up with smug Mac users telling us all how wonderful they are because they can now run even more 5 year old games at a rubbish setting.