Steam for OS X? Yes, please!

Chris White 26 Feb, 2010 at 3:31pm ET Article published in Gaming

Let’s face it—being a gamer on OS X sucks. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of a cohesive digital distribution and social platform for gamers. Part of the problem is that Apple never really cared for gaming until the iPhone and iPod Touch really took off as gaming devices—and they certainly didn’t foster the game development community as well as the could have.

Well, it seems that Valve, the developers of the incredibly popular PC game distribution platform known as Steam might be working to change that. While poking around with the newest Steam beta for PC, MacNN discovered ten images that look like the OS X window buttons, all of which have osx in the file name as well as an osx.menu file. Taking a peek at the menu file, we can see a full set of menu items that nearly match those on the PC with a few minor changes.

Icrontic is not responsible for any side effects of enthusiast excitement.

Add to that their move away from Internet Explorer for internal web rendering to the OS X-friendly WebKit and it seems that Valve is at least thinking about bringing Steam to the Mac. Either that, or it’s a cruel joke to make OS X users salivate.

If Steam went OS X there’s a good chance that PC game developers would at least consider spending more time working on releasing games on the Mac knowing that they wouldn’t need to implement their own distribution, DRM, and update system as well as gaining the built in social and achievement systems. This may or may not compel more AAA developers to prioritize bringing their games to the Mac, but it’s likely that indie game designers and current OS X game studios would embrace Steam and bring a lot more legitimacy to the platform.

Any way you look at it, if this happens, it’s great news for gamers and Apple users alike.

Comments

26 Feb 2010 ~ 3:47pm timuchan Now if only the unibody macbook pros didn't have crippled fans...
26 Feb 2010 ~ 3:48pm timuchan Oh, and yes, I do use SMC fan and crank them up to 5-6k rpm when I game. It still doesn't matter sometimes. Counter Strike: Source crashes about every 15-20 minutes due to overheating.
26 Feb 2010 ~ 4:05pm BuddyJ OMGEEE! This makes me a happy panda.
26 Feb 2010 ~ 4:20pm kryyst People have been hacking steam onto OS X through wine for a while now. Could be that they are just rolling out a less - hack required - version for it. Which is a good thing. But just having the source to get games available is still some time away from easily making the games playable.

But thanks to more (though still minimal) opengl games that to is coming closer through wine.
26 Feb 2010 ~ 4:40pm David Chartier Cutting my optimistic side some slack, I saw a comment somewhere theorizing that perhaps Steam, Valve, or other publishers could cut a deal with the Codeweavers guys to use CrossOver Mac tech to emulate some games that won't be ported right away. They'd probably have to up the requirements for these games, and it certainly wouldn't be very elegant. But it would definitely be one way to say "look, we have Left 4 Dead 2, Modern Warfare Whatever, and others ready for Mac on day 1!"

Then again, they probably haven't made any such deals, and the selection will be, at best, decent for opening day. Still, I'll take it.
26 Feb 2010 ~ 6:15pm mertesn Even better, you may get to pay a reasonable price for Mac games. Imagine being able to play that five year old game for $10 instead of the $50 the Apple store expects you to pay.