Tech Blog

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Valve is a really interesting video game developer and digital content distributor to report on.  As Mathew pointed out in his write-up on Valve's Portal 2 announcement , the company has a distinct, nonconforming way with dealing with media.  Quite often they provide next to no information in their press releases and they get right to the message.  Case in point: on Thursday I received a media bulletin from Valve that simply read:

" Valve today announced the public release of Steam for the Mac is May 12. Please stay tuned for more information."

That's it.  No corporate spin, no quotes from company executives, no hyperbole.

Steam for Mac is a big deal, extending the previously Windows-only digital distribution software to the Mac OS X.  With Apples' share of the domestic US market rising to 8 per cent in the first quarter of this year, releasing a version of Steam for Mac opens up the potential for millions of new customers.

Rumours of Steam for Mac surfaced in late February when members of the Steam forum dug up a handful of graphics that contained Mac OS X graphics and icons, hinting that Valve may be working on Mac support.  A week later Valve all but confirmed an imminent Mac announcement with the release of a series of images that depicted characters from popular Valve franchises -- from Half-Life's Gordon Freeman to Team Fortress 2's Heavy -- in faux Apple ads.

On March 8, 2010 an official press release from Valve confirmed that Steam would be ported to the Mac OS X in April.  As evident by the note Valve sent out last week, the launch of Steam of Mac has been delayed to May.  No reason for the delay was given by Valve.

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "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. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and PC will be Portal 2, coming this holiday season.  Opting not to employ popular emulation techniques to deliver Mac games, Value will be releasing native versions day and date with their Xbox 360 and Windows releases.  Mac game patches and updates will also be available simultaneously with the Windows updates.  Valve is fully integrating Mac players into the Steam multiplayer universe through common sharing of servers and lobbies with Windows players.

Steam for Mac will launch with the availability of Valve's library of games including the Left 4 Dead series, Team Fortress 2 , Counter-Strike , Portal and the Half-Life series.