The Mac community of gamers is getting excited as Valve, the famous game editor on Windows (for Half-life and counter-strike for examples) started a "teasing" campaign as the company will release games on Mac OS X in a near future. It seems quite clear now that Valve will be porting "Portal" on Mac OS X. however, do not rush as the expected release date should be at the end of the year.
For Mac gamer, as well as Mac users, this is good news, and might indicate that beside the market for iPhone games, editors and developers finally enjoyed the SDK and might now consider also releasing games for Mac hardware. Since the first Mac Intel, many Mac users have been expecting a new wave of games for Mac OS X. We of course have the quick (and sometimes dirty) porting made via Cider, but sometimes it looks more like a marketing action than a real investment of editors in Mac games. The best example being the fact that Spore from Electronics Arts does not run on Snow Leopard, and now almost 6 months after the introduction of the new OS, there is no fix released by Transgaming or EA...
Some other companies continued to offer real games, based on Mac OS X SDK and resources to offer Mac users a true immersion and entertainment, such as Feral and its game Bioshock, finally available on Mac, years after having been launched on PC. But better later than never. Now, it remains unclear if Valve will really develop a 3D engine compatible with Mac OS X (based on Open CL?), or will they use some virtualization tricks, heavily CPU consuming, to make their game running, at low cost, on our Mac? We will have to wait months before having a final answer.
[update]
Our friend Alex from the Mac gamer dissected the press release from Valve and we can indeed expect native support for Mac OS X as well as an entire cross-platform environement making Mac and Windows gamers joining the same arena.
Offical PR from Valve:
Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”
“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.”
“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. 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. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”
Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.
