#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC FOR MAC#
#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC UPDATE#
#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC WINDOWS#

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game's upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game's announcement. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.' would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. This wouldn't be possible on a closed system like Microsoft's Xbox Live, he said: 'Microsoft's QA fees. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC UPDATE#

Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. 'We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.' Easy updates 'Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs,' said Jason Holtman, Valve's director of business development, in the press release.

#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC FOR MAC#

Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows, the company said.īringing Valve's gaming engine Source, and the company's Steamworks development and publishing suite, to the Mac will make it easier for developers to bring games to OS X. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.' We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients.

#SCREEN GAMES FOR MAC WINDOWS#

Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies and so forth. 'Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. '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,' Cook said. '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, in Monday's press release. If you're playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress. By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they're playing.If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they'll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.'The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.'īringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they're getting something on a daily or more frequent basis. 'It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don't particularly like that. where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,' Newell said. 'The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times. Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told in advance of Monday's announcement. Bringing the service to Macs means wider selection, quicker updates and more episodic content for Apple's traditionally game-deprived computers. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases. Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs.

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