Valve to bring Steam gaming to the Mac

I've long thought that one of the major adoption bottlenecks for Mac has been games, or more specifically, the lack of them. This is about to change as Valve plans to release a version of its Steam digital distribution service for Mac OS X platform next month.

But a distribution platform is nothing without games. To fix this shortcoming, Valve is also planning to release Mac versions of its own games. On top of that, the Source engine that Valve uses to develop all its own titles, and which it also licenses to third-party developers, will incorporate both OpenGL and DirectX, offering Mac support to all Source developers.

Starting April, games such as Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 will be available to those using the Mac platform.

"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 Steam development director John Cook. "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," said Cook. "Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates."

Valve is also offering cross-platform benefits to customers. "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."

Mac users get one step closer to being able to delete that Windows Boot Camp partition.