Games
Steam now available for Mac
By Jim DalrympleMay 12, 2010, 1:45 pm PT
Let the gaming begin! Valve Software on Wednesday publicly released Steam for the Mac. It’s now available, and it’s free to use, though most games incur a fee to play. Valve is also giving away its popular action game Portal until May 24, 2010.
Steam provides a framework for buying and downloading games online. It’s been around since 2004 for Windows PCs, and Valve has finally released it for the Mac. The service requires Intel-based Macs; games have varying system requirements.
While the vast majority of games available for Steam work on the PC only, Steam is launching on the Mac with more than 60 titles. The majority of the launch titles are casual games – puzzle games, task management games and other types of games that can already be found through services like Macgamestore.com, though there are a few surprises for hardcore game fans, such as Portal, Civilization IV and several expansion packs, and Torchlight, a dungeon crawl action game reminiscent of Diablo.
The Mac release of Steam coincides with the introduction of a new feature on Steam called Steam Play. Steam Play lets users buy a game once, but play it on whatever platform they prefer, Windows or Mac. Not all games are available for both platforms, but those that are only require users to buy one license to play on either platform (or both, if they’re playing a game at work on a PC, and home on a Mac, for example).
Steam Play also extends the concept of Steam Cloud, an existing feature to Steam that enables players to seamlessly pick up where they left off in a game, regardless of location. Changes to game options and save files are mirrored wherever you log on to Steam.
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Steam now available for Mac
By Jim DalrympleMay 12, 2010, 1:45 pm PT
Let the gaming begin! Valve Software on Wednesday publicly released Steam for the Mac. It’s now available, and it’s free to use, though most games incur a fee to play. Valve is also giving away its popular action game Portal until May 24, 2010.
Steam provides a framework for buying and downloading games online. It’s been around since 2004 for Windows PCs, and Valve has finally released it for the Mac. The service requires Intel-based Macs; games have varying system requirements.
While the vast majority of games available for Steam work on the PC only, Steam is launching on the Mac with more than 60 titles. The majority of the launch titles are casual games – puzzle games, task management games and other types of games that can already be found through services like Macgamestore.com, though there are a few surprises for hardcore game fans, such as Portal, Civilization IV and several expansion packs, and Torchlight, a dungeon crawl action game reminiscent of Diablo.
The Mac release of Steam coincides with the introduction of a new feature on Steam called Steam Play. Steam Play lets users buy a game once, but play it on whatever platform they prefer, Windows or Mac. Not all games are available for both platforms, but those that are only require users to buy one license to play on either platform (or both, if they’re playing a game at work on a PC, and home on a Mac, for example).
Steam Play also extends the concept of Steam Cloud, an existing feature to Steam that enables players to seamlessly pick up where they left off in a game, regardless of location. Changes to game options and save files are mirrored wherever you log on to Steam.
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6 Responses to “Steam now available for Mac”
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I was curious, so I'm in the process of installing Steam and Portal right now. I'm not much of a gamer, so my experience with this "framework" is limited. Not loving how oddly the UI works so far. Reminds me of something created in Flash or Air, which is not a positive.
Let us know how it goes.
Jim, Just playing with it now, seems to work really well, I bought Civilization 4 from them and the transaction was painless and quick. The download on the other hand took about 4-5 hours their servers don't really seem to be up to snuff. It initially kicked off with speeds of 1.0Mb/s but slowly went down to about a 100Kb/s and went down even further but all in all it seems to be a tight little app and works quite nicely.
I imagine it was really busy today. Downloads seem to start off okay though, that's a good sign. Maybe in a few days it'll calm down some, or they'll increase the servers.
Thanks for the info.
When I downloaded it last night during YML, it took about 35 minutes to download Portal. (3.8 gigs) At first it wouldn't download at all, saying the servers were too busy. No doubt all the Mac gamers had gotten home from work – like me. B)
Even though the look is not Mac-like so much, I don't think it's bad. And though I was skeptical of Portal it is really addictive. Very well thought-out game play.
I'm looking forward to Halflife 2, which I never had a chance to play cause I gave up my PC to an ex girlfriend. =/
Downloads of Steam & Portal were slow, but I expected such a thing on the day of announcement like this, especially over wifi.
Configuring a profile on Steam itself reminded me of a c. 2006 message forum, but with slower response than an in-browser equivalent. Am I being naive when I ask why this cross-platform functionality wasn't provided within an existing browser? It's un-Maclike.
I'm running this on my Late 2008 MacBook 13" (2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 10.5.8), which I never intended to use as a game machine, but is the only Intel Mac I have. I'll try the game later today.