Steam for Mac Becomes Official

Tweet

We’ve showed you all the teaser images Valve launched and we told you how leaked scans of the April 2010 edition of Gameinformer have brought us confirmation that Steam is coming to Mac users later in May. But we were not expecting Valve to actually launch the Steam client for Macs today too.

Valve did so and totally surprised us all. It looks like most Valve games will be available to Mac users and I’m sure you’re recognize some of these titles: Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, the Half-Life and more titles will probably be available this April. And let’s not forget that Portal 2 is also coming to town later this year.

Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve said about the new Steam client:

Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac.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.

That’s a rather long and detail statement for an average press release. It looks like Valve put a lot of thought into this particular project and we can’t help but wonder if they really wanted to launch it today or were they forced by the inevitable leaks that appeared all over the web?

In fact, the whole press release looks like it was assembled in a hurry. We don’t have that many facts for you but only quotes which aren’t always sufficient to satisfy our tech-loving minds. On the other hand this whole cloud-based cross-platform gaming support is definitely going to be interesting especially since no one will be charging gamers for it.

We can also tell you that games will be launched simultaneously for Macs, Windows and Xbox 360 consoles once Steam for Macs is in place, including games like the much anticipated Portal 2.

I wonder what Microsoft is thinking about all of this!