Valve teases Apple announcement of ... something [update]

by Ben Gilbert on Mar 3rd 2010 3:55PM

We'd love to outright confirm that "OMG, yes, Steam is finally coming to Mac!" but that'd be a lie. Truth is, of the five images that Valve sent out to a handful of outlets (as seen in our gallery below) – each one depicting characters from separate Valve games in some form of faux Mac advertisement (from Half-Life to Left 4 Dead and everything in between) – none provide ironclad confirmation of our suspicion that the developer is likely porting Steam over to OS X.

That said, given the presence of six dots at the bottom of each of the five images we've seen so far, suggesting an iTunes-like image gallery with six images, we're hoping for an actual news release in the not-too-distant future ... ~~possibly via that sixth image~~. For now, we've put in a call to Valve and will be speculating wildly in the meantime. Check out the five screens so far in the gallery below and get to the speculating with us, won't you?

Update: Valve kindly sent over the last image, which unfortunately doesn't "OMG confirmed!" our guesses. It is, however, the coolest (fake) ad yet.

Valve Mac faux ads

[Thanks, Joe K]

Tags: half-life, half-life-2, left-4-dead, portal, steam, Steam-Mac, steamworks, team-fortress-2, valve

Reader Comments (137)

Steam would be pretty sweet, it'd give me something to play on my Mac besides Blizzard games.

as you can see from my avatar, i can play loads of games on my mac

just curious, how many of you mac owners consider yourselves gamers and don't use bootcamp for games?

i only recently started using it since they made official support for Windows 7, but i'm so glad i did, TF2 on pc is awesome! and i absolutely love the deals that Steam gives us

Well, having Steam on Mac isn't going to make all the games on Steam suddenly work on Mac. It's just going to open up the distribution doors for the games that already do.

@BigDonny09 - I own a Mac, no bootcamp & i'd consider myself a gamer.
Ah PS3, games without the torturous hassle of Windows.

Torturous hassle of windows? I'm guessing you haven't tried 7 yet?

Running a dual boot is one way, but I also run Crossover from Codeweavers. Steam works fine on there with quite a few games on top of that. Theres also a bunch of games that people have ported which run very well in general.

A good thing if it happens. I buy most of my games from Steam, and if I can do it without rebooting it will be even better. Unless it uses the crappy Cider "technology", that is.

" 'There's different types of computers, though," said one guy. 'We'll figure that out later," another guy said.

And years later they did."

Steam is definitely coming to mac.

This. How can you not say "steam for mac confirmed OMG WRF BBQ"?

BUT now what am I going to say in a debate against macs?!

Still no games.

>no games
>looks at Marathon
>lolwut.jpg

>implying I can

>implying
Go back to /v/.

>implying implications

"macs are the wrost OS"

Agreed. I would never install MAC on my Windows. It's the WROST!

i think KEK is already studily drunk

Marathon? So one game in the last 15 years. yay?

>looks at Marathon's release date
>lolwut.jpg

YES!

*high fives*

I'm really hoping they strike some sort of deal with Asypr so that things like COD4 that I own for PC will work on my Mac, but that's too logical of an idea to work.

You must be new here. We're supposed to hate Macs.

No seriously, awesome for Mac users.

So, you finally going to start playing L4D2 with the JPAG? I hate looking at you on my friend's list and seeing you with a huge number of days being offline...

*Fist bumps*

As long as Mac users realize that the support will still be on a game by game basis.

Well, let's see.

If they're developing a WINE style framework to run directx apps like some dedicated form of parallels, it might be a broad swath of games with just some incoherence here and there.

If it's just "we ported Source to OS X" then it'd obviously only be those games, and potentially other mac-native games.

Source to OS X is probably the simplest, just switching out all the MS specific stuff for OpenGL and Quartz.

It's not a huge thing for me, though, since I can run bootcamp on my MBP, and there's no way in hell I'd buy a Mac Pro to run games when my gaming rig does the job for an order of magnitudeth the price.

Well, just think of the market for CounterStrike and TF2 on Mac - those games still have several hundred thousand players.

But Apple have expressed a desire to get into gaming, and if Valve of all people start to get on board then it shouldn't be too hard to convince everyone else.

I'll still always massively prefer my PC, but more customer choice and competition is a good thing for everyone.

EA has been releasing games like Dragon Age and Spore. Blizzard does, and now Valve. I think that ought to be enough to convince others. Exclusivity on computers is absurd. With so much money going to console games you would think this tired old elitist attitude would croak for the greater good of all players.

As a Mac user, this is happened years and years after I actually cared. I even vaguely remember when they cancelled the Mac port of Half Life when it was supposedly close to finished. Then I got Orange Box for my 360. Then I installed Windows on my Mac.

Oh, wow, dude. Then what happened next!?!? Please, tell us because we are all really interested.

Then I got lambasted by some little needledick on the internet.

And then how many games in the Steam catalog will be playable on the Mac at first?

As long as the Valve/Source games are, that's all that matters.

All they need is one or two, to Mac users that would seem like a feast of uncomparable proportion.

I imagine the answer to that depends on how many have Mac versions

It's probably going to start with those games used in spoofing the Apple ads above, like TF2, HL, L4D, Portal...

A list of Steam games with Mac ports has been compiled over here:
http://savygamer.co.uk/2010/03/03/here-is-a-list-of-games-currently-on-steam-that-already-have-a-native-mac-port-in-existence/

Games? On a Mac? What is the world coming to...

I never understood why more games weren't on Macs...

Because is the late 80's to mid 90's MIcrosoft basically owned the computer gaming industry. And it just kinda became tradition to not develop for Macs.

I assumed market share had most to do with it. If most gamers own a PC, wouldn't most developers make their games for the PC?

It costs money to develop cross-platform. Since the majority of gamers owned PCs, most developers probably didn't feel the market was large enough to be worth it (nevermind that it wasn't large enough BECAUSE of this assumption)

One of the big reasons probably had to do with the PowerPC processors used, which were different from the x86 Intel/AMD chips. Now that Apple uses Intel chips, the walls lie more in software than hardware, as most games on PC use the DirectX API, which has no support on Mac OS. If more developers worked with OpenGL, then we could potentially see more games on Apple PC's. But frankly, the investment probably isn't worth the time.

How it got to be that way though, is nothing I can say that didn't come from where I poop.

Just curious, how many of you guys with Macs play anything other than WoW and/or Bejeweled on your machines?

I play WoW! Oh wait.. you said besides... umm... Warcraft, Starcraft.... and the Sims.... :\

Personally I don't play games on my Mac. Not because I can't (I also own a PC), I just prefer console gaming.

That said I think Steam branching out on Mac's is very awesome. Perhaps now I can finally stop hearing things like "MACS CAN'T DO GAMES LULZ". You have no idea how much grief I get for simply using a Mac T__T

I play Peggle and Plants vs. Zombies as well.

I do have a bootcamp partition for steam though, so I'm hoping that I won't have to rebuy all of these games for mac, if they do port them all.

I keep Starcraft on my laptop. I also play a lot of shmups on MAME, using my 360 controller.

*high five for JBourne*

You didn't say "WoW".

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Valve Mac faux ads

Reader Comments (137)

Posted: Mar 3rd 2010 3:58PM (Unverified) said

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