It's Official: Valve is Bringing Steam to the Mac

The key to your comments is "But then it's really the only way Valve can expand." Think about it they sell PC games online. Valve is probably the biggest provider of this? There are others like Direct2Drive. These have succeeded because retail space for PC games is disappearing. Does games stop even sell PC games anymore? You can and have been able to buy Mac games online for some time now. While Mac games are even less popular than PC games, there is still money to be made right now. Call of Duty 4 is popular on the Mac. I read that 25% of all WOW players are on Mac's. Also, contrary to your usual market share BS, Mac CONSUMER market share is bigger than 3% or whatever you quote, especially in the US. Consumers, not corporations buy games, so this was a logical step for Valve to increase sales. What is surprising is that newer games like Left 4 Dead 2 will be ported. I would have assumed older stuff like Half Life2 as this is the usual port scenario on the Mac, only popular games and after some time has passed.

PC gaming isn't dead but what ever guess the people I hang out with at college don't matter, PC sales are changing from retail to online, and NPD the common source used to show that PC gaming is dieing doesn't report online sales , as to rr0de74@live.com, the common belief is that Macs hold between 9 to 11% of the market share in the US, but if we are arguing which one has a bigger gaming market, PC crushes it, most macs are not good at graphic intensive gaming unless you own a mac pro tower and then you kinda have gone over kill there. But I see this as a good thing letting the PC and Mac gaming market stay vibrant underneath the radar of NPD, and if all those darn pirates just bought there games I'm pretty sure the PC market would be tieing the console market in game revenues.

They should now charge $100 per game just because it's on a mac...sarcasm

"most macs are not good at graphic intensive gaming unless you own a mac pro tower" Not the new ones. The new ones suck for graphics options. The only options are GeForce GT120's (no SLI) or a single Radeon HD 4870. The Mac Pro doesn't even deserve the "pro" moniker anymore because the graphics options are only consumer offerings. It's a joke. There are no Quadro or FireGL offerings at all, even though Apple says this is supposed to be a system for professional graphics and workstation 3D applications.

Maybe but wouldn't the licensing, cost more for console. You know to get there game released on a console, Plus I believe the PC market has the more loyal of fans, and easier if you develop in a niche market. Like the Game Biz series, it is extremely niche. It would really depend but I would say PC's would be easier to enter as a new game developer unless you join a company then it doesn't matter, because one there is less competition, more loyal gamers, and as long as you keep your prices reasonable and don't release buggy games to the market, then the pirates should be kept low. I could also argue PC gamers are pickier in the choices they make for games, last time I counted I had over 100 PC games, on physical disc, and that is from around 15 years of collecting them pretty much, with my steam account add like another 20. While my friend who owned a 360 it red ringed recently, had about 30 or 40 and that is from 2006 to now, compared to my PC and PS3 purchases in that time I might have gotten like 15 or 20 games in the same period.

This is pretty interesting news, but I don't know how well it will catch on. Most (if not all) Mac owners I know aren't really interested in computer games - of course that may be because of the poor state of gaming on the mac. I do wonder how the iMacs will deal with gaming though, although Steam has plenty of casual games to offer as well. As for "The iPhone and Xbox 360are much bigger deals" - eh, I'm not so certain. I would hazard a guess that there may be more steam users than iPhone owners (can someone find figures?) and especially iPhone game players. Definitely more PC game players. Nvidia and ATi seem to be doing wuite well out of it.

"Maybe but wouldn't the licensing, cost more for console." The dev kits for consoles (hardware kit and SDK) certainly aren't cheap. "that is why you buy the GTX 280 for MAC from nvidia, if you wanted to game on mac" Not my point, although that is a good one. My point was about the "pro" in "Mac Pro". It isn't. It was better before when they offered Quadro and FireGL products at checkout. Instead, you HAVE TO take a Mac Pro with a GT120 or 4870, neither of which are "pro" cards by any stretch of the imagination (and the GT120 isn't even a good gaming card). If you want a "pro" card, you'd buy a Quadro FX series card, or a Quadro Plex GPU computing unit.

BTW: FFXIII is out tomorrow for NA markets.

If the developer is good then patches are automatically sent to the person each time they either start the game or click check updates. As for Video-processing, depends on what task you want, a dual quad core machine is great for this task, but with recent advancements in the technology that Nvidia has implemented, and ATI to a lesser extent, has made the gap between the two technologies, as a gtx 280 is pretty close in video rendering when compared to a single core-i7. As for workstation class graphics I don't know as much about them, not my field, but as I understood it was that the cards are the same as there graphic equivalents though cherry picked to ensure the quality of the chip, drivers that allow it to do things that are meant for graphic intensive rendering task, direct support from the manufacturer, Nvidia, or ATI(AMD), and usually loaded with a large amount of ram compared to there consumer cousins.

"Its seems that video cards are so powerful now, even at the $150 range that software or games for the most part is behind the hardware." Totally untrue. There are lots of software programs that will take advantage of higher-end video. What is happening is that feature set isn't differentiating much between the same components in the same GPU generation (which is something that AMD gets right about their CPU's, but Intel doesn't). "Call of Duty, if I am not wrong is using a heavily modified quake 3 engine." The original did. Call of Duty 4 uses a version of the id "tech 4" engine, roughly equaling what is used in Quake 4 and Doom 3, but had been heavily modified with extra entensions for HDR, among other things. In World at War and MW2, the engine was revised so heavily that Infinity Ward now considers it their own IP. "I could be wrong but the video work, is a CPU, not a GPU hog and so the Pro's can process it faster with dual quad's." In the new Mac Pro's, that's a definite. The problem is that they don't even utilize GPU computing on most software now due to the lackluster graphics options. Video editing applications can be written to use your GPU for rendering frames of video, just like it rasterizes vector information into realtime 3D frames (that's an oversimplified comparison, but whatever). There are MANY Windows applications that already do this. Any application with NVIDIA CUDA or ATI Stream does this. DirectX Compute will just unify those API's. Apple doesn't get that yet. Right now, even OpenCL doesn't easily work with multiple GPU's. In order to use multiple GPU's in a system with OpenCL, you'd have to break up video tasks into multiple GPU threads. Video editing applications still don't do that. Many video applications still only work on only as many threads as you have tracks for output and NVIDIA's native API's only support 1 GPU for compute right now, meaning that the GT120 is just a terrible option. "Also for the...developer there support is a lot easier." Wow. That's just so totally wrong, you have no idea. Ask anyone that has programmed for the PS3 or Wii (Xbox uses a dev kit that uses software tools that are similar to VS). Development for multithreading gaming machines is EXTREMELY difficult compared to what you can do on a PC, especially when you consider the complexities of PowerPC processors. "Finding and downloading a patch to MW2 on a PC is a lot harder for the average user compared to a console, where is just downloads it automatically, because PSN or Xbox Live handles it the hosting and delivery." Also wrong. You clearly haven't played any multiplayer PC games in a long time. Whenever you connect to a game server, your game is automatically patched so that it matches the game server (game servers are meant to be updated as soon as a patch is released, but that's only a problem for games that allow for user-hosted servers). "Nvidia has implemented, and ATI to a lesser extent, has made the gap between the two technologies, as a gtx 280 is pretty close in video rendering when compared to a single core-i7" Most software accelerates video encoding and filter transforms by several HUNDRED percentage points over CPU processing. In many cases, it's MULTIPLES of CPU performance. Here are good examples: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_apps_flash_new.html#state=filterOpen;f... & Audio "As for workstation class graphics I don't know as much about them, not my field, but as I understood it was that the cards are the same as there graphic equivalents though cherry picked to ensure the quality of the chip, drivers that allow it to do things that are meant for graphic intensive rendering task, direct support from the manufacturer, Nvidia, or ATI(AMD), and usually loaded with a large amount of ram compared to there consumer cousins." They are usually the same GPU's, sometimes clocked higher, and often have specialized rendering features for better visual quality for both realtime preview and off-screen rendering computations for programs like Maya, 3DS Max, and AutoCAD. Precision is often higher due to higher-grade circuitry, and firmware (VGA BIOS) optimizations and extensions that you won't find on a gaming card. Finally, the most important part: they're tested for compatibility with professional-grade software, are validated by the software vendors, and receive specialized driver support to optimize usage for said software applications. BTW: Professional cards have accelerated off-screen 3D rasterization for years now. They've only started doing that with consumer applications in the last year or so (since NVIDIA started pushing CUDA for consumer use). @sub: The percentages are off. They didn't use weighted averages, which would be far more accurate. The percentages for some of the figures are so far off, that you can't say that one is just as accurate as another when they all used different criteria for getting at those figures. If you actually weigh the averages for each survey, the percentages for some of the far-off points end up not making much of a change to the real medians.

"I don't know, this is a weird move in a way" Yes, its very weird when a company thinks it will be profitable creating software for the Mac. Maybe if they were not selling millions of computers each year, many to their target user base, it would make more sense to you, Always has to be negative regarding Apple and the Mac, doesn't it?

Kelko people know that the netbooks are not for gaming, and going off of your basis for gaming from the 9400 for the macs, then a large percentage of PC would be able to play those games as well the 9400 is nothing. Look at anyone who gets an AMD machine it usually comes with either a 3200 HD or a 4200 HD is pretty good at low to medium level gaming. @rr0de74 it really doesn't cost that much to have a good gaming machine, my $500 now machine when you add in the cost of the tri core I recently got, can run ME 1+2 at there highest setting at 1680x1050 I have a 22 inch screen, though AA is turned down, on a Nvidia 9600 GSO 768 MB GPU. This machine is a little over a year old, and yes it does cost more than consoles, but not as much as people think. I'm waiting for Fermi now to drive ATI's prices down.

You're all forgetting the Mac users who dual boot with Windows just so they can play games. Are they counted in the "PC Gaming Market Share"? I'm guessing they are since they're accessing the games via Widows and not OS X. You will now have a whole pile of Mac users who can now access Steam without having to boot into Windows (and, not have to pay for the Mac version of the games they already purchased off Steam). I think that's pretty cool. Personally, I don't care much for Valves games. I'm a Blizzard (read:Diablo... can't stand WoW) and id fan myself but I think this is a pretty cool thing Valve has done no matter which way you look at it. Gaming is gaming no matter the platform and Valve decided to bring their wares to another section of the market.