In: Games, General

Valve has taken an important first step, now we need to follow through

This week Valve, the creator of the legendary Half Life series of games has been releasing some teaser images hinting that it’s Steam platform may soon be on the way to an Apple computer near you. This is an important first step for the gaming community as a whole, one in which we the gamers need to follow through on.

Let us not underestimate that last sentence. This is an important step for the gaming community, not just for the Apple users but for all PC gamers. What Am I talking about? Competition. Having games created for and released only on one PC platform inevitably hurts the market as a whole. Think of how the console market would look like if the only one available was a Playstation. Now imagine if that one console maker released an update that gave you a bloated unusable interface and then forced all it’s game developers to create games for the platform because it was the only way to use new features.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we have choice and a competitive market with consoles. This isn’t even about games, it’s about people being able to use the system they feel most comfortable with.

The Apple platform is now as good as any PC for gaming, gone are the architecture differences of decades past. It’s about time game developers saw this market for the potential it has, but it’s up to us as gamers to help support Valve and any other companies that create games natively for the Mac. Supporting Valve now is an integral part of making this work. Why? Because you’ll not be finding any other large studios games on the Apple Steam platform for a while, at least I think. My guess is that the large publishers will be looking to Valves sales of it’s own Steam based games before making any decisions about bringing their ported or porting/creating games for the platform.

For the good of PC gaming itself, that is why we need to support Steam on Macs.

If you’ve not caught any of the hubbub on BoingBoing or seen any of the teaser images head over to the article Gallery: Valve tease Steam/Half-Life/Left 4 Dead for Macs, in style for a look see.

Update: There is an interesting article and discussion at rockspapershotgun.com where they also point out a list of already ported Mac games. Quite a few in that list so we may see more than just Valve games at launch, however I still think the big publishers will be looking at Steam sales to decide whether to make an Apple push themselves or not.

Update: I took a little break from posting to plan a wedding, in that time Valve have confirmed, beta’d and shipped Steam for Mac. In fact it’s currently installed and downloading Portal which Valve gave away for free with the release of the Mac platform. Here’s hoping other publishers see the value in our gamers too! To comment on the above update quickly: Valve have released a list of supported games at launch, hopefully we’ll see some more mainstream titles shortly. I’d love to have Dawn of War II or Valve’s own Half Life 2 on my OS X side.

Posted: Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Tags: apple, Games, gaming, important-steps, platform, steam, steampowered, valve, valve-software