The All New Gabriel Newell's Digital Wonder Emporium, aka, The Steam Update Thread

BadKen wrote:

Press release

"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "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."

Wow.

So duel licenses are a go?

A good way to get some people on mac steam from day one. Hopefully that audience will give other developers and publishers an incentive to get their mac catalogue on there.

One wish for the future is that the store clearly shows what platform and license the games are for: mac, pc, or both.

WizKid wrote:

So duel licenses are a go?

Pistols at dawn, sir!

Impulse and GamersGate aren't going to like this one little bit.

Impulse and GamersGate can come up with a competing product. The mac is mostly unclaimed territory, anyone could have done this, including apple (GamesForApple, iGame) but no one seemed interested because of the perceived 'there's no games on mac'.

This announcement (assuming the Valve games are ported) just reduced my need to Boot Camp by about 50%.

Scratched wrote:

Impulse and GamersGate can come up with a competing product. The mac is mostly unclaimed territory, anyone could have done this, including apple (GamesForApple, iGame) but no one seemed interested because of the perceived 'there's no games on mac'.

To be fair, there really aren't a lot of games on mac. It might not be worth it for Impulse or GamersGate to come up with a mac delivery system if they have nothing to send to the mac. Steam now has some of the more popular PC games available today to sell the system. Pretty much how they got into the PC market too.

One has to wonder how much Steam's user metrics figured into this equation. By that I mean: I presume that when I run Steam on my bootcamped Mac, it gives them some amount of configuration data.

So perhaps they know something about the ratio of Steam customers running on bootcamped Macs vs. those running on non-Mac PCs that the rest of the industry doesn't know. If, completely making up a number, 25% of all Steam users are running on Macs running Windows, that's not an insignificant fraction of the market.

I really hope this leads to managing all saved games in the cloud as well. Mac goodness and cloud management of the save-game states = big win for me.

Cloud saving is already built into the 'Steamcloud' feature of Steamworks, but it's up to the developer to use it, unfortunately. I'd like to see em throw in some workaround for the other 90% of games to sync a save folder for you.

peterb wrote:

One has to wonder how much Steam's user metrics figured into this equation. By that I mean: I presume that when I run Steam on my bootcamped Mac, it gives them some amount of configuration data.

So perhaps they know something about the ratio of Steam customers running on bootcamped Macs vs. those running on non-Mac PCs that the rest of the industry doesn't know. If, completely making up a number, 25% of all Steam users are running on Macs running Windows, that's not an insignificant fraction of the market.

I've wondered about that, too. Looking at the most recent hardware survey on Steam, there are some chipsets and configurations in there that look suspiciously like MacBooks.

In any case, this announcement made my day brighter.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
peterb wrote:

One has to wonder how much Steam's user metrics figured into this equation. By that I mean: I presume that when I run Steam on my bootcamped Mac, it gives them some amount of configuration data.

So perhaps they know something about the ratio of Steam customers running on bootcamped Macs vs. those running on non-Mac PCs that the rest of the industry doesn't know. If, completely making up a number, 25% of all Steam users are running on Macs running Windows, that's not an insignificant fraction of the market.

I've wondered about that, too. Looking at the most recent hardware survey on Steam, there are some chipsets and configurations in there that look suspiciously like MacBooks.

In any case, this announcement made my day brighter.

It absolutely has to figure into their decisions. I cannot imagine a company as savvy as Valve, who already track so many of these details and using that data to drive other business/development decisions, would blindly go into this on a hunch. My guess is, a LOT more people than is first believed are using Mac hardware to run PC games. Afterall, they're not just saying that we'd like to do some concurrent releases (nevermind ports) but they have publicly stated that OS X is now a Tier 1 platform with PC and Xbox...

Instead, I'd like Steam and Steamworks, as well as Stardock and Impulse, to open the protocols so that other vendors can tie into them. The way IM clients eventually ended up doing a while ago.

Just as a warning, Mac video cards are generally pretty underpowered, and then on top of that, have relatively poor drivers, compared to Windows. I'd usually come close to doubling my frame rates in WoW on my Mac Pro by switching to Windows.

I usually played on OS X anyway, because I liked the OS better, and it was mostly fast enough, but if I hadn't had such a ridiculously overpowered machine for the time, it would have been fairly painful to stay out of Windows.

Malor wrote:

Just as a warning, Mac video cards are generally pretty underpowered, and then on top of that, have relatively poor drivers, compared to Windows. I'd usually come close to doubling my frame rates in WoW on my Mac Pro by switching to Windows.

I understand this. However, I've also played a number of indie games that performed far better in the Mac OS than they did in Windows on the same hardware. I'd just like a choice in platform.

Of course, one good point to this is that it may finally light a fire under Apple to start shipping competitive video cards, and to tighten their drivers up and get better at extracting the real performance of the cards underneath.

Tigerbill wrote:

So has anyone else had the client crash when trying to purchase a game? I was buying BF:BC2 and it got to the payment screen, I was using PayPal so it opened another window I put in my info and Steam closed. Luckily it didn't charge me, and I was able to purchase it through the Steam online store in Firefox.

I had the same problem. I was able to buy the game by using my web browser on www.steampowered.com and skipping steam for the purchase part.

Malor wrote:

Of course, one good point to this is that it may finally light a fire under Apple to start shipping competitive video cards, and to tighten their drivers up and get better at extracting the real performance of the cards underneath.

Yes. I think this initiative of Valve's is one key catalyst for Apple stepping up to the plate finally. I think the first was the Apps store for iPhones and now iPads. Even though they argue that gaming isn't really on the radar for them, the apps store has shown them how lucrative it can be...

The argument/theory that no one plays games on macs is going to die hard and fast in 2010.

And for developers: a really nice advantage to developing for Mac is many fewer configurations and drivers to deal with = more time optimizing.

Apple's choice of video cards has gotten a *lot* better in recent years.

Man. I so wish this announcement would lead me to buy more games from Valve to support their awesomeness. But it's not like I don't buy all their stuff anyway.

They're still almost always underpowered for their screen sizes. The biggest iMac, for instance, has a huge amount of screen real estate, 2560x1440, which needs either a GTX 295 or ATI 5870 to drive really well, and they provide only a 4850 with it. That's maybe a quarter the power it should have for a screen that large.

HedgeWizard wrote:
Malor wrote:

Of course, one good point to this is that it may finally light a fire under Apple to start shipping competitive video cards, and to tighten their drivers up and get better at extracting the real performance of the cards underneath.

Yes. I think this initiative of Valve's is one key catalyst for Apple stepping up to the plate finally. I think the first was the Apps store for iPhones and now iPads. Even though they argue that gaming isn't really on the radar for them, the apps store has shown them how lucrative it can be...

The argument/theory that no one plays games on macs is going to die hard and fast in 2010.

And for developers: a really nice advantage to developing for Mac is many fewer configurations and drivers to deal with = more time optimizing.

Do you think Apple would support something like Steam, or do you think they would try to block it out and find some way of delivering games to Macs using their own store front. They won't make much money on software sales if Valve does all the work and Apple is known to try to enforce their own Monopoly on content.

As for configurations, there are many configurations for Macs. Sure there are probably less manufacturers that they have to worry about, but overall there are many different MB, graphics cards, CPUs etc... Porting games to the Mac will also be difficult if they use DirectX. I don't think there are any legal ports to Mac. Games like Quake would be easy since it is an OpenGL based game, but many games today rely on DirectX

kazar wrote:

Do you think Apple would support something like Steam, or do you think they would try to block it out and find some way of delivering games to Macs using their own store front. They won't make much money on software sales if Valve does all the work and Apple is known to try to enforce their own Monopoly on content.

When has Apple ever tried to do this on the Mac platform?

kazar wrote:

As for configurations, there are many configurations for Macs. Sure there are probably less manufacturers that they have to worry about, but overall there are many different MB, graphics cards, CPUs etc... Porting games to the Mac will also be difficult if they use DirectX. I don't think there are any legal ports to Mac. Games like Quake would be easy since it is an OpenGL based game, but many games today rely on DirectX

Obviously, Valve thinks that the effort is worth it.

kazar wrote:

Do you think Apple would support something like Steam, or do you think they would try to block it out and find some way of delivering games to Macs using their own store front. They won't make much money on software sales if Valve does all the work and Apple is known to try to enforce their own Monopoly on content.

It's not a question of Apple wanting to monopolize delivery; they can't control other software vendors for OS X in the same way they can iPhone/iPad developers. If Apple wants to take advantage of current & next gen graphics to support their burgeoning exploration into gaming, they have to put in gaming capable hardware. That's a big IF, and up until last year Apple had continued to say they had no intention of gaming being a major feature to their products. However, with the App store they have clearly courted game development. With numbers that I am sure Valve can provide courtesy of Steam analysis, Apple will see that they can only gain market share in the desktop/laptop environment by putting out gaming capable rigs. Right now, with all of the intel based systems they are running, they really only need to improve the GPUs. The rest is on developers, which leads to...

kazar wrote:

As for configurations, there are many configurations for Macs. Sure there are probably less manufacturers that they have to worry about, but overall there are many different MB, graphics cards, CPUs etc... Porting games to the Mac will also be difficult if they use DirectX. I don't think there are any legal ports to Mac. Games like Quake would be easy since it is an OpenGL based game, but many games today rely on DirectX

The permutations in hardware on the PC side vastly overwhelms the number of permutations on the mac side, by orders of magnitude. Granted I don't deal much in driver development, but clearly Valve believe that creating OS X games (that interoperate with PC games even better) is worth their time and development. I know there are folks on this forum far more capable of talking the advantages of DirectX and what's it done for development and I would be interested to hear their thoughts on how this all translates to development for OS X. I do believe that Apple's decisions to move towards intel chipsets was what opened the door and will only further improve the liklihood of more developers willing to develop for OS X. Certainly they will if/when Valve reap the rewards for being the first real serious deliverer of content

Here's an interesting interview via AppleInsider...

I'm somewhat surprised by this line:

The Steam client and native implementations of our games will ship in April. We expect a number of third parties will release their games at the same time.

I figured they'd have to show third parties some success with the Source engine games before getting buy-in, but it sounds like they have a few games already lined up from other publishers. Again, though, that can mean different things. They could just mean that they have a set of the current OS X games that will go up on Steam right away.

peterb wrote:

Obviously, Valve thinks that the effort is worth it.

It was tough to tell from the press release if they only went with OpenGL for the Mac builds of if they moved the entire Source engine over to it. The quote from the person working on Portal 2 seems to imply they moved completely to OpenGL, though, as the person said something to the effect of checking in code and having both versions built at the same time, which would imply having a single codebase. Though thinking a bit more about it, it's very probable that even if they kept DirectX for the Windows code there would still be significant code sharing among the two projects, so the statement could still make sense even if the OpenGL/DirectX portions were separated.

Edit: Reading the interview I read down below as well as a few other articles and it seems pretty clear that they worked OpenGL into the Source engine side-by-side with DirectX.

Installing near state-of-the-art cards in a Mac means you have to hack your own machine. Even then performance is optimal under Bootcamp. I echo the hopes here that Apple recognizes the market potential and loosens its iron grip a quarter turn.

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

I think they're hoping there is a market for games on the Mac. We'll see how it turns out. I worked at an apple store while in grad school and I really never had people asking about playing games or looking to purchase games the 1.5 years I was there.

HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

I figured developers like PopCap that have a PvZ for iPhone to port it to Mac OS X, but this is a totally different caliber of gaming.

Ulairi wrote:
HedgeWizard wrote:

Sounds like Battlefield Bad Company 2 might makes its way to Mac as well... clearly something is in the water....

I think they're hoping there is a market for games on the Mac. We'll see how it turns out. I worked at an apple store while in grad school and I really never had people asking about playing games or looking to purchase games the 1.5 years I was there.

How long ago was that? Was it pre intel chipset? After?