This is exciting. From Valve, the company that has already revolutionized the concept of ownership over computer games. It was already a huge leap forward to have access to your entire library of games from any PC anywhere. Now your library will be almost universally accessible from any computer, period:
“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.”
Further to this, the brilliance of Valve utilizing their proprietary Source engine for all of their products (and heavily licensing it out to 3rd Parties) means that only one engine needs to be ported to allow Mac users to enjoy a massive catalog of games.
“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation. The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”
This is almost too good to be true, especially for someone like me who’s gaming on an outdated iMac with a measly 20 GB Windows Partition. The Bootcamp Beta license expired when Leopard was released, and I haven’t bothered to upgrade from Tiger yet (thought apparently $29 is all you need), and thus I can’t change the partition size anymore. With such little space, I can only install one game at a time, so this is going to be a great opportunity to migrate some of my library over to my Mac partition and finally take a crack at swinging my crowbar in OS X.
It’s a great time to be into computer gaming.
