mac-steam posts

While its only been a few months since Valve added support for Mac games in its Steam game download service, the latest results from Steam's voluntary hardware survey still show that Mac gamers comprise only a fraction of Steam's total audience. The July survey results show that only 5.07 percent of Steam users have Mac-based operating systems.

However the latest Microsoft operation system, Windows 7, is gaining in market share with just over 40 percent of Steam users recorded as having the OS installed on their systems (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions). Windows XP users, while losing market share, is still installed in a large fraction of Steam players' PCs with a total of over 33 percent (again with both 32-bit and 64-bit users).

Valve made a big move a few months ago when it launched its Mac game download service on Steam. However some people have complained that some of the Mac ports of Valve games such as Half-Life 2 have not been as solid as the PC versions. Now the Steam web site has detailed some of the performance improvements that Valve has made to the Mac versions of its games.

Valve says it has worked with Apple to get the improvements in the Mac ports, saying, "In addition to low-level implementation changes which have improved performance across the board, Apple has also removed some implementation inefficiencies which allow us to improve visual quality, most notably in the area of GPU occlusion queries." So not only should Valve's Mac ports run better they should also look better. On newer Mac products Valve states, "Depending on the game, video settings and the hardware, we have measured frame rate improvements from 15 percent to 120 percent on these systems." There's a ton of technical stuff on how Valve manage to get more performance out of its Mac games in the post.

It's a few months since Valve began adding Mac games to its Steam PC game download service. Many in the industry had considered the Mac platform to be a dead end for making native games. However in a chat with Valve's Jason Holtman and Doug Lombardi at Gamesindustry.biz (free registration required) it sounds like Mac gaming is alive and well, thank you.

While Valve, as usual, isn't giving out specifics on Mac game sales via Steam, Holtman feels that there is an overall surge of interest for gaming on the Mac in the past few months since Steam's Mac support launched. He states, "The reaction that we've got from the development community is that this could be a big ingredient towards that renaissance. People have both a business motivation as well as a personal motivation to see games on the Mac. They want to play them themselves." He added that this reaction has come from both indie game developers as well as " the big guys."

As promised on Tuesday Valve has now released the long awaited Mac port of their 2004 first person shooter classic Half-Life 2 via their Steam client In addition Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 have also been released for the Mac. Also, both the PC and Mac ports of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 finally include Steam achievements for the first time and sport some graphical improvements based on the latest Source Engine (which Episode 2 already has). Finally all three games now support Steam Cloud which allows players to save games online and use them on any PC with a Steam client.

To celebrate all three games get a big 30 percent off sale for a limited time. Half-Life 2 is now priced at just $6.99 while Episodes 1 and 2 are on sale for $5.59 each. Finally The Orange Box which has Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (coming to the Mac "soon) is priced at $20.99

Unless you're a total Mac and Apple buff, you'll need to remember the 80s to recognize the commercial that inspired this parody featuring Half-Life 2. The game is almost six years old now, but it's still kicking, and it's ready to make its debut on Mac Steam tomorrow, May 26th.

PC users who want to take a flash back in time can download the original Half-Life 2 demo here. Be aware that this version of demo installs an old version of Steam.

Download HD Half-Life 2 'Free Yourself' Trailer (67 MB)
Download the Half-Life 2 PC Demo (751 MB)
Check out all Half-Life 2 Downloads

As promised a number of weeks ago, Valve is finally bringing its classic 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 to the Mac platform via Steam. The game will be released on Wednesday as part of Valve's now regular weekly update of adding new Mac games to the Steam platform.

Shacknews has confirmed that the release of Half-Life 2 will also include Mac versions of the game's two mini-expansions, Episode 1 and Episode 2. It's likely that people who already own the PC version of the game will be able to download the Mac version for free. It's unknown if this release will also finally add the long awaited Steam achievements to Half-Life 2.

Valve's launch of the Mac version of their Steam game download service has been a success, but there's one big issue that a number of Mac users of Steam don't care for. When Valve launched the Mac client it chose to put all of the downloadable game content in a sub-folder of a Mac's Document folder. Some Mac users have complained that they like backing up their Documents files but may not want to back up their game content there and others don't want their game files in such a viable location

In short, Valve decided to locate the Steam files in that part of the Mac OS because they wanted a way for users to quickly delete all Steam game files if they wanted to. However Valve is now working on a way to put the Steam files in a lower priority location on the Mac OS and if you want to delete Steam it will ask you if you want to delete all of your game files as well. There's no word on when this Mac Steam update will go live.

It's been only a week since Valve launched the Mac version of its Steam game download client. Today Valve revealed a few tidbits of facts regarding the first week of the Mac port of Steam. They also announced that they will be gathering hardware data from Mac users for their regular monthly hardware survey. The first full survey results will be released next month.

In the meantime Valve has announced that since they made their puzzle shooter game Portal free it has racked up 1.5 million downloads so far. The Mac version of Portal is also one-fifth as likely to crash as its PC counterpart. Two thirds of Steam users on a Mac play their games on a laptop. And finally Mac downloads on Steam have already accounted for more than 11 percent of all Steam downloads.

Hot on the heels of the launch of the Mac client for Steam, Valve has just announced that the full version of its 2007 shooter-puzzle game Portal is now available to download for both PC and Mac for free. Nope; it's not a typo or a mistake. The only catch is that the full game will only remain free to download on Steam until May 24.

Just in case you haven't played the game; it's short (you will get through it inside of three hours, most likely) and its mix of portal gameplay, puzzles and humor will keep you guessing until the final level. And of course there is the fact that Portal 2 is due for release later this fall.

The long awaited launch of the Mac Steam client is now available to download, but it looks like Valve, at least as of this news post, has yet to go live with the client's Mac Game Store. Our sister site Joystiq reports that Mac users can still purchase games via the official Steam web site.

At the moment there's not an official list of games for the Mac launch of Steam although it's looking like it could be as many as 50 titles could be available for Mac users. Many of them will be able to be downloaded for free if users have already bought the PC version of the game via Steam. We will update this post when we get a definitive list of launch titles for the Mac client.

Update: Valve has now turned on the big switch to the Mac game store and indeed well over 50 titles are available to download for Mac players. You can check out the full list of games after the jump. One note: Torchlight is now on sale for both the PC and Mac for just $9.99.