Game developer Valve has released Steam, its social gaming platform, for the Mac. Steam, which launched in 2004, is a social gaming app merged with a game store that allows a user to download a plugin, then choose games, including many in demo, to play. It has been a PC game to date. No longer.
“It’s been a ton of work, but the Mac is great for the same reason the PC is great – they are both open systems that let gamers and game developers be as close as possible.”
Each Wednesday for the next few weeks, Steam will release games playable on the Mac. The games currently available include Civilization, Guns of Icarus, World of Goo, Zuma Deluxe, And Yet It Moves, Braid, Escape Rosecliff Island, Torchlight, Football Manager 2010, Quantz, Tales of Monkey Island and Brainpipe.
David Chartier pointed out on Macworld that this was not a slapdash job porting this over to the Mac.
This isn’t some duct-taped Java port that limps along with a fraction of its Windows counterpart’s features. Valve used native Cocoa tools, even going so far as to re-engineer the Steam client and store on Windows to use Apple’s WebKit rendering engine
And yes, for the record, I am ashamed of the headline
