Obviously, we’re all proud to be Mac users--the Mac OS and Apple’s elegant hardware are a match made in geek heaven, and we can’t imagine ever not using Macs. In fact, the only time we’re ever reluctant to admit our rabid Mac fandom is when we’re hanging out with our PC-using buddies and the conversation turns to gaming. “Mac gaming?” they snicker. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Well, laugh it up, fuzzball, because we’re here to tell you that 2010 is the year Mac gaming finally gets some respect.
Launched in May, Valve’s industry-leading Steam service for downloading games and managing multiplayer is tearing down the wall that used to separate Mac gamers from our PC pals. Apple’s latest machines--desktop and laptop--have powerful Intel processors and graphics cards, backed up by long-lasting batteries, that make gaming more attractive across the product line. New technology is closing the gap between Windows and Mac release dates, and the big publishers are bringing huge, hotly anticipated titles to both platforms this summer. In the pages that follow, we round up dozens of reasons to get excited about gaming on your Mac, including details on how to take on the Mac|Life editors in multiplayer battles over Steam. Being a Mac user will always be cool, but these advances in gaming are making it more fun, too.
This changes everything
Somewhere down the road on a cold winter’s night, when your grandchildren ask, you’ll be able to tell them 2010 was the year gaming came into its own on the Mac. “It was the year of the iPad,” you’ll say thoughtfully while sitting by the cozy fireplace. “It was the year iOS 4 finally brought data tethering to certain devices. And it was the year Valve finally released Steam for the Mac so we could play some really cool games without having to boot into a Boot Camp or virtual partition…
“It was also the year I entered rehab for my Portal addiction.”
Seven years after its groundbreaking release on Windows and after more than a year of development, a not-so-little content-delivery app called Steam launched this May on the Mac. It opened the floodgates for a slew of marquee Windows-based games to run natively on Mac OS X while also providing additional tools to help developers port their current work to the Mac. Think of Steam as a kind of App Store for your Mac--but with a cooler, black-toned interface. When you install and launch the Steam client on your Mac, you connect directly to Valve’s online game store, where you can purchase and directly download games, maintain lists of friends you play with, devour the latest news and updates, and much more. It’s supremely usable, and for any gamer, it quickly becomes as essential as Safari and iTunes.
Every game has achievements to earn, a list of your friends who also play, forums, support links, and more.
Presently, Valve reports that it has an installed base of 25 million Steam clients, making the system one of the most successful online storefronts ever created. The Mac version’s initial library of over 50 recently released and soon-to-be-released games includes classics such as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (narrative-driven shooters), Counter-Strike (multiplayer perfection), and Portal (a dark, funny puzzler), with Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 (zombie killin’!) rounding out the pack. Valve has also promised that the much-anticipated Portal 2 will arrive both on Mac OS X and Windows simultaneously--an olive branch years after the company canceled a Mac port of the sci-fi classic Half-Life.
Why the change of heart? For one thing, porting a title to Mac OS X has gotten easier. After years of playing around with Linux binaries for its dedicated server machines, then porting the Steam download and user interface rendering engines to Mac OS X, Valve has already sorted out a fair amount of the tricky development work. Other factors, such as Apple’s switch to Intel processors in 2006 and the availability of Mac OS X system libraries that Valve was already familiar with, helped the process. Additionally, Valve has been collaborating with Apple on refining its OpenGL code so it works well with games, and it also developed its own toolset, the Steamworks API, to make porting that much easier.
But even if porting is easy and a platform’s users are clamoring for a great game, the only way a company will undertake that effort is if they can turn a profit. Valve seems to have thought this through on both the developer and consumer ends, and the key feature, Steam Play, allows for the free transfer of games across OSes. Say you already purchased the Windows versions of Portal or Left 4 Dead on your Boot Camp partition. Just launch Steam on your Mac OS X partition, download the Mac version of the game you’ve already paid for in Windows at no additional cost, and you’re good to go. Even better, Mac and Windows users can team up--or battle each other to the death--in multiplayer games while taking advantage of Steam’s friends list, achievements, and community features.
More Mac games are being added to Steam each week, and if you bought any games on Steam for Windows, you can re-download them on your Mac for no charge.
You’ll still have to wait to get Mac ports of every Valve game you own for the PC, but not much longer, according to Valve. Developer Jason Mitchell says, “The base [engine] layer is there for them already. We can get to the titles in a year with 1.5 to 2 full-time engineers devoted to it.”
“There’s something every week,” says Valve’s vice president of marketing, Doug Lombardi. “We’re targeting Wednesdays for new-release day on the Mac, and we understand that people want the other [Valve] properties out on the Mac. They’re coming. We’ve made you wait several years, and if you can wait a few more days or weeks, we’re finally going to make good on all that.”
Valve’s system even puts other developers at ease--in the past, developers often had to wait weeks or months to see how their games were selling. The Steamworks API includes utilities that report real-time sales data, so developers distributing their games on Steam can see what’s selling and offer discounts and promotions as needed.
But the best news is that Valve saw a bump right away from its Mac sales. “The first week was 11 percent,” says Lombardi of Valve’s revenue increase in the week following the launch of the Steam for Mac client. According to Lombardi, Valve thinks it can sustain that growth and even push it further into the teens as additional users sign on and more games are added to the Steam storefront. Success stories like Torchlight, Killing Floor, and that 11 percent figure are the smoking gun that proved that Steam on the Mac could work.
See what your friends are playing at any given moment.
“Making a Mac version these days isn’t an extraneous extra effort,” says Lombardi. “Now that we’re proving that there’s double digits of extra revenue to glean from [it] without an incredible development effort, folks are seeing this as absolutely penciled in. We’re optimistic that [developers] are going to be doing what we’re doing with Portal 2, which is bring the game out on both platforms. You make one purchase, and you have access to both versions via Steam. And that’s the way it goes.”
Mac users ought to enjoy Steam’s non-gaming bells and whistles, too. Upcoming Dashboard-esque widgets will provide the ability to stream music through Pandora or watch Hulu right on Steam. And gaming add-ons include an extension that allows you to buy game guides and switch between the game and the guide as you play.
But in the Apple universe, the beating heart of gaming is absolutely Apple’s mobile devices. Even with Steam already succeeding on conventional notebooks and desktops, representatives from Valve admitted that the jump over to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch will be incremental at first, serving more as an extension. “You’d be able to check your achievements, schedule a game time, make friends, and chat with friends,” says Lombardi. “But creating a game from that experience would be something we’d want to do from scratch. We’re looking at them with great interest, like everyone else is, but we’re not listed on the iPhone developers page yet, and we’re not going to be appearing there in the coming weeks or months.”
Awkward hand-holding between robots is just a small part of the humor that makes Portal so great. Once you dive into its marvelous, puzzled-packed adventure, you’ll be overjoyed to know that Valve’s highly anticipated Portal 2 will be released simultaneously for Mac, Windows, and Xbox 360 toward the end of 2010--and it includes a cooperative mode featuring the lovely couple above.
Even so, with Steam for Mac’s growing library coming in, the promise of Portal 2 (above) being simultaneously released for the Mac on the same day as Windows, and--hopefully--the financial numbers to prove to other developers that Valve’s model works, Steam will be the dawn of a new era of Mac gaming. Let the fragging begin.
Valve adds more Mac games to Steam every week--see the full lineup at store.steampowered.com/browse/mac. We recommend these 10 games to anyone looking to get their gaming feet wet.
» Beautiful and heart-wrenching, must-have Braid (pictured above, $9.99) is a compelling winner of the “videogames as art” debate.
» Top-down shooter Madballs in Babo: Invasion ($9.99) is fast-paced, colorful, and chaotic; and it contains just enough strategy to keep players coming back.
» Stylized puzzler World of Goo ($19.99) is charming, simple, family-friendly, and absolutely addicting.
» Clever writing and puzzles keep the five-episode adventure Tales of Monkey Island ($34.99) enjoyable to the end.
» Fast paced and clearly focused, MMO action-RPG City of Heroes: Architect Edition ($19.99) has an easy learning curve.
» The bundled Sam and Max Complete Season 2 ($29.99) saves you $15 compared with buying its five episodic adventures individually.
» Vibrant and zany with limitless replay value, Peggle Complete ($14.99) is a puzzle masterpiece that, quite simply, you need to own.
» Survival-horror first-person shooter Killing Floor ($19.99) has stunning graphics, co-op mode, and cross-platform multiplayer.
» Cure that Diablo itch with Torchlight ($19.99), a fully fleshed-out action-RPG on Steam.
» The essential Orange Box ($29.99) is five amazing multiplayer games for the price of one: Half-Life 2 and both its follow-up episodes, Portal, and Team Fortress 2.
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