Steam For Mac
Posted by BigC on Thu, 24 Jun 2010.
The UNIX market share, more so Macs, have an ever growing share of the computer market and out of those users, many of them were gamers who, up until now, were made to install Windows through Bootcamp on their Mac to play Steam games. Those days are now (nearly) completely over! VALVe have released their highly acclaimed Half-Life series, Counter Strike: Source and other games on Mac. Before VALVe had officially announced Steam for Mac, they had sent teaser images to a number of forums to get some hype around the matter.
The installer can be downloaded straight from their website and all you need to do is remember your password and log in. The Mac version looks near as makes no difference exactly the same as the Windows version, and was released when the new Steam layout was released nearly two months ago. The Steam client is now more stable, unlike before and things load quickly without crashing your computer. The Mac version still lacks all the thousands of games available for Windows, although more are being released every week.
Many users have already bought a Windows version of the game, so VALVe decided to introduce a feature called SteamPlay. This allows users to purchase one copy of the game and use it on both platforms. This also applies to, so far as what has been released for Mac, every single game on Steam.
VALVe have also picked up that many gamers have more than one machine that they use to play games, an so Cloud Syncing was introduced. This is a feature that will automatically transfer any new save game files to any other computer that you log in to so you can play on any computer from the point you left of.
When you play an online game, such as Counter Strike or Team Fortress 2, both Mac and Windows users can be on the same server so this allows for more consistently populated servers, so you are never going to be left with out other players to play against.
Even though the Steam client is more stable than the previous one, that is not that hard. It is still buggy, as it is on Windows and can sometimes take up an extortionate amount of memory and CPU cycles. The client doesn’t really download at a uniform rate and can freeze up and suddenly become fine again quite often, although when it does work you should get decent download speeds.
The Mac version of the games, according to Steam are a lot more stable on OS X than they are on Windows, but that comes at a cost where OS X has inferior performance figures to Windows. Nevertheless I tested latest offering, Half Life 2: Episode 2, on highest graphics settings and was getting between 20 and 40 frames per second on a two year old computer, which at the time wasn’t the fastest anyway. (24” iMac with 8800GS). There are also none VALVe games such as Civilization IV and Civilization V coming out for both Mac and PC, and you only need to purchase it once you play on both platforms.
Even though the performance is lower than Windows for some of the Steam games, VALVe have had less than a year of experience with Mac OS X, whereas with they have had over a decade with Windows. What VALVe have done is an excellent example of what many other game developers could do and bring more games to Mac.
So if you are one of the many Mac users out there and have a Steam account, download it for Mac now and start playing. Check out the Steam Teaser below.