A big day today with the confirmation of a speculated rumour - a rumour that probably seemed too good to be true for many.

Valve Software have announced that their Steam distribution platform - as well as the Source gaming engine - is coming to the Mac. This means that Mac users will soon be able to buy games like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Portal.

"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," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "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."

Portal 2 will be the first game coming out on Mac and PC simultaneously, with development for both platforms occuring side-by-side.

This is fantastic news for Mac owners, who have typically been left in the dark when it comes to gaming, and great news for game developers, who now have a proven, tested, popular distribution system for this new platform. Hopefully this will mean more cross-platform games for everyone.

This is pretty awesome!! Though pretty predictable; I definitely feel it was inevitable seeing Mac take up the gaming mantle at some point given it's recent growth. Doesn't really come as any surprise that Valve are leading the charge here and I hope they make a squillion dollars out of it, because everyone else has had plenty of time to get their games on Mac. Now they've dropped the ball and Valve are pretty much instantly going to rule the games publishing market for Mac, especially given that there's no real known retail channel for most Mac games.

seemed 'too' good to be true

isn't it going to look shit with only 3 games? :P also i thought all mac users booted into windows to play games...

Now all that needs to happen is for apple to open and start knocking out more video cards a'la 5xxx series

Gaming on a macpro native is something I am looking forward to

Will be interesting if they release some of the older games (CoD4) that have native mac clients to those who have bought CoD4 for the PC (me) through Steam.

mac and pc users can play on same dedicated servers?

^ don't see why they couldn't. It's just standard network traffic hitting a server, no restrictions on the server os.

The steam library will be small though, won't it? Most games require directx don't they? Or is a mac version of directx now available as a nice abstraction layer between game code and operating systems?

I was seriously considering moving to mac a few years back but it was the lack of steam that stopped me. That said, this doesn't interest me that much now thanks to the awesomeness of windows 7.

"Plus, Mac and Windows players can go head-to-head, since both Left 4 Deads are cross-platform compatible. Mac owners can even host their own servers and create their own maps, just like Windows users."

boom

Sounds pretty sweet. Was only time until we had mac's with us. Lets just hope Apple actually starts making gaming rigs, that are affordable.

merh. Good luck to them! More money for everyone involved.

well it is in Steams best interest to do so... they will now reach a new consumer base which will raise revenue. Suprised they didn't do it like ages ago.

So will we need to rebuy Mac equivalents of the games we already own? I'm presuming so but would be nice not to have to.

Awesome news! Games are the only thing missing from my mbp and valve are coming to the rescue!

Quake Live has been keeping my interest enough to not bother with a reboot at all recently - but yes, this is great! I guess that since Valve collects hardware stats, they could easily see a potential market on Mac hardware.

Does anyone know if they ported the orange box to openGL for ps3, that might be where this has steamed from

Awesome. Connecting Apple-fanboys to the real world. I can't wait for the in-game chat arguments.

[666]SikhKunt: why is my fucking ping so gay?
[{DICK}]Head: are you on a Mac?
[666]SikhKunt: yeah, so?
[{DICK}]Head: mac's are fucking gay
.
.
.

Believe it.

Only source games can be ported because macs can only run games on an engine released in 2004.

I thought this was what boot camp was for.

I stopped rebooting for games about the time I stopped running DOS

Welcome to 2002 mac!