Valve to Deliver Steam & Source on the Mac

Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform

March 8,
2010 - Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming
service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Mac.

Steam and
Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2,
Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in
April.

"As we transition from entertainment as a product to
entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open,
high-quality Internet clients," said Gabe Newell, President of Valve.
"The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."

"Our
Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million
Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said
Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks
for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new
feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the
product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of
charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud,
allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing
the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most
developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."

"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 Valve's
first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code
produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so
the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2
Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right
alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using
Source to do game development for the Mac."

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