John Cook, Valve’s director of Steam development has stated that Steam coming to Mac will be one of the ‘biggest events in history’.
Arriving on the Mac in April.
Speaking to Joystiq earlier, Cook said, “We consider this to be the biggest event in Steam’s history since the service was first launched. There are several people involved, from the UI team working on Mac support in the Steam client to graphics engineers working on the native version of Source and our games. It’s a big effort.”
In relation to the future of Mac gaming, “Steam has proven to publishers and developers that the PC games [industry] is still thriving, it just needs to be attacked from more directions than retail. And like Steam on the PC, it took some proving with Valve titles to get third parties interest. We believe Steam for the Mac will be a similar, but much shorter, process.”
Mac gaming has never been a big draw for consumers, despite the hefty hardware, but these recent developments are set to change all that. And with Steam coming to the Mac, the argument that ‘only PC’s can play games’ will soon become a moot point.
This is bad news for Microsoft too, as now they will have some serious competition. For the consumers though, all this rivalry could be a good thing; maybe PC gaming will experience a roaring comeback.
Steam will be arriving on the Mac next month. The recently announced Portal 2 is also set for release on both PC and Mac simultaneously later this year.
