News has been everywhere the last 2 weeks about first the buried OSX assets in Steam, then Valve’s “leaked” images to certain sites hinting at upcoming Apple Support, and finally the official announcement that Valve is adding the Mac it’s list of supported tier-1 platforms.

“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.”

Don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to playing some more HalfLife2 and Portal on my mac hardware! One interesting little tidbit overlooked in this is that they haven’t written abstraction layers to make the existing apps work on the Mac, they’ve rewritten the core systems to integrate WebKit into Steam, and OpenGL into their Source engine.

This is a huge step in reducing the dominance of DirectX in the marketplace, bringing OpenGL back “into the fold” for gaming (tho some would argue it never left).  With a company and product as successful as HalfLife, TeamFortress, and Portal, hopefully we’ll see other developers re-evaluating the lock-in of Microsoft systems (DirectX, Windows) for more open and cross-platform alternatives.

via Steam News.

Tags