But they made us pay full price for L4D2!!!11!
Portal 2 will be released same day for Mac and PC. Also, some other pretty sweet news:
Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.
* If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play. * By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.
Looks like it is up to each publisher if they want to do the same for their cross platform games or if they want to charge separately. Pretty cool about the save games, though. More good stuff: Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac | WIRED
Webkit sounds like some boring middleware for making IT apps so I didn’t click in that thread because I thought it might result in me getting assigned tasks at work.
See, this is why Valve gets a ‘free pass’ from people who use it; they’re not a bunch of money-grabbing whores. Would Ubi do something as decent as this? Fuck no!
Ubi would never have tried something as radical and consumer friendly as releasing DRM free PC games! Er, wait…
That’s not what I was talking about but, you go girl!
Valve quite simply could not have done a more thorough job with this Mac support. Cross-platform game purchases and gameplay? Cross-platform Steam Cloud settings and saved games? Native OpenGL versions instead of emulations? Simultaneous builds for both PC and Mac meaning that both versions will get updates at the same time without any overhead on Valve’s part?
Simple brilliance. There’s really nothing else to say about this.
Well, unless you’re an out-of-touch idiot like Paul Thurott who still clings to retarded assesments formed on flawed/incorrect reasoning and has absolutely no concept of anything in the games industry beyond the 360.
As a former kool-aid drinking Mac evangelist I appreciate the hell out of what they’re doing. The situation isn’t as dire as it was back in the day when we only had a handful of AAA titles every year, but I still think it’s great what they’re doing here. Time to finally pick up the Orange Box (yeah, I know I’m terrible).
Can’t imagine how this could have been more awesome other than them giving away the Orange Box for free. Total Awesome Sauce in my book.
Interesting, in the 3rd link you posted Valve says they’ll be putting OS usage numbers into the existing Steam Stats page. Commence the fanboy flame wars!
Also, let’s just reiterate how incredible those Mac ad parodies are.
So does this mean that HL2, HL2:Ep1, HL2:Ep2 and Portal will get Steam Cloud support? They never patched that functionality in, but have a good reason to now.
Yes, I believe it does mean that.
New Portal 1 ending:
http://nerdvana.freedomblogging.com/gaming/valve-opens-the-door-on-portal-2?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
More info:
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/703048/TheFeed.html?utm_source=g4tv
So none of the articles I’ve seen so far mention mods. I don’t know much about HL2 mod development, so what’s the deal there? Will existing mods work on Macs and if not how difficult would it be to port them?
No clue. Is valve doing a public gdc keynote?
In my experience with most Mac games, Mods are mostly data based, and so have no problem running on Mac.
I recall testing out some CoD2 mods when I worked on that, and didn’t have any problem.
Only thing I’ve heard is that Gabe Newell is accepting a pioneer award. Not sure if he’ll be able to make any sort of extensive speech though.
He talked a bit and actually had some slides. He specifically called DRM a misfeature and talked about “openness” which makes me wonder if they’re going to open up Steam any more.
He teased revealing a bunch of company secrets, but then it went to a fake BSoD with a bunch of portal references.