Steam Mac Beta Gets Quick Test

Since its original rumor, we’ve talked a fair bit about Valve’s Steam client on Mac, and I have a good feeling we’ll be talking about it for a while, as it’s interesting in so many ways. As large as Valve is, its in-house game collection is small, but with all those available for the Mac, owners of Apple PCs will suddenly be able to play most or all of them without setting up a dual-boot machine.

The reason I find all of this exciting, despite not owning a Mac, is simply the fact that one large developer has come out of the hole in the ground and is actually going through the lengths of delivering its titles on a non-Windows PC. This is something that has had to happen forever, so I’m hoping that Valve will be the domino to cause other developers to start taking alternative OSes more seriously.

That all said, the Mac version of the Steam client has been in beta for a couple of weeks now, and Ars Technica has taken it for a spin and given us its initial opinions. Overall, I think most of the opinions and findings are what I could have expected. The game selection is currently slim (Portal only, but more of the Source catalogue will be available at launch) and the client is seemingly stable.

Since many Apple PCs don’t include gamer-level hardware in most configurations, you may have to down the settings in some of the titles. The author of the article had to do some tweaking with Portal, despite the fact that it’s not exactly a graphically intensive game (by today’s standards). This was even on a MacBook Pro, a model that tends to include reasonable hardware.

We’ll of course learn a lot more upon official release, which is set to take place on May 12. I can’t wait, especially to see what kind of game selection there will be from Valve in particular (or if there will be any other games immediately available from other publishers). There are many Source-based games that haven’t been talked much about, such as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and even the original Half-Life, so it’d really be nice if gamers would be able to play those games on May 12th as well. Soon we shall know…

In fact, Valve is going to be the big winner for a while here unless other companies step up: a ported Source engine allows Portal, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2 (and all its episodes), and Team Fortress 2 to be available for sale when the service launches. Portal 2 is another game likely to be released day and date on Macs. Valve is going to launch a service on the Mac that will be offering a good selection of its own games to a customer base hungry for titles. That’s a very good position to be in.