I'm sorry this is such a boring image but, "OMGZ LUK OSX!!!!111!"
Popular game distribution and community tool Steam is rumoured to be heading to a Mac release, following uncovered files in one of the latest beta builds.
According to the image, originally posted in this thread, OSX named files have been found in the latest beta for Steam. Whilst there has been no confirmation of such, there has been various rumours regarding Valve’s status’ towards Apple’s Operating System, as well as toward Linux distributions.
The next big Steam release is moving the engine for browsing the store and community sections away from Trident, used primarily by the Internet Explorer browser and basically, what makes using Steam, even through methods such as WINE so difficult. They are now going to be using WebKit rendering engine, used in Mac OSX for a raft of applications as well as browsers, such as Safari and Chrome. This promises to improve speed, compatibilty and system stability. This is probably the first indicator of moving to other platforms.
Also, this is a little more hazy, but Postal III is using the source engine (Valve’s engine which powered little games such as Half Life 2), and credits, PC, Mac and Linux as it’s platforms. So, with my investigation magnifying glass firmly affixed upon this, it looks like we could be seeing the source engine being ported to the aforementioned platforms. This would allow all of Valve’s games which matter being playable.
The final piece is that Valve put out a while ago they were looking for developers skilled in Mac and Linux development, clearly pointing towards a port job, although we haven’t heard anything concrete from the company itself regarding these rumours.
Of course, there is a few hitches should Steam jump over to the other platforms, without or without the source engine, which seems unlikely. Despite the whole host of games on Steam, very few have ever been made compatible with Mac. Even with Source, it still leaves a relatively small list, compared to the numbers on the system and who knows what kind of performance hit it may take running off it’s native Windows system. Whether there are plans for companies who have put out Mac versions of games, for example EA and Spore, to bundle that in, automatically downloading the right one, rebuilding the entire store just for Mac and Linux users, or just leaving it how it is and waiting for the Mac releases to role in.
Needless to say, not without there flaws, but these plans could help Valve and Steam in their plan of Digital Distribution domination.
If we haven't bored you, here is some more:
- RUSE Free Steam Weekend
- Does the New Steam Blow?
- RUSE open beta on Steam very soon
- Half Life 2 and cross platform Steam cloud support, now on Mac
- Konami PC: Only on Steam
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Steam coming to Mac? | Game Engine | Drakz Free Online Service on 02.25.2010
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Does the New Steam Blow? | Game Engine on 04.19.2010
[...] since we heard word of Steam and source based games being ported to Mac and the change from using the Trident rendering engine to webkit, as we talked about on Ignition, [...]