Steam Coming to Mac? Confirmed


For years, the Mac gaming has been about kids games, new releases released a year after the PC version ships, and lousy gameplay. Now, it’s all been changed.

We first posted about this back in February, but now it’s all been confirmed. Steam is coming to the Mac.

For the uninitiated, here’s what Steam is, according to their website.

  • Instantly access your favorite games
    The full Steam library and all future Steam releases are at your fingertips. After you’ve purchased a game, download it immediately and start playing.
  • Join the Steam Community
    Now it’s easy to find someone to play with, meet up with friends, connect with groups with similar interests, and host and join chats, matches, and tournaments. Best of all, it’s all free.
  • Chat with your friends while gaming
    With Steam’s “Friends” service, you can talk to your friends while you play. You can also see when they’re playing games and easily join the same servers together.
  • Easily browse multiplayer game servers
    Steam’s integrated server browser makes it easy to navigate thousands of Internet game servers.
  • Receive automatic game updates
    Hunting for patches and downloading from unorganized web sites is so twentieth-century. On Steam, your games stay up-to-date by themselves. No hassles.
  • Play your games on any PC
    Once you have a Steam account, you can sign in from any PC to access your games. Your games are associated with your account, not your computer.
  • Enjoy Steam-only special offers
    From pre-release discounts to free-play weekends, Steam delivers what gamers value most.

Now take out all of those “PC” references and swap them with “Mac,” and you’ve got online gaming for the Mac, all ready to go.

But wait, there’s more.

“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”

Meaning, if you already play Steam games on your Boot Camp drive or on another PC, you don’t have to buy anything new to play on the Mac. They also announced that the Mac is going to be under the same release schedule as games for Windows and the XBox 360. All of a sudden, things are looking up.

It’s about time someone started taking Mac gaming seriously.


Kossi Adzo

Kossi Adzo is a technology enthusiast and digital strategist with a fervent passion for Apple products and the innovative technologies that orbit them. With a background in computer science and a decade of experience in app development and digital marketing, Kossi brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to the Apple Gazette team.

2 Comments

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  1. Yes, it is about time! Microsoft must be pissed off, seeing as now PC users have no more reason to use Windows.

  2. It’s about time. I can scrap my wreck of a PC and just use my Mac. This is a good start to things. 😀