Mac Gamers to Play Portal 2 with Their PS3 Friends

Valve Software’s Gabe Newell and Josh Weier have dished out some of the Steam features shipping with the PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2, the upcoming first person action puzzle game.

The project lead on Portal 2 at Valve has confirmed in a statement that Portal 2 will be capable of cross platform play, in that Mac users will be able to play with both PC and PS3 players online.

"We made a promise to gamers at E3 that Portal 2 for the PlayStation 3 would be the best console version of the product," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve.

“Working together with Sony we have identified a set of features we believe are very compelling to gamers. We hope to expand upon the foundation being laid in Portal 2 with more Steam features and functionality in DLC and future content releases," Newell said.

"We designed the Portal 2 PS3 experience to be very straightforward for gamers," said Josh Weier, project lead on Portal 2 at Valve.

In addition to cross-platform play, the chat function will also work between PCs Macs and PlayStation 3 consoles, according to Valve.

"PS3 gamers will be able to simply drop the Blu-Ray disc in the PS3, link to their Steam account from inside the game, and all their Steam friends (on PC and Mac) will be visible and accessible for chat and game invites."

The company finally revealed that buyers of Portal 2 for PS3 would be allowed to download the Mac and Windows PC versions of the game for free.

Those who purchase Portal 2 for the PlayStation 3 will be able to unlock a Steam Play copy of Portal 2, by linking their PSN (PlayStation Network) and Steam accounts.

The features shipping in the PS3 version of Portal 2 also include persistent cloud-based storage of PS3 saved games, marking the debut of Steam functioning on any next generation console.