Valve Confirms Portal 2, Other Steam Games for Mac

After weeks of speculation, Valve has officially announced plans to bring its Steam gaming service, and the Source gaming engine, to the Mac. Titles like Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series are coming to the Mac in April, the company has announced.

In the official report, Steam’s President, Gabe Newell, is cited as saying, "As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients. The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services."

Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve, also commented on the company’s bold move to port numerous games to the Mac saying, "Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac. 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."

Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows will be Portal 2, a single-player first-person action/puzzle video game developed by Valve itself. Originally released in a bundle package called The Orange Box for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 on October 9, the game has players solving a series of puzzles by teleporting their character and simple objects using a "portal gun," a unit that can create inter-spatial portals between flat planes. The game is played from a first-person perspective, and has received mainly positive reviews.

"Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project lead, added. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac." For more information on Valve’s work, and the games coming to the Mac this year, visit the studio’s website.