Valve hinted at supporting steam on Macs last week via various fake Mac ads (like the one above) featuring popular characters from their games including Half Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Portal and Team Fortress 2. Well it looks like those joke ads had a hint of truth behind them after all. Today the corporation officially announced that they’re bringing Steam to Mac OS X. This means that Mac heads will finally be able to run Steam natively without using bootcamp.
Valve also revealed a gang of new features with this announcement. The biggest draw, in my opinion, is the new Steam Play feature. It’ll let Steam users who already own a supported copy of the game on PC download the game on a Mac free of charge and vice versa. So far this function, along with cross platform play with PC users, will be supported on Source engine games like the aforementioned Half Life series and Left 4 Dead. It’ll be available for devs to implement on third-party games hosted on steam should they choose to support it.
Steam on OS X along with its new features should be available to Mac heads by “late Spring” according to Joystiq. I wasn’t able to find this approximate release window on the Valve Time Table but something tells me gamers should be patient until this release sees the light of day. At any rate it never hurts to put more potential users on some of the best games available.
[Via Joystiq]
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