Valve's Steam Heading to the Mac?
A forum thread has been generating some buzz around the Mac web by suggesting that Valve will be porting their Steam platform to the Mac. Steam is a digital distribution system for PC games -- essentially an PC game App Store. A Mac version of the store would still require games to be ported over to the Mac platform before becoming available.
The screenshots (above) posted to the thread reveal Mac OS X menu components in the Steam file directory -- though some have suggested that these could simply be a Mac OS X-based theme. More convincing, perhaps, is the presence of Mac OS X-like menu definitions and strings that suggest support for multiple platforms:
"steam_welcomeaction_platformwrong" "%gamename% is not available on your current platform."
Even more suggestive of Valve's plans was a recent report that Valve Software's Chris Green has been recruiting for Mac engineers:Chris Greens Summary
I work for Valve. You should work for Valve.
REALLY looking for senior Linux + Mac engineers.
Always hiring Senior Engineers, Artists, and Mappers
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As an avid Steam gamer this has me quite excited. I imagine that we'll be able to sign in with our PC accounts and access universal games.
Hope they officially announce the details for all this soon!
Oh and to current Steam users. Get the UI beta. It's the most beautiful thing ever (or at least what Steam should look like in 2010. It's rather awesome).
Thanks to the helpful people on the Steam forums for these three discoveries. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1157656&highlight=Mac
I also had a poke around in steamclient.dll (also found in SteamUI.dll), there are usually some goodies strung around in there.
There are references to OSX in there, too, alongside other platforms like linux and X360.
There's also an 'osx.menu' in resource/menus, which contains definitions matching standard OS X menus. Oh man I hope there will be a Steam for Mac. Hopefully they'll make a UI that fits in slightly better with OS X...
There's a line in Steam\Public\steamui_english.txt that says:
"steam_welcomeaction_platformwrong" "%gamename% is not available on your current platform."
It would be great if we have bought the windows version of a game that works on mac, we would be allowed to the version in mac as well without any extra charge.
I've long since switched to Windows for games though. My gaming tastes are just to specific to settle for the thin outflow of Mac ports.
Very Mac-like icons though. I'm hoping that one comes out soon, as I don't really like to use my Windows partition to game. (Especially the X, – and + icons.)
However, I hope that there is indeed a Mac version coming :)
Steam Mac = Awesome.
Although, no! Wait! I just bought Windows 7 Professional. If they make all the Steam games work in OSX I no longer need Windows installed and just wasted $150.
I guess I could live with that actually.
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