Valve’s Steam to arrive on Apple's Mac

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, director of Steam development in a statement about the announcement ahead of Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week.

Valve revealed that it will also be bringing games powered by its ‘Source’ gaming engine to Mac including number of popular titles such as Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, Portal and Left 4 Dead 2 in April.

More on Valve Steam for Mac
According to Cook, the Steam client and native implementations of its games for Apple’s Mac will be shipping in April. The company will also bring third-party publishers onboard for the release of their games.

Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve said, "Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac.”

Valve also announced two new features for Steam, ‘Steam Play’ and ‘Steam Cloud’ for Mac and PC.

“Steam works for the Mac supports all of the Steam works 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," said Holtman.

Each game will require its own set of performance tools in terms of memory, CPUs, and graphics. The first game that will ship simultaneously from Valve on both PC and Mac will be ‘Portal 2’ this coming holiday season.

“Our future games will ship simultaneously on the Mac,’ said Cook.

Valve planning to widen its horizon
Valve’s Steam service currently has over 15 million user accounts, making it the most prominent means of distribution of digital games, specifically on the PC Platform.

The company has released new games on Xbox 360 and PC simultaneously in the recent past but now it wants to expand its development scope wider than before.

"We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform, so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates," said Cook.