I'm not sure you can install things like Half-Life 2 and Left4Dead without Steam, so steam helps bring access to those games at least.
This sounds more like a restriction than a feature.
Quote:
What I like most about steam is having all my game purchases tied to a single account so I can easily download them to whatever machine I want (just can't be logged into the steam account on two different computers at the same time.) I also like how it automatically applies updates. It's basically the app store of computer games lol
If you play on more than one computer, I suppose it might be a cool feature.
I suppose all of this seems to be of limited value to me. It appeared to be a somewhat exciting development for Mac gaming but once I saw how little new it offers, I could not see how it will do anything to bring more games to the Mac except for some really old titles perhaps.
For anyone who doesn't know the backstory. When counterstrike was a huge gaming phenomenon, mac users switched to PCs in droves (I know, at one point ALL my mac friends got PCs and ditched their macs just to play counterstrike.) A lot of people moved back to the mac because of Bootcamp and the ability to finally play Counterstrike (among other games). That steam is going OSX native is HUGE in terms of OSX and gaming. Apple has never had decent gaming support and getting some would make the platform hugely more attractive to a lot of folks.
That's why this is a big deal. It has the potential to give apple 5% increased marketshare. Maybe more.
This sounds more like a restriction than a feature.
If you play on more than one computer, I suppose it might be a cool feature.
It makes it so you don't need to keep around old gaming disks. The OSX versions of Steam games are free to use if you already bought the PC version, so there is no reason for bootcamp. The service isn't perfect, but it's very convenient for buying online stuff.
For anyone who doesn't know the backstory. When counterstrike was a huge gaming phenomenon, mac users switched to PCs in droves (I know, at one point ALL my mac friends got PCs and ditched their macs just to play counterstrike.) A lot of people moved back to the mac because of Bootcamp and the ability to finally play Counterstrike (among other games). That steam is going OSX native is HUGE in terms of OSX and gaming. Apple has never had decent gaming support and getting some would make the platform hugely more attractive to a lot of folks.
That's why this is a big deal. It has the potential to give apple 5% increased marketshare. Maybe more.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
I would say my previous post in the last paragraph answers it and that is if Valve does well in terms of selling its game and then you bring the steam platform that they created along and you combine the fact that mac's and pcs have pretty much the same hardware along with having macs selling in record numbers pretty much creates a perfect storm for motivating other game developers to start developing for mac.
I will say this, if valve games don't sell well on mac it most likely will not cause a shift in terms of development but if valve games do sell well on mac it most likely convince other developers to begin development of mac games and the steam client makes it even easier to deliver content to mac customers then through retail.
I suppose all of this seems to be of limited value to me. It appeared to be a somewhat exciting development for Mac gaming but once I saw how little new it offers, I could not see how it will do anything to bring more games to the Mac except for some really old titles perhaps.
Might not have value to you. If you play online games that have a limited number of gamers per game (Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead, counterstrike, etc.) Steam will help you find the games they are in. Doing this otherwise requires some other tracking software or using ip addresses.
It also centralizes your game purchases and the licenses never expire. There is no maximum number of times you can download a game or a limit to a number of machines. Steam also often has a lot of deals, where you can get games for like 1/2 price or less. They do this to try and get a critical mass of people playing online titles.
Overall, if you are into gaming, it's a decent service. The DRM terms are lot better than a lot of other things.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
One more point - Valve ported their Steam Engine to the Mac. This might be a bit misleading - the Steam Engine is the 3D graphics engine that is the backbone of a large number of game titles. This means that most of the major Steam titles will be available for the mac in short order. To put this into perspective - at any time up to 2 million people are logged into Steam. Those people will now all see that Valve is supporting Macs. How many unique people that is, i'm not sure, but it's at least 2 million and probably more like 5-10 (how many people are logged into steam 24/7?
That's a huge audience of people who until now would never consider a mac because they can't play the core of Valve games.
Are you seeing how this is a big deal yet? We can keep discussing it.
Might not have value to you. If you play online games that have a limited number of gamers per game (Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead, counterstrike, etc.) Steam will help you find the games they are in. Doing this otherwise requires some other tracking software or using ip addresses.
It also centralizes your game purchases and the licenses never expire. There is no maximum number of times you can download a game or a limit to a number of machines. Steam also often has a lot of deals, where you can get games for like 1/2 price or less. They do this to try and get a critical mass of people playing online titles.
Overall, if you are into gaming, it's a decent service. The DRM terms are lot better than a lot of other things.
I have to ask: since when do software licenses expire? Isn't this a solution looking for a problem?
I'm not a big online gamer by any means. The only game I do play has GameSpy built in, which does exactly what you say Steam does, as nearly as I can tell. Maybe Steam does this a whole lot better. I don't honestly know.
Price of course is an advantage, but I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that games aren't going to sell for less just because they are selling on Steam... the publishers have to go along too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by freakboy
One more point - Valve ported their Steam Engine to the Mac. This might be a bit misleading - the Steam Engine is the 3D graphics engine that is the backbone of a large number of game titles. This means that most of the major Steam titles will be available for the mac in short order. To put this into perspective - at any time up to 2 million people are logged into Steam. Those people will now all see that Valve is supporting Macs. How many unique people that is, i'm not sure, but it's at least 2 million and probably more like 5-10 (how many people are logged into steam 24/7?
That's a huge audience of people who until now would never consider a mac because they can't play the core of Valve games.
Are you seeing how this is a big deal yet? We can keep discussing it.
This is a technical reason nobody has mentioned before. This point I certainly get.
I have to ask: since when do software licenses expire? Isn't this a solution looking for a problem?
I'm not a big online gamer by any means. The only game I do play has GameSpy built in, which does exactly what you say Steam does, as nearly as I can tell. Maybe Steam does this a whole lot better. I don't honestly know.
Price of course is an advantage, but I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that games aren't going to sell for less just because they are selling on Steam... the publishers have to go along too.
This is a technical reason nobody has mentioned before. This point I certainly get.
The point about sales is this: when you log into steam, there are usually a few news updates (these are sometimes pushed to you if you are already logged in). These updates will be ads mostly that say things like 'get this game for 75% off'. So the whole system is a really effective way of advertising and selling software.
My point about licenses never expiring was more that you don't ever need to worry about keeping around the disks and license info. It is all stored for you on steam. Of the hundreds of games i've bought over the years, the only ones that i can currently reinstall are those from steam. The rest have disks that are long lost or tossed.
But the biggest point here is simply the size of the audience. 8% of steam users represents at least 200,000 people and maybe up to a million. Those people are active gamers. A million is a number that all of a sudden makes porting worthwhile - a game won't come close to be worth porting until you can ship ~20k units? Steam makes that a lot easier since it will have most active mac gamers logged in.
As someone else mentioned the unreal engine is also ported to OSX natively - so all games built on that engine can also be quickly ported. So this is a huge win for Apple, Mac gamers, and the platform overall. We all know that the one thing that holds back OSX is software. The tides are turning and its suddenly becoming worthwhile to support Apple.
Yes but like I said, with Valve helping Apple to develop the drivers this will be an inevitability. Valve's games still play awesomely on my MacBook Pro compared to EA's Cider wrapped DirectX games. I see no drop off but then I don't have the graphics cranked up to high because I don't need them to be.
Yes and when you see an OpenGL game beside a DirectX game the difference is hugely in favour of the OpenGL which was my point about DirectX sucking.
They are. They're the same video cards as what's in PCs. Why do they have to support DirectX when OpenGL has nothing to do with DirectX? That's just clutching at straws.
Or wrapping them in Cider. There's no need to dual-boot.
OpenGL 4.0 has the same HW requirements as DX11; they're basically linked. If you want OpenGL 4.0, you need the HW and the SW extensions, neither of which Apple has, heck OSX doesn't even have the complete extensions for GL 3.2/3.3, even though the current Nvidia and ATI GPU's are capable; ie Apple writes terrible video drivers, but given how slowly they roll out HW updates, and the small subset of GPUs they support, that shouldn't be. There is no clutching at straws, Apple is way behind of PC's in graphics.
And it doesn't matter how much of a supposed advantage OpenGL has over DX, if most games are still written in DirectX. MS spent a ton of money and effort on making the programming tools and documentation available to developers, Apple has done nothing of the sort. If they want to take gaming seriously, they need to get off they asses, spend that pile of money they're sitting on, and hire programmers and engineers to get things up to snuff.
If Apple has to rely on Valve (a game dev) to help them write drivers for them, that's not very good IMO. Apple should be able to do all that themselves.
I don't care about Cider; it's a crappy emulation/translation layer, SW emulation almost universally sucks, and EA is a lazy dev, regardless of OS or console.
And Valve's games should play well, most of them use the Source engine, which while continually updated, HL2 and Portal came out nearly 6 years ago; I can play HL2 with decent frame rates on my 3 year old laptop, and it could probably run L4D decently too - kudos to Valve for making games that scale well though.
OpenGL 4.0 has the same HW requirements as DX11; they're basically linked. If you want OpenGL 4.0, you need the HW and the SW extensions, neither of which Apple has, heck OSX doesn't even have the complete extensions for GL 3.2/3.3, even though the current Nvidia and ATI GPU's are capable; ie Apple writes terrible video drivers, but given how slowly they roll out HW updates, and the small subset of GPUs they support, that shouldn't be. There is no clutching at straws, Apple is way behind of PC's in graphics.
And it doesn't matter how much of a supposed advantage OpenGL has over DX, if most games are still written in DirectX. MS spent a ton of money and effort on making the programming tools and documentation available to developers, Apple has done nothing of the sort. If they want to take gaming seriously, they need to get off they asses, spend that pile of money they're sitting on, and hire programmers and engineers to get things up to snuff.
If Apple has to rely on Valve (a game dev) to help them write drivers for them, that's not very good IMO. Apple should be able to do all that themselves.
I don't care about Cider; it's a crappy emulation/translation layer, SW emulation almost universally sucks, and EA is a lazy dev, regardless of OS or console.
And Valve's games should play well, most of them use the Source engine, which while continually updated, HL2 and Portal came out nearly 6 years ago; I can play HL2 with decent frame rates on my 3 year old laptop, and it could probably run L4D decently too - kudos to Valve for making games that scale well though.
this is 100% true. Apple's drivers blow for gaming performance. They have for a long long time. Since there is zero competition for GPU upgrades, neither NVidia or ATI have any interest in improving them either.
I remember way back at the end of the 90s, ATI had one dude working on their video drivers. One.
If Valve can put some pressure on Apple to put pressure on the guys writing the drivers, that would be great for the platform.
Comments
I'm not sure you can install things like Half-Life 2 and Left4Dead without Steam, so steam helps bring access to those games at least.
This sounds more like a restriction than a feature.
What I like most about steam is having all my game purchases tied to a single account so I can easily download them to whatever machine I want (just can't be logged into the steam account on two different computers at the same time.) I also like how it automatically applies updates. It's basically the app store of computer games lol
If you play on more than one computer, I suppose it might be a cool feature.
I suppose all of this seems to be of limited value to me. It appeared to be a somewhat exciting development for Mac gaming but once I saw how little new it offers, I could not see how it will do anything to bring more games to the Mac except for some really old titles perhaps.
For anyone who doesn't know the backstory. When counterstrike was a huge gaming phenomenon, mac users switched to PCs in droves (I know, at one point ALL my mac friends got PCs and ditched their macs just to play counterstrike.) A lot of people moved back to the mac because of Bootcamp and the ability to finally play Counterstrike (among other games). That steam is going OSX native is HUGE in terms of OSX and gaming. Apple has never had decent gaming support and getting some would make the platform hugely more attractive to a lot of folks.
That's why this is a big deal. It has the potential to give apple 5% increased marketshare. Maybe more.
This sounds more like a restriction than a feature.
If you play on more than one computer, I suppose it might be a cool feature.
It makes it so you don't need to keep around old gaming disks. The OSX versions of Steam games are free to use if you already bought the PC version, so there is no reason for bootcamp. The service isn't perfect, but it's very convenient for buying online stuff.
For anyone who doesn't know the backstory. When counterstrike was a huge gaming phenomenon, mac users switched to PCs in droves (I know, at one point ALL my mac friends got PCs and ditched their macs just to play counterstrike.) A lot of people moved back to the mac because of Bootcamp and the ability to finally play Counterstrike (among other games). That steam is going OSX native is HUGE in terms of OSX and gaming. Apple has never had decent gaming support and getting some would make the platform hugely more attractive to a lot of folks.
That's why this is a big deal. It has the potential to give apple 5% increased marketshare. Maybe more.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
I would say my previous post in the last paragraph answers it and that is if Valve does well in terms of selling its game and then you bring the steam platform that they created along and you combine the fact that mac's and pcs have pretty much the same hardware along with having macs selling in record numbers pretty much creates a perfect storm for motivating other game developers to start developing for mac.
I will say this, if valve games don't sell well on mac it most likely will not cause a shift in terms of development but if valve games do sell well on mac it most likely convince other developers to begin development of mac games and the steam client makes it even easier to deliver content to mac customers then through retail.
I suppose all of this seems to be of limited value to me. It appeared to be a somewhat exciting development for Mac gaming but once I saw how little new it offers, I could not see how it will do anything to bring more games to the Mac except for some really old titles perhaps.
Might not have value to you. If you play online games that have a limited number of gamers per game (Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead, counterstrike, etc.) Steam will help you find the games they are in. Doing this otherwise requires some other tracking software or using ip addresses.
It also centralizes your game purchases and the licenses never expire. There is no maximum number of times you can download a game or a limit to a number of machines. Steam also often has a lot of deals, where you can get games for like 1/2 price or less. They do this to try and get a critical mass of people playing online titles.
Overall, if you are into gaming, it's a decent service. The DRM terms are lot better than a lot of other things.
I really don't want to belabor this subject, but honestly, this makes zero sense to me. It seems to me that the things which brings games to the Mac platform are either (1) Bootcamp, so Mac owners can run it in Windows, or (2) the developer's willingness to port it to the Mac. How its availability through Steam made a big if any difference to either development is what I don't get.
One more point - Valve ported their Steam Engine to the Mac. This might be a bit misleading - the Steam Engine is the 3D graphics engine that is the backbone of a large number of game titles. This means that most of the major Steam titles will be available for the mac in short order. To put this into perspective - at any time up to 2 million people are logged into Steam. Those people will now all see that Valve is supporting Macs. How many unique people that is, i'm not sure, but it's at least 2 million and probably more like 5-10 (how many people are logged into steam 24/7?
That's a huge audience of people who until now would never consider a mac because they can't play the core of Valve games.
Are you seeing how this is a big deal yet? We can keep discussing it.
Might not have value to you. If you play online games that have a limited number of gamers per game (Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead, counterstrike, etc.) Steam will help you find the games they are in. Doing this otherwise requires some other tracking software or using ip addresses.
It also centralizes your game purchases and the licenses never expire. There is no maximum number of times you can download a game or a limit to a number of machines. Steam also often has a lot of deals, where you can get games for like 1/2 price or less. They do this to try and get a critical mass of people playing online titles.
Overall, if you are into gaming, it's a decent service. The DRM terms are lot better than a lot of other things.
I have to ask: since when do software licenses expire? Isn't this a solution looking for a problem?
I'm not a big online gamer by any means. The only game I do play has GameSpy built in, which does exactly what you say Steam does, as nearly as I can tell. Maybe Steam does this a whole lot better. I don't honestly know.
Price of course is an advantage, but I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that games aren't going to sell for less just because they are selling on Steam... the publishers have to go along too.
One more point - Valve ported their Steam Engine to the Mac. This might be a bit misleading - the Steam Engine is the 3D graphics engine that is the backbone of a large number of game titles. This means that most of the major Steam titles will be available for the mac in short order. To put this into perspective - at any time up to 2 million people are logged into Steam. Those people will now all see that Valve is supporting Macs. How many unique people that is, i'm not sure, but it's at least 2 million and probably more like 5-10 (how many people are logged into steam 24/7?
That's a huge audience of people who until now would never consider a mac because they can't play the core of Valve games.
Are you seeing how this is a big deal yet? We can keep discussing it.
This is a technical reason nobody has mentioned before. This point I certainly get.
I have to ask: since when do software licenses expire? Isn't this a solution looking for a problem?
I'm not a big online gamer by any means. The only game I do play has GameSpy built in, which does exactly what you say Steam does, as nearly as I can tell. Maybe Steam does this a whole lot better. I don't honestly know.
Price of course is an advantage, but I suppose I'm operating under the assumption that games aren't going to sell for less just because they are selling on Steam... the publishers have to go along too.
This is a technical reason nobody has mentioned before. This point I certainly get.
The point about sales is this: when you log into steam, there are usually a few news updates (these are sometimes pushed to you if you are already logged in). These updates will be ads mostly that say things like 'get this game for 75% off'. So the whole system is a really effective way of advertising and selling software.
My point about licenses never expiring was more that you don't ever need to worry about keeping around the disks and license info. It is all stored for you on steam. Of the hundreds of games i've bought over the years, the only ones that i can currently reinstall are those from steam. The rest have disks that are long lost or tossed.
But the biggest point here is simply the size of the audience. 8% of steam users represents at least 200,000 people and maybe up to a million. Those people are active gamers. A million is a number that all of a sudden makes porting worthwhile - a game won't come close to be worth porting until you can ship ~20k units? Steam makes that a lot easier since it will have most active mac gamers logged in.
As someone else mentioned the unreal engine is also ported to OSX natively - so all games built on that engine can also be quickly ported. So this is a huge win for Apple, Mac gamers, and the platform overall. We all know that the one thing that holds back OSX is software. The tides are turning and its suddenly becoming worthwhile to support Apple.
Yes but like I said, with Valve helping Apple to develop the drivers this will be an inevitability. Valve's games still play awesomely on my MacBook Pro compared to EA's Cider wrapped DirectX games. I see no drop off but then I don't have the graphics cranked up to high because I don't need them to be.
Yes and when you see an OpenGL game beside a DirectX game the difference is hugely in favour of the OpenGL which was my point about DirectX sucking.
They are. They're the same video cards as what's in PCs. Why do they have to support DirectX when OpenGL has nothing to do with DirectX? That's just clutching at straws.
Or wrapping them in Cider. There's no need to dual-boot.
OpenGL 4.0 has the same HW requirements as DX11; they're basically linked. If you want OpenGL 4.0, you need the HW and the SW extensions, neither of which Apple has, heck OSX doesn't even have the complete extensions for GL 3.2/3.3, even though the current Nvidia and ATI GPU's are capable; ie Apple writes terrible video drivers, but given how slowly they roll out HW updates, and the small subset of GPUs they support, that shouldn't be. There is no clutching at straws, Apple is way behind of PC's in graphics.
And it doesn't matter how much of a supposed advantage OpenGL has over DX, if most games are still written in DirectX. MS spent a ton of money and effort on making the programming tools and documentation available to developers, Apple has done nothing of the sort. If they want to take gaming seriously, they need to get off they asses, spend that pile of money they're sitting on, and hire programmers and engineers to get things up to snuff.
If Apple has to rely on Valve (a game dev) to help them write drivers for them, that's not very good IMO. Apple should be able to do all that themselves.
I don't care about Cider; it's a crappy emulation/translation layer, SW emulation almost universally sucks, and EA is a lazy dev, regardless of OS or console.
And Valve's games should play well, most of them use the Source engine, which while continually updated, HL2 and Portal came out nearly 6 years ago; I can play HL2 with decent frame rates on my 3 year old laptop, and it could probably run L4D decently too - kudos to Valve for making games that scale well though.
OpenGL 4.0 has the same HW requirements as DX11; they're basically linked. If you want OpenGL 4.0, you need the HW and the SW extensions, neither of which Apple has, heck OSX doesn't even have the complete extensions for GL 3.2/3.3, even though the current Nvidia and ATI GPU's are capable; ie Apple writes terrible video drivers, but given how slowly they roll out HW updates, and the small subset of GPUs they support, that shouldn't be. There is no clutching at straws, Apple is way behind of PC's in graphics.
And it doesn't matter how much of a supposed advantage OpenGL has over DX, if most games are still written in DirectX. MS spent a ton of money and effort on making the programming tools and documentation available to developers, Apple has done nothing of the sort. If they want to take gaming seriously, they need to get off they asses, spend that pile of money they're sitting on, and hire programmers and engineers to get things up to snuff.
If Apple has to rely on Valve (a game dev) to help them write drivers for them, that's not very good IMO. Apple should be able to do all that themselves.
I don't care about Cider; it's a crappy emulation/translation layer, SW emulation almost universally sucks, and EA is a lazy dev, regardless of OS or console.
And Valve's games should play well, most of them use the Source engine, which while continually updated, HL2 and Portal came out nearly 6 years ago; I can play HL2 with decent frame rates on my 3 year old laptop, and it could probably run L4D decently too - kudos to Valve for making games that scale well though.
this is 100% true. Apple's drivers blow for gaming performance. They have for a long long time. Since there is zero competition for GPU upgrades, neither NVidia or ATI have any interest in improving them either.
I remember way back at the end of the 90s, ATI had one dude working on their video drivers. One.
If Valve can put some pressure on Apple to put pressure on the guys writing the drivers, that would be great for the platform.