Love Macs and love to game? Steam for Mac means you won't have to split loyalties. Image from Flickr.
Gamers the world over who are also mac lovers can now rejoice: Steam for Mac will be available for download today. Steam for Mac will integrate content delivery and settings for a wide variety of games, with more to come available each week. So get your instant loans ready; Steam for Mac is set to steam up your gaming experience.
How Steam for Mac will work
Steam for Mac is a content delivery system for games that is modeled on the already-successful Steam platform. The network allows users to purchase, store and play their games entirely digitally. Steam is available for simple games such as PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies all the way up to intensive games like Left 4 Dead. Users can log in, purchase games using credit cards, PayPal or other payment systems, then have the games automatically updated and available to play on any Steam-enabled computer.
Steam for Mac increases Valve value
The company that owns Steam for Mac and the original Steam system is Washington state based Valve corporation. Valve corporation, in addition to building a multi-publisher release platform, has also produced and published many of its own games. Valve is also famous for supporting open source program development in the user community. Valve is not publicly traded and therefore does not provide financial information to the public. However, there are more than 25 million active user accounts, and it is generally believed that Valve is doing financially well.
The logistics of Steam for Mac
The Steam for Mac release raises many logistical questions for gamers. First, if you have already purchased and verified a game on Steam for Windows, you will be allowed to re-download the game for Mac without paying a second time. Steam for Mac will also be Steam Cloud compatible, allowing game settings and progress to be saved and played across multiple systems. The Steamworks development system will also be available for Mac computers, increasing the number of games that will be developed for Steam.
