We all knew it was coming, but it’s official now.  Valve – and their shiny Steam boat – are coming to Macs everywhere! It’s planned launch is in April, and Valve’s games – Counter-Strike, Half-Life series, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 – will be ready too.

But, that’s not all they have up their sleeves.  More into after the break.

Valve plans to implement a new feature in Steam called “Steam Play.”  This will give gamers who own PCs and Macs the ability buy a game once, and play it on either system. Valve’s business development director Jason Holtman says, “…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,” he added.

Valve plans to treat the Mac as a “tier-1″ platform, and all releases following Portal 2 this Christmas will be released on PC, Mac, and X360.  They are supporting a “heterogeneous” mix of servers and clients. This means that Mac and PC owners will be operating in the same “universe of lobbies, servers, and so forth.”  The first Mac Steam client available will be the new generation client that is being beta tested on Windows.

I don’t own a Mac. So, my investment in this announcement is minimal.   Mac owners can only hope this means big name titles will be hitting their white monitors much faster. If not, at least they will get Valve’s games the day they come out!  That’s a victory…right?

Any Mac users out there want to weigh in?  It’s great that they are making an effort to make it identical to the Windows experience, but isn’t this something that should have happened a long time ago?

Source: Eurogamer