loadingreadyrun.com

EDIT: Ok, perhaps not quite so much of a rumour any more:

http://kotaku.com/5484948/valve-teases-upcoming-mac-announcement-not-so-subtly

(And given this, perhaps it's more than just Steam alone...)

Though it's still little more than a rumour substantiated partially by the inclusion of a platform-agnostic web renderer (as opposed to IE frames) and resources in the new beta (including code pointing to OSX-specific functions and imagery for such an implementation [a dock icon and other imagery with the resource name "*_osx_*.tga"]), it's looking increasingly like Valve intend to support OSX for their delivery platform sooner or later.

Collected evidence

My question is, is this actually of benefit?

More and more when a Mac owner laments the lack of support by game publishers and developers they counter the gloom by saying that they're happy using bootcamp. A content delivery system is obviously of little use if there isn't any content to deliver, so will this actually benefit you, as Mac users?

Perhaps it will drive more new games toward the platform, but it's never going to result in a shift away from the PC as a gaming platform, and developers are inevitably going to favour one over the other in terms of support, patch turn-around and post-release content.

I can see this being a great boon to mac-head indie developers looking for a unified delivery platform, but I'm unsure of its benefit beyond that.

Thoughts?

Yay! No need for silly Windows on my compy!

I can't imagine Valve porting Steam to another platform unless they do the Source engine at the same time. Hopefully we'll be getting a linux version at the same time (although I'm pretty sure I'll stick with Win 7 either way).

7 is sextastic

That would be really sweet, I just hope that I wouldn't have to buy new Mac OS X versions of games I've already bought for my boot camp partition.

Also, it would be really bizarre for them to make Steam for Mac if there aren't any games for Mac on there. Well, I guess some Popcap games would work. But still.

Update: All Valve's Source games are coming to Mac with Steam, and if you already have them on PC you won't have to re-buy them. Also, PC and Mac players will be on the same multiplayer servers.

http://tf2.com/post.php?id=3578

Sweet merciful... anybody know what the requirements would be for TF2?

Now I want a Mac, I could still play my games and NOT crash randomly... why didn't Valve do this before I bought a new PC?