OS X : Steam is coming to the Mac

[iCraig]

Originally Posted by Will

I have a steam account and have a few games from it, but I just thought it was a platform from which to play games rather than just a device for downloading them and managing them!

It's good for having any game on it (you can import non-Steam games into the list as well) because you can use the steam overlay to chat to friends and browse the web by just pressing Shift-Tab. That's a godsend for people who hated having to keep alt-tabbing from a game as it can cause a game to stop responding, or literally take ages if the game resolution and desktop resolution are different.

[divine]

Originally Posted by iCraig

People on a real Mac will have crap graphics cards won't they? For games like Left 4 Dead 2 anyway?

Only Hackintoshes will really have the high end cards dropped in them, and those people will likely just boot into a Windows install to play games and play a full range rather than the selected ones that'll work on OSX natively.

It's good but only useful for a small market really.

Well, Left 4 Dead 2 rec spec is a 7600 or X1600, The 9400 or 4670 in most current iMac models would be just fine for that.

Also bear in mind that they'll probably be able to tweak a bit more, seeing as there is a much smaller range of hardware likely to be present, they can probably get a bit more out of a 4670 in a Mac than they would in a PC. Similar to a console but not on such an extreme scale.

I highly suspect their biggest Mac profits will be coming from stuff like PopCap games though, casual stuff that already works, they already sell and will be ultra easy to impulse buy, almost as if you were on an App Store