I love that the mac is going to be treated as a tier-1 game device by valve and that you don't need to buy both a mac version if you have already purchased the PC version.<p>This could be the catalyst that the mac world was looking for to be more gamer oriented and not an afterthought.
I hope this kicks off the gaming peripheral market for macs. It would be lovely to have a a handheld controller to play this stuff. Macbook Pro keyboards are not very good for gaming :) The tiny arrow keys are pissing off.<p>I hear the ps3 controller already hooks up with snow leopard easily, so that's good news.<p>EDIT: Google search for "ps3 controller snow leopard" shows a bunch of hits, just to confirm what I said. <a href="http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS368US368&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ps3+controller+snow+leopard" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS368US368&so...</a>
As a user who endured many crashes in Team Fortress 2 with the edge versions of Crossover Games, I'm happy that I'll become a first-class citizen soon...
<a href="http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/news/3569/</a><p>"Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."
My experience with Steam on windows has not been entirely pleasant. Granted, the poor user interface, and the endless amount of intrusion into the startup and gaming process can quickly be forgiven in light of the fact that I got one of the most entertaining games I've ever played through Steam: Portal.<p>Still, as someone who really doesn't want to have to own a high-end windows box for the sole purpose of gaming, this announcement make me (cautiously?) optimistic.
One thing that I'm wondering is whether I'll be able to get the Mac version of Dragon Age, for example, through Steam without having to buy it again since I've already bought the Windows version through Steam. I'm sure there could be some licensing issues there, but if Valve managed to convince other game developers to allow them to do that with non-Valve games, it would make this even better.
Already many students are using Apple laptops at school, and perhaps have a PC at home since you can also play games on it. If you could play all the new cool games on a Mac, instead of a home PC you could consider either getting a beefier Mac laptop or a Mac desktop system.<p>While there may still be a lot of people preferring a PC, I think their future number just went down a lot. Time to long AAPL?
Anyone with knowledge of the current generation of video cards know how recent models of iMacs and Macbook Pros will perform (assuming performance of Steam on Mac is comparable to its Windows counterpart).<p>I tried checking out the video card in my 27 inch iMac (by far the most expensive desktop I've ever purchased) and was a bit underwhelmed to find out the card was released in 2008...
I really like the Steam Play concept and hope all the older Valve games I bought will use this feature.<p>Finally no more or at least less reboots to windows