Valve Leaks Teaser Images for Announcement of Steam (and Games) for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Valve Leaks Teaser Images for Announcement of Steam (and Games) for Mac

macrumors.com

55 pointspmjordan25 comments

Looks like Valve is not going to be DirectX showcase anymore. They went all in with DirectX9/10 and were started by Gabe Newell who worked at Microsoft and on Windows itself.

OSX is huge for developers and is gaining. Since going Intel and nix based it has attracted developers and is the prettiest distro of nix you have ever seen. If Steam and Valve aren't going to Mac someone will.

This is so huge because it also cements OpenGL (since they will need to have a OpenGL renderer in their engine) as having a resurgence and no longer makes the major decision point for many people on their next computer due to Windows still being seen as a gaming machine.

It has not been directx vs opengl really. It's more of a direct3d vs opengl as they are really only renderers and not full stacks to build your game off. That being said, using opengl is smart to do because that is a tough part to get right and the other code(sound, input, networking) should have cross platform libraries or be easy enough to create from the native code.

Actually they might just use cider (http://www.transgaming.com/business/cider/), which is afaik similar to wine. Half Life 2 and other source engine games seem to run just fine on wine, getting Gold and Platinum ratings (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...), so this looks like the easier route to me.

The relative merits of the 2 APIs have diminished over the years. For high end realtime rendering they merely act as shims for managing various kinds of buffers and activating the shader code for processing those buffers. The rasterisation stage at the end is tiny nowadays. You need separate render paths for different hardware on both D3D and OpenGL. Neither API gives you a fundamental advantage, it's really just a matter of taste and destination OS. I expect the API call layer of their engine to be tiny and interchangeable, think Direct3D 9 vs. 10. (their engine already supports some consoles, too)

I hope this ends up being a sort of "build it and they will come" scenario, and it ends up boosting OS X game development across the board.

With Valve developing for OS X and Blizzard being a long time OS X supporter, I'm pretty close to not needing a PC for anything at all. Maybe in a few years the platforms will be equally competitive.

I wonder if it's the various multiplatform indie games on steam that made them reconsider. Those alternative SKUs of games are currently not earning Valve money in the OSX (or Linux, or...) versions, as they have to be sold via other channels.

I bet a big reason as well is all of the games on iPhone, and soon on the iPad, which is a huge market that Steam can't tap into. If iPhone games can be considered essentially Mac games then there has probably been a million percent increase in Mac game development in the last couple years. I'm sure with little work most of these games could be released for the desktop -- Valve could become the store for Mac games. If they have success I'm sure it will push Apple to start offering desktop apps/games on iTunes.

I'm not sure that Valve will be able to get too involved in the app store profits.

But the iPhone has done wonders for the casual/2D gaming market, and gotten Apple's APIs a lot of exposure, and 3D gaming on the iPhone forces a developer to get used to OpenGL ES and the Mac development environment. The number of people capable of delivering a good Mac game has exploded over the past few years.

When you combine this with Apple's incredible market share among college students, it's clear that companies like Valve have to be strongly considering going cross-platform.

Is it really "leaked" information since the images are deliberately released to promote their announcement? I suppose it's now standard operating procedure in the computer software industry to pretend to accidentally release images to hype your product. Just feels dumb to me.

I suspect, in this case, it's more a play on the word Valve then anything. But is there

word : leak :: astroturfing : grassroots ?

This is fantastic news. I hope they have plans to expand this to Linux as well!

It would be great to see some of the better Linux games distributed on a content platform like steam (similar to how they help distribute the big HL2 mods).

The Steam client and Valve games run great under Wine, so if a native port is too much trouble, they could license the Wine libs and it should work fairly quickly.

There you go: http://en.djl-linux.org/?q=node/18

That was a very clever marketing campaign.

(a) It piggybacks on 26 years' worth of Apple's ads, and Apple has had some of the best ads in history.

(b) By pretending to leak the images, they created a buzz among the people who hunted down the whole series.

all true... but note that this only works for news items that are news-worthy already.

Someone sends me a "leaked" image about their uninteresting startup, I'm not posting it. :) That said, Valve should have released a new image every day, not all at once to 6 different sites.

Excellent news. The screenshots heavily imply to me that they've ported the HL2 engine (and HL2, portal, TF2, L4D) to OSX.

I haven't had a windows machine at home for several years, because of that, I shifted most of my gaming to consoles. If they port to OSX, I would likely buy my valve games on OSX.

Exactly what I'm thinking. If Valve games get ported to Mac OS X I'll actually buy them and stop considering XBox, PS3, PC gaming machine etc. purchases.

Do I have to be the first to say just how hilarious these images are? I don't care for the Mac but even I'm interested by it now.

I want LINUX support! Hear me Valve?!? You're obviously running source on OpenGL...

Valve did a 2nd update to portal and added an ending where Chell is being dragged away for "Asset retrieval" by a robot.

The new ending was just uploaded to you tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_45oK0AIb8

Ok, so are these going to be a bunch of Cider ports? I don't tend to get very excited about those.

i wonder what this will do to Apple's hardware lineup? If people are demanding more power from macs as game technology on the platform advances, and people can't just upgrade their video card, what will happen to the game market? Die off, or goad Apple into a mid-range mac pro?

The cake is a lie.

Interesting, I wonder if my game purchases will migrate platforms too.

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