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Why Robin Makes Batman Better While it wasn’t listed among the other Valve games that were getting Mac OS X support earlier today, the original Left 4 Dead is also making its way to Apple computers alongside its sequel.
Yesterday’s announced update to Valve’s Steam digital distribution service came with a surprise – hints that the Half-Life developer may be planning to add Mac OS X support to the currently Windows-only platform.
MacOS and Linux’s install base is dwarfed by Windows, so in terms of which platform to develop for, that ends the argument right there. Right? Wrong, says Wolfire Games‘ Jeff Rosen.
Hey, making massively multiplayer online games is difficult. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. But that doesn’t mean we can’t poke fun at EVE Online when it accidentally snatches the totally wrong texture from the hard-drive.
Why doesn’t Valve care about Mac gaming? Gabe Newell says “there’s never any follow through on any of the things [Apple says]they’re going to do.” Inside Mac Gaming has a slightly different interpretation on that, claiming that Valve’s terms for bringing Half-Life 2 to the Mac OS involved a $1 million advance payment from whomever was handling the port, a big buy-in for a game that would sell exclusively to the Mac gamer demographic.
Hahaha! “Mac gamer demographic”. Anyway…
Over at Inside Mac Games, you can read this entry on Tuncer’s Blog tossing around the pros and cons of a Mac-native version of Half-Life 2. His post is in response to this tirade by Gabe Newell on Kikizo, explaining why HL2 will never see the light of day on Apple’s platform. Essentially, Gabe blames Apple’s lethargy when it comes to gaming on Mac, while Tuncer admits the Mac isn’t a great gaming platform, but also drops the bomb that Gabe wanted a sweet $US 1 million to do the port.
In the end, if you really want to play HL2 on your Mac, there are ways to do it that don’t involve bludgeoning Steve Jobs or finding the moolah to pay off Newell.
Mac gaming may be the punchline of many PC gamers jokes, but it’s kept alive by a handful of Mac OSX publisher holdouts. Only the biggest games make their way to the Apple OS, like World of Warcraft, The Sims, Doom III, Halo and Civilization. But, EA’s pledge to bring more of its games to the platform have become reality today with the release of surefire hits Madden NFL 08, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars and Need For Speed Carbon. All four games will be available at retail within the next two weeks.
Apple stock was up 5.01 (4.28%) on news that probably had nothing to do with this at all. Full press release after the jump.
