Valve has also announced today that their back catalogue of games would also be updated and released for sale on Mac. All Source engine titles, including Counter Strike Source, Half Life 2 + Episodic Content, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 will be available. One key feature of this cross-platform capability titled Steam Play, would be that license keys would be usable between the two platforms, allowing for Steam titles already purchased for the PC to be playable on Mac without additional charge.
All this will combine with another announced feature, Steam Cloud, which will allow players to transfer specific game and level information between systems. Essentially, a player could play halfway through a level on one PC/Mac system, and would be able to continue onward from that same point on a different system.
Recent changes in the Source engine have allowed for Valve to develop all their titles natively for Mac, the inclusion of Webkit into Steam plus the change to OpenGL will allow for Valve to develop all future titles simultaneously for Windows & Mac systems, the first of these titles being Portal 2, which has a slated release for October this year.
Both systems will be fully compatible online, allowing for matches involving PC & Mac OSX based players. Valve have also enabled this capability for other third party developers to take advantage of, so a number of third party Steam titles could very well make their way to Mac OSX by year’s end.
Valve has stated that Steam will be released online for Mac OSX users to download in April.
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