4 ms·
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
by weaksauce 17y ago
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.
This could be the catalyst that the mac world was looking for to be more gamer oriented and not an afterthought.
- potatolicious 17y agoWhat's even better I think is the expansion of Steam Cloud into savegames altogether. The ability to sync progress on a game seamlessly and automatically across multiple machines is going to be a real treat. It's already useful for hardcore gamers now - go to a gaming cafe, log into your Steam account, and all of your control schemes and settings are just the way you like 'em.
- metachris 17y agoThis also means a lot more games will be developed with OpenGL rather than just DirectX, which might bring many more future games to Linux as well.
- MikeCapone 17y agoThat would be awesome. The only game I play is Call of Duty 4 because it's too annoying to reboot my Mac Pro in Windows mode.
- coderdude 17y agoNow there's a moving target. Given the amount of testing that is required just to get modern games to work across most hardware without problems (on Windows), Linux (which distros?) as a tier-1 platform is wishful thinking. The mass gaming market exists on stable, more or less predictable platforms.
- vorador 17y agoMaybe not linux, but Ubuntu ?
- cookiecaper 17y agoHe didn't say anything about Linux as a "tier-1 platform". I don't think there are many of us fooling ourselves about the worthiness of that kind of investment; there's just not enough money in Linux gaming to hold up a release on Mac/Win for Linux issues. The guy said OpenGL-based games might be good for Linux, which is indeed true; it's much easier to go from an OpenGL Mac game to an OpenGL Linux game than it is to go from DX Windows to OpenGL Linux. Games on Mac are good news for Linux because if the game is made sanely, it shouldn't be much work to get it to at least compile on Linux, as both systems are more or less POSIX compatible. This is good! Even if there are problems with the Linux build after a successful compilation, we're still much further ahead than we are with a DirectX Windows game as the target. Furthermore, making the OpenGL renderers available under Windows may greatly improve the experience in WINE, especially for non-flagship games. Again, there's no guarantee that this renderer will be exposed in Windows, but even if not, there's at least a tangible possibility that it might happen sometime. The bottom line is that the investment required to port a Mac game to Linux is almost always going to be much less than the investment required to port a [DirectX] Windows game to Linux. Therefore, previously Windows-only games coming to Mac is great news because at the very least it makes the possibility of a Linux release that much closer.
- whughes 17y agowine also works considerably better on OpenGL, as I understand it. A movement toward OpenGL usage would bring immediate benefits to Linux gamers.
- cookiecaper 17y agoRight, but there's no guarantee that the OpenGL renderer will be exposed to the Windows games.
- houseabsolute 17y agoNow if only it were possible to buy a good graphics card on an Apple computer. I say this as a proud owner of a Macbook Pro, by the way.
- rplacd 17y agoThe mid-range "customizable" Mac Pro has always been a pipe dream for me :(