Valve Software on Monday announced it will bring Steam, Valve's gaming service, and Source, Valve's gaming engine, to the Apple Macintosh. Steam and Valve's library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.

"As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients. The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services,” said Gabe Newell, president of Valve.

At present, Steam partners deliver over a thousand of video games to 25 million Steam clients. So far Steam only supported Windows-based personal computers and an addition of Macintosh support not only adds new revenue stream for Valve, but also provides a lot of games to Apple platform. Historically, Apple lacked support of high-quality video games, partly due to the fact that the platform does not support Microsoft DirectX application programming interface. Thanks to Valve’s efforts, at least certain OpenGL-based games will be available on Mac.

"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation. The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows,” said John Cook, director of Steam development.

Tags: Apple, Macintosh, Mac, Valve Software, Steam