Valve On Mac Gaming: Part One

That's been part of the company's philosophy since before we shipped Half-life. I can remember Gabe banging into all our heads how we made to make sure we had a mod SDK available within 30 days of shipping the first game. His Windows background was that the more people we had building stuff the more stuff there'll be for customers to experience and enjoy and at the time the more people we'll be able to find and recruit – vis a vis the Day of Defeat team and the Counter-Strike team and Adrian Finol who came from the Frontline Force team in Venezuela even.

So we've been able to recruit from that forever. But now it's even more true when you have distribution platform in Steam – even if you never meet these people or they come to work for Valve they may make something great with these tools and distribute it over Steam, and we benefit from that. There's no hidden agenda there. It's pretty blatant.

Oh yeah, it's been a great reaction from the development community. I think a lot of people, myself included, were Mac guys once upon a time, and we were forced over to the PC if we really wanted to be in games. I can actually remember the Fall of 95 or 96 when I finally gave up, when the original Windows era was just coming in to replace the old DOS days and Apple was sort of falling part, the wheels were coming off. So a lot of people are in their history somewhat fanboys or have a relationship with the Mac, so when they hear that it's coming back or there's something that can bring that back, they're sort of excited in a nostalgic way.

And then there's the business side of it, hey this is another platform. And it's a viable one – there are a lot of people that are getting Macs that you hear about, whether it's a mobile Mac or a new iMac or whatever have you. There's a renaissance in the Mac space and games should be part of that. The reaction that we've got from the development community is that this could be a big ingredient towards that renaissance. People have both a business motivation as well as a personal motivation to see games on the Mac. They want to play them themselves. I have a Mac in my house, and when we started putting the games on Steam it was a great convenience just for me personally and selfishly. We're hearing it from indies all the way up to the big guys.

Oh absolutely. The moment we launched, and prior to launch too because they knew it was coming, but certainly the moment we launched and they saw the reaction, they saw some of the numbers of some of the games they brought out they went "oh. Right. Those people are out there." One of the nice things about Steam is it gives people instant feedback – you can actually see something that didn't exist before. It's really easy to run the numbers and say "oh, how about that."

The other interesting thing is, because Steam's a worldwide platform, people were all of sudden seeing that there were people with Macs all over the world. Right, that's a big difference – there are people that have bought them outside of North America, lo and behold. And they're playing with them and they're using them and they're travelling with them and there's a great need for games there. So publishers of course sat up and went "oh. There are customers out there. And they're using that type of hardware. So now I can go ahead and do it." Very, very different map than you would have done a year ago on a Mac port.

I guess the last thing I'd add is the other interesting thing we're seeing from publishers and developers alike is people aren't necessarily thinking of it as... it's kind of derogatory to think of it as a Mac port. They're not thinking about porting about their games to Mac: they're thinking "wow, I need to write for a Mac. I'm not going to do a port six months later or maybe a year later, I should bring that in and do that now because there's a fair amount of people out there."

and people understand the value of the simultaneous release from doing it with consoles. I mean people struggled with that all throughout the last 10 years or so, maybe even longer, where this version came this day and the other version came maybe months later. And people consolidated that. The other thing too, added to what Jason said, the power of the information gathered via Steam I think is something that publishers have really turned onto over the last year and a half or maybe two years. You get sort of addicted to that level of information.

It took a while for everybody to get on Steam, but once they got there and started seeing the power of that information, by the time the Mac launch happened people were instantly curious as to what happens, they were asking very intelligent data-driven questions about what they had seen, putting in suggestions for us to run different types of experiment on pricing and promotion and all that stuff on Mac titles, so they could wrap their heads around it and make their own plans for it. So we see that as a really, really good sign of what's to come from the publishing community for the Mac.