Valve Quietly Releases Original Half-Life on Steam for Mac

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Well that only took 15 years and Valve/Steam still hasn’t officially acknowledged the presence of the original Half-Life as being available for the Mac platform. If you have been waiting these many years, all that can be said now is it’s about time Steam……what took you so long?.

It’s the game that made Valve’s fortunes, and an all-time classic, so it’s great to see it on the Mac after fifteen years.
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Has anyone else noticed there's no more "Mac" tab at the top, it's been replaced by "Linux" and moved to the bottom of the categories list. :D
 
Just installed this on my gf's system.
Will have to test it out soon.
 
heatlesssun said:
Do you mean in the Steam Client?
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I mean in the store!

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r3awak3n said:
oh yeah, I had not noticed that.

Im bet it shows up on a mac.
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The store is just a webpage though, so probably not! (I guess that project didn't really go anywhere anyway :D)
 
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
 
Vincent Tempus said:
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
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How many tools that have no interest in Macs read threads about them?
 
Im not sure.. being that I have a couple of macs that i use at work, Im not sure why i would use one for steam though unless it was the only computer I had available, however then i would only be able to play about half the games i own, and even less of them well.
 
Vincent Tempus said:
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
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Does it count as a Mac install if steam is running on the bootcamp copy Windows, the same place Mac users run all their other real software?
 
DeathPrincess said:
I mean in the store!
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Thanks, just went there and I see what you posted. I have know idea what used to be there but I'll take your word that there used to be a Mac tab since you noted the change. Of course this makes sense with the upcoming Linux powered Steam Box.

It will be interesting how the Steam Linux thing goes. Right now there's a grand total of 64 games for Linux showing in the Steam Store. Compared to 535 for the Mac and 4250 for Windows. There's a awful lot of work to be done to get games on desktop Linux and I just don't see what's going to motivate developers for such a tiny market. Valve is going to have to sell millions and millions of Steam Boxes and then if it is an open distro of Linux developers might be spooked over piracy.

Still I welcome a new gaming product and am very curious to see how it goes.
 
David_CAN said:
Does it count as a Mac install if steam is running on the bootcamp copy Windows, the same place Mac users run all their other real software?
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I guess not because that was my solution as well when i had a late 2008 macbook as my main computer.
 
Vincent Tempus said:
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
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I have. I have a macbook pro and when I go somewhere with no access to my desktop I play a few games on the mac. Played the whole walking dead series on the mac and it was fine. I am glad its on steam because sometimes I will use it to play some light ass games.
 
Thanks for the info heatlesssun.

Light gaming on a mac is fine.. I still think you would probably get better performance running the game off windows bootcamp, not to mention it would be able to run all of your steam purchases instead of just the mac compatible games.
 
Red Falcon said:
Remember, OS X systems aren't really designed for gaming, outside of the ultra-expensive MacPro, and the Linux client is still in beta.

Give it a few years, then we'll talk.
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True, it does take time for platforms to mature. That said Linux desktop is pretty mature platform and the Steam client being in beta or no, there's simply just not that many desktop Linux clients and the percentage has pretty much been stuck at something like 1% of the desktop client market for many, many years.

And a Steam Box has a hell of lot of well established competitors that simply have more to offer, from the PlayStation to the Xbox to Windows PCs. And then there's new kids like the Android console that on the way.

Steam is a business that's pretty much Windows based now and I understand wanting to be cross-platform and not tied to Windows particularly now that Windows has it's own software distribution method. But outside of the anything but Microsoft crowd I simply don't know what a Steam Linux client and a Linux based Steam Box will have to offer anyone else. Simply replicating a small fraction of games for other platforms isn't enough.
 
Ahem.

Wow. Seriously? Two pages and lots of complaints / comments over taking so long or quietly released... and not single actual thought over why released.

These releases are, get this, CONSIDERED TO BE BETA.

Part of bringing the GoldSrc engine games online to other platforms is both a test by Valve to test the viability of their porting tools, and another method of gaining real world information over system usage.

Lots of gamers own Half-Life. It's one of the best selling Windows Client games of all time.

Lots of gamers play Counter-Strike. It's one of the most popular online multiplayer games of all time.

Now, if you were Valve and you were trying to get hard-core oriented gamers to get on a GNU/Linux and give your software a thorough testing... would you keep pushing titles that only have a few hundred thousand active gamers?

Or would you use a software title that has millions of active gamers still accessing the title, and many who will do anything, absolutely anything, to gain a performance edge.

See where I'm going with this? Shouldn't too be hard. Bringing Counter-Strike and the crowd of performance-obsessed player-base associated with that game into GNU/Linux requires making sure Half-Life works first.

The release(s) on OSX?

Hardly surprising. Once a developer has their code in a platform-neutral state, porting to other platforms is pretty dead simple.
 
Vincent Tempus said:
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
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About 5%. Blizzard also has very good Mac clients for SC2 and WoW
 
Red Falcon said:
Remember, OS X systems aren't really designed for gaming, outside of the ultra-expensive MacPro, and the Linux client is still in beta.

Give it a few years, then we'll talk.
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Gaming is quite good on the 15" MBP, plays DOTA 2 and SC2 great. Haswell later this year will make smaller Macbooks and ultrabooks in general much better for gaming.
 
No, I'm not really seeing where you are going.

There certainly are not MILLIONS of original Half Life players today.

Nor is the CS 1.6 community all that big anymore.

And who is going to install either of those oldarse games except a few tech-heads that want to just see it work for ten minutes then uninstall it?

They'd be better off getting the Source engine up and porting Black Mesa over. At least the fan remake is of semi-modern game quality and you might get all the Mac gamers (however many there are) to actually want to try that.

But anyway, I'm really arguing your point that it's a test. Port something old, get a little feedback without botching up a brand new AAA release and angering the world. Rinse, repeat with something newer until you are doing simultaneous releases on both platforms.
 
Saist said:
Lots of gamers own Half-Life. It's one of the best selling Windows Client games of all time.
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Actually, that would have been Half Life 2, back in 2004.

Lots of gamers play Counter-Strike. It's one of the most popular online multiplayer games of all time.
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The original? No.
2000 called and wants it's game back. ;)
 
heatlesssun said:
It will be interesting how the Steam Linux thing goes. Right now there's a grand total of 64 games for Linux showing in the Steam Store. Compared to 535 for the Mac and 4250 for Windows. There's a awful lot of work to be done to get games on desktop Linux and I just don't see what's going to motivate developers for such a tiny market. .
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Those numbers may be misleading. There are a fair number of Steam games (Braid, for example) that _do_ have a native Linux port, but it's not enabled in Steam currently. I know personally that you can buy Braid native for Linux in the Ubuntu Market -- I don't know why it's not available under Steam.
 
Red Falcon said:
Remember, OS X systems aren't really designed for gaming, outside of the ultra-expensive MacPro, and the Linux client is still in beta.

Give it a few years, then we'll talk.
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Mac systems aren't designed for gaming but many are designed for content creation and include features like CUDA enabled video cards which are used in many CG creation and video compositing applications for acceleration purposes. The same video cards that are used in many gaming rigs. Granted the cheap Macs aren't set up that way, but neither are cheap PCs.

And all told it looks like the Mac claims almost 4% of the Steam usage which is in line with what I would expect given the MacOS market penetration (remembering that not everyone is interested in using their computers to play games). Even Linux is pushing 1% which is pretty decent for having only had the client released in Beta late last year (and only "officially" available for a single distribution).

The best thing Valve has done for gaming on the Mac and Linux IMO is Steamplay. Buy it once, play it on whatever OS you've got. There are plenty of people dual booting their Mac and Linux boxes into Windows just to play games who would never have gone for Steam on the other platform had they been forced to pay for their games all over again.
 
Vincent Tempus said:
How many people actually use steam on mac anyway? just wondering because it's not like they design macs for gaming. ( I guess the release dates work in mac's favor, its in the same style they release systems.)
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I do. Play TF2 and CS:S all the time.
 
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