Place Your Bets: Valve Bringing Steam To The Macintosh

Many of us have noticed that Steam recently released a new beta client, complete with all kinds of cool new UI improvements and other assorted bells and whistles. In reading the beta release notes recently I noticed something interesting. One of the line items in those notes was that Valve has replaced the in game web browser’s rendering engine with WebKit instead of IE. Since Steam runs on Windows only, it makes perfect sense that it would be easy to just use IE, so their motivation to make this change seemed curious to me.

What if you wanted Steam to run on a machine that wasn’t Windows based? You would need to remove all dependencies on Windows, which includes the in game browswer using IE. Changing to WebKit during this beta release is a tell tale sign of portability I tell you! This was my theory. In making my rounds around the interwebs today I came across some very interesting articles that pretty much validated my thinking, and I went from theorizing to placing my bets on this inevitability. *Update: Others have reported seeing OS X buttons in the graphics folder of the Steam install, so I’d bet the farm that this is no rumor but a definite thing that will happen.

Valve has begun cirulating some very curious pictures (here, here, and here) that incorporate gaming, computers, and knock-offs of Apple marketing. The lads at RPS and other spots across the interwebs have already concluded what is slowly becoming obvious: Steam is coming to the Mac. Even if it is just Steam’s own games that are made available to Mac owners, this is huge news. It opens the door to Macs being just as viable for gaming as PC’s are, and that is great news, even if you don’t own a Mac.

~br3ntbr0