Valve to Cater the Mac Gaming Market?

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Valve's intentions lately as many gaming websites have been lit up about having MacOS X support for Valve's award winning STEAM platform.

This whole fiasco happened during the launch of the new beta STEAM UI update. Some of the things that caught people's attention were the fact that:

• STEAM no longer uses the Trident browser rendering engine. Instead it now uses WebKit instead. Trident is the closed source backend that Internet Explorer uses while WebKit is the open source backend that Apple's Safari uses.
• STEAM has MacOS X icons for minimize, close and maximize. 
• STEAM has an osx.menu file in the STEAM directory

With that said, obviously it points to a possible Mac port of the STEAM client that Windows users have cherished for more than a decade. So why is this good news?

Basically having more publishers jumping aboard a new platform will help them grow. Historically as long as you have gaming on your platform, it tends to grow considerably. This is certainly good news for Apple since more and more publishers have jumped aboard since Apple's Intel transition back in 2005 - 2006. EA was one of Apple's major gaming backer. Unfortunately, not much Mac versions came out. Then again, I blame Cider since that thing just makes crappy Mac ports and just make developers lazy by using Windows versions on top of a Windows compatibility layer created by Transgaming, a Canadian company specializing in getting Windows applications to work on UNIX platforms. They are well known for their Cedega service and ripping off the WINE project which made it possible.

Main reason why Cider shouldn't be used is because it tends to introduce more problems than it solves. It's also confusing for regular Mac users who have no prior experience with a WINE-related product. It's hard to add on new assets like modifications or new maps. It also shows the lack of real commitment a company has in a new platform. Sure, it's great to use it for your first few releases, but god damn it, if you are going to make a version for a new platform at least port the game properly. For the Mac, use the proper Mach-O format and OpenGL libraries in your engine. Also, another thing that pisses me off when using Cider is that it tends to drain your battery more. There are more Apple laptop sold than desktops. Thus, having a battery draining application isn't a good idea. A native app tend to use less CPU cycles than a Cider-based application. Furthermore, in order to fully utilize Cider, from my understanding (I have this installed on my Macbook anyways) is that it requires the X11 window server which is another several hundred megabyte out of your hard drive. Cider is so clunky that it should just generally be avoided.

Today, several websites have received teaser images from Valve. Could we actually see Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal and/or Left for Dead on the Mac platform? What do you guys think?