With the recent news that Valve is moving over some of their most treasured IP’s to Mac, my mind began to drift off into thought of what this means as a PC gamer. Honestly, for now and for the foreseeable future, there is no need for me to own a Mac. Apple makes some solid and stylish products for sure. I’m a sucker for well engineered things, but much like designer clothing, chic comes at a cost. So, being someone who tries to get the most bang for my buck, I build my own systems. I can’t really do that with Macs, and for good reason. They want to keep their systems optimized. With that, there’s not much to geek out about with Macs. There’s not an abundance of websites out there devoted to tweaking, over clocking, and modding Macs like there is in the world of PC’s. So it’s always seemed to me that if gaming really opened up for Macs, it would be more akin to console gaming than it would to a PC, and the freedoms that come with PC gaming is what makes it so attractive to me. But with things going the direction of being more streamlined via programs like Steam, and games focusing more on content rather than visuals, resulting in less and less need for “top tier” PC hardware technology (unlike a few years ago when it was updated hand over fist), maybe that’s the horizon we’re looking towards.

I honestly don’t know how to take this news. On one hand, you have Valve, a company that rarely does anything in its business practices that are questionable, so you instantly think that this could be something very significant. It’s a company which many PC gamers like me look to as the gilded defender of our ways, who are now making a sort of alliance with the “enemy”. Then on the other hand, it’s almost business as usual for the Mac users. Here they are, getting two and three year old games that their PC counterparts have long since played.

Then there are the other two faces to this matter. First, is how Valve is going about it. It’s not like they’re just tossing some Mac versions of their games into boxes and placing them alongside the slew of Blizzard games on the shelf at Mac stores everywhere. No, instead they are giving them Steam. Much like how the iTunes app store has exploded, this could quite possibly open up the floodgates to developers who want a more cost effective way to distribute games to Macs. But, again, on the other hand, Apple hasn’t really made a huge deal about this, and Apple likes to make huge deals about stuff that they figure will have a profound impact on its customer base.

So are we looking at a sheep, or a wolf in a very well designed wool suit?