|
Valve has announced today that its Steam platform will soon be available for Mac users. This means that soon the entire Steam library, including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will all be available in April for purchase. You can checkout the full press release below:

Valve has revealed its new User Graphic Interface for steam, and is giving players the ability to opt into a public beta to try it out. To opt in, all you need to do is Click This Link while Steam is running, and under Beta Participation, choose "2010 UI Update". 

A recent online petition has been circulating the internet urging Valve to take up development on a long awaited Counter-Strike sequel. However, at last week's X10 event, Valve’s Chet Faliszek quickly played down the idea that a Counter-Strike 2 game was being considered on account of the of the petition. So you're saying we might talk about it tomorrow? Thanks Inc Gamers for the news.

A small update for Counter-Strike: Source has been released. While the update adds no new features to the game per se, it does fix some small annoying bugs. To get the latest update, simply restart your Steam Client.

A new Steam client update has been released this week, making several important tweaks to the engine. As always restart your client and the changes will automatically take effect.

If you are still looking for a reason to pickup Counter-Strike: Source, Valve has just announced that you can pick it up today through Sunday in the Steam Store for just $5.00, 75% off the original price, as part of this week's Weekend Deal. For more information head on over to the Steam Store.

As a result of the recent downtime, we have decided to switch hosting companies and will be moving to a new server this afternoon. We do expect to have a limited amount of downtime while the transfer is completed, however we do not anticipate any user accounts or data to be lost. We hope to have the transfer completed by early tomorrow afternoon.
Please note that during downtime, no staff or support emails will be received. Just hang on, and we will get back to you once we have everything back online.

The New Official Website for CS Promod has now launched, with the first release of the mod coming soon hopefully as well. After being completely rebuilt from the ground up, the developers of the new CS Promod hope to create a community based Counter-Strike game which can be updated and tweaked on a regular basis, since after all, Valve has been slacking to say the least. The new website features a community complete with developer logs, user accounts, and plenty of media to keep you occupied until the mod's official release. 

Despite the lack of updates for Counter-Strike over the past several months, many fans have continued to hold out hope for a "Counter-Strike 2" to be released. While Valve has no plans for any new Counter-Strike titles, Counter-Strike's lead creator, Mihn Le, has quietly been developing a new game titled Tactical Intervention - which he hopes will be the next generation Counter-Strike. In a new interview, Le sits down with IGN to discuss Tactical Intervention and what makes this game so important to Counter-Strike fans. No release date has been set for Tactical Intervention as of yet, but you can be sure there will be plenty more information released in the coming months. For now though be sure to head on over to IGN to read the Full Interview!  Source: Planet Half-Life

A new steam client update has been released fixing a variety of issues. As always, simply restart your steam client and the changes will automatically be applied, or click File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...".

|
"Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac," said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. "Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play."
"We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. "The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows."
Portal 2 will be Valve's first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. "Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step," said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. "We're always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.""