When I told you about Valve claiming it was all Apple’s fault that their games weren’t making it to the Mac, Mac gaming expert Peter Cohen bought up a couple points in the comments explaining it wasn’t solely Apple’s fault. Clearly a comment here wasn’t enough, so he wrote up a Game Room weblog piece.
A gaming Web site called Kikizo recently posted an interview with Valve Software’s co-founder, Gabe Newell. In it, Newell made some pointed comments about why his company’s products haven’t ever come to the Mac platform. Newell’s comments have a grain of truth, but make no mistake: If Valve Software was serious about the Mac, it’d already be here.
Peter brings up several good points. First, he points to other game developers that either port their own work (Blizzard rocks). The other thing he points out, that’s far more compelling, is the rather large advance they asked for licensing the game. Peter calls it absurd. Tuncer of Inside Mac Games calls it $1 million.
The next time you groan about having to reboot into Windows to play Half Life 2, think about the real reason. And maybe, just maybe, someone will explain glass houses to Gabe Newell.
i think you should make more of the fact that Valve demanded $1,000,000. for the mac market that kind of money is truly and utterly ridiculous to pay just to port the game, specially when Valve will still demand royalties, and when up until very recently, Havok was still charging a huge amount for a mac license (6 figures)...
not to mention that unless Valve did the port in house, they would probably have tried to undercut the porting house by offering the mac version of the game on Steam.
not something you want to get involved in really.