Valve's not-so-subtle hints that Steam would be coming to the Mac platform were met with a great deal of enthusiasm from the wholly under-served community of gamers who own Apple hardware. It has been years of slim pickings for Mac owners.

We've been playing with the beta of the Steam service on a variety of Mac systems over the weekend, and while this may not be the Holy Grail for Mac gaming some had hoped it would be, the future is indeed brighter than it once was. Let's take a look.

The beta is barely a taste

The only game available to play in the beta so far is Portal, which isn't exactly a cutting-edge title. I was able to play fine with my Unibody MacBook Pro after chopping down a few of the graphical options and hooking up an external USB mouse. The touchpad on newer Macbooks is great for productivity, but it's not exactly optimal for gaming performance. If you're a Razer fan, be aware that there are now full Mac drivers for all their products... possibly preparing the hardware for the rollout of this very service.

MacBook Pros include two GPUs, and Steam gently reminded me that I had my system set to use only one of them for longer battery life, offering a link to my system's settings to remedy this problem. I turned on the more powerful—and battery-limited—GPU for better gaming performance. I was also asked to enable "access for assistive devices" in system preferences under Universal Access.

After that, the game worked beautifully. As anyone with a Windows partition on his or her Mac OS X systems already knows, Mac hardware is hardly going to replace any similarly priced gaming PC, but newer models certainly have the horsepower to run Source-based games at a very playable framerate, as long as you don't mind monkeying around in the graphical options to find settings that work best for your system.

What this means moving forward

With only one game available for now, the beta mainly just shows the Steam client working. Soon we'll have access to Team Fortress 2 to try out, but as that's another game based on the Source engine it's doubtful there will be much to learn from running it... outside of the fact that we can.

In fact, Valve is going to be the big winner for a while here unless other companies step up: a ported Source engine allows Portal, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2 (and all its episodes), and Team Fortress 2 to be available for sale when the service launches. Portal 2 is another game likely to be released day and date on Macs. Valve is going to launch a service on the Mac that will be offering a good selection of its own games to a customer base hungry for titles. That's a very good position to be in.

There's the symbol!

Good news if you run Windows and Mac OS X: if you already own these games on the PC you won't have to pay for another license on your Apple computers. If you already own Left 4 Dead, you'll be able to download it again on your MacBook and play.

In fact, when the client leaves beta for wide release, a new storefront dedicated to Mac games will be available. "Once the Mac beta ends, we'll have the store up and running with a collection of your favorite Mac games and a continually growing catalog," the beta page states. "Buy games once and play them on any Mac or PC. Just look for the SteamPlay symbol when shopping." Games bearing that symbol will work on both your PC and Mac, no matter which system you bought them for.

This is what Steam is really going to bring to the table: a powerful incentive for more developers and publishers to port their games to Mac OS X. Steam has some serious momentum in the world of digital distribution, and if Valve's own games begin to sell in large numbers to Mac gamers, others will pay attention. Being able to buy a game that will work on all your PCs is a powerful value-add for gaming consumers, and this is a very good day for Mac gamers. The open question is whether more publishers will step up and take advantage of the opportunity.

The Steam client for Macs will be available on May 12.