Valve's Steam for Mac has boosted developers' interest in releasing Mac versions of their games, but according to Valve, that interest won't translate into more new Mac releases until next year. Still, Valve believes that 2011 will mark a sort of renaissance for Mac gaming.

Valve director of business development Jason Holtman said in an interview with GamesIndustry that, while hard numbers weren't available to share, there are plenty of Mac users on Steam. Even users with both PCs and Macs are using the Mac to buy games, instead of thinking of their PC as the sole machine for gaming.

"They're not thinking about their PC and Mac being separate anymore, they're really thinking about both of them being together and the platform just being there," Holtman said.

That behavior is driving new interest in delivering Mac versions of current game releases from publishers, as opposed to considering ports after the Windows version has shipped. "Developers who weren't thinking about the Mac a year ago are coming to us and saying, 'Wow! How could I make a Mac version of my game?'" said Holtman.

Graphics performance is still an issue on Mac OS X, though, and so is OpenGL coding for developers more accustomed to DirectX. Apple still has plenty of work to do to support newer versions of OpenGL and better optimize graphics drivers to achieve performance parity with Windows. But to help developers accelerate development schedules and work around these issues somewhat, Valve is making code it has developed for the GL layer available to Steamworks partners.

Those developers "will have access to some of the hard work that we do to get our games up on Mac, and they'll be able to incorporate that into their games," Holtman told GamesIndustry. "And our hope is it gets them there faster."

Even with Steam for Mac making a great distribution platform and Valve providing OpenGL graphics tools, though, Mac gamers shouldn't expect a bunch of simultaneous releases from other top-tier developers just yet. For games already in the development process for 2010, adding a Mac version could ruin current schedules and cause release delays. Valve vice president of marketing Doug Lombardi said that publishers are instead looking at releases planned for 2011, and looking at how to incorporate making a Mac version from day one.

"The interesting thing we're seeing from publishers and developers alike is they aren't thinking about porting their games to Mac," Holtman said. "They're thinking, 'I need to write for a Mac. I'm not going to do a port six months later or maybe a year later, I should bring that in and do that now because there's a fair amount of people out there.'"

While gaming has never been one of the Mac's strong suits, Valve's efforts to bring more developers to the platform and generate interest in first-class Mac OS X versions of top-tier games is certainly welcome.