Valve and Mac: Dream Come True or Worst Nightmare?
Valve is a company open to changing ideas. They made a massive deal about creating more Mac compatible games. It’s a good market. It’s a great market. Whether you like it or it, the Mac, and all Apple products, are extremely profitable.
So, being the market smart company they are (or at least think so), Valve decides to port nearly all current Source games to Mac and also develop all future Source games for both PC and Mac. So, finally, other companies start joining in on this idea, and in the next couple of years, the likelihood that all games will also be for Mac is very high. Sounds like a dream come true right?
Perhaps not, at least in Valve’s case.
Now that the games the company focuses on, specifically the now highly-downloaded and free to play Team Fortress 2, are available for OS X, you would think Valve would take into account that their Mac market is becoming a second priority.
You would think.
What Valve has on their hands now is angry Mac players left and right. To the surprise of many, while Mac does have many popular casual games, hardcore fans of gaming are abound on the system. Yet, it seems Valve chooses to ignore this.
Nearly every other day, updates are constantly coming in for Mac Source games. Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Well, that’s until you realize that many of these “updates” cause the games to crash. Freeze. Not even start.
That’s not even the main big issue at hand here, folks. The issue at hand is that Valve pretends it’s not happening. It will take usually an entire week or so for them to even bother to fix the problem. E-mailing their “customer service” takes nearly a week to even see a reply, and the answers are phony, which obviously does nothing. Head over to the Steam forums and you’ll see many users complaining of the same problem. And they all say the same thing, “Why bother asking Valve? They won’t help.” Even PC users point out the issue of lack of customer service.
So, in an ever-changing and demanding market, why ignore something that is making you money? Why release updates without testing them for paying customers? Why?
No one knows the answer.
Maybe, just maybe, Valve will come to their senses and treat Mac’s as importantly as PC’s. As more and more consumers switch their views to Apple products, the gaming community on the Mac grows. Valve either has to chip in and gain or fold and lose profit. Wouldn’t it make sense to choose the latter?
