Download Steam Client for Mac OS X

Steam, a popular digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform for games and related media developed by Valve Corporation, has been made available to users of Mac OS X system. The Steam client for Mac OS X is officially made available for free download on May 12th, 2010, after Valve teased the Mac community with images featuring Valve game characters with Apple logos or in parodies of old Macintosh advertisements.

The availability of Steam client on Mac platform likely to satisfy one of the main frustration on Mac system, i.e. lack of quality game titles. Though not all games available on Steam is playable on Mac, the debut of Steam on Mac operating system does accompanied by tens of games available immediately, with the list growing everyday including native Mac OS X and OpenGL versions of Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Portal, and the entire Half-Life series due to be released in future.

Some of the games available for Mac include:

And Yet It Moves
Atlantis Sky Patrol
Bejeweled 2 Deluxe
Bob Came in Pieces
Bookworm Deluxe
Braid
BRAINPIPE: A Plunge to Unhumanity
Chocolatier: Decadence by Design
Chuzzle Deluxe
City of Heroes: Architect Edition
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
Civilization IV: Warlords
Cooking Dash
Diaper Dash®
Diner Dash: Hometown Hero
DinerTown Detective Agency
DinerTown Tycoon
Dream Chronicles: The Chosen Child
Escape Rosecliff Island
Fairway Solitaire
Fitness Dash
Football Manager 2010
Galcon Fusion
Gemini Lost
Guns of Icarus
Hotel Dash Suite Success
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
KrissX
LOOM
Luxor
Luxor 3
LUXOR: Mah Jong
Machinarium
Mahjong Roadshow
Max and the Magic Marker
My Tribe
Nightshift Legacy: The Jaguar’s Eye
Osmos
Parking Dash
Peggle Deluxe
Peggle Nights
Portal
Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery
Quantz
Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization
Tales of Monkey Island Complete Pack
The Dig
The Nightshift Code
Toki Tori
Torchlight
TriJinx: A Kristine Kross Mystery
Unwell Mel
Valerie Porter and the Scarlet Scandal
Wandering Willows
Wedding Dash 2: Rings Around the World
World of Goo
Zenerchi
Zuma Deluxe

With the availability of Steam client for Mac, Steam also introduces Steam Play. SteamPlay allows players and gamers who have already purchased compatible products in the Windows version to re-download the Mac versions at no cost, and vice-versa. Note that not all games are in Steam Play list though, and some game titles does require user to purchase Windows and Mac versions separately to gain the cross-platform functionality.

The Steam Cloud is Windows and Mac cross-platform compatible, so does multi-player games, allowing Windows and Mac players to play with each other. Portal 2, due by the end of 2010, will be simultaneously released on both the Windows and Mac versions of Steam.

Download Steam client for Mac: steam.dmg

As a special promotion, Valve and Steam are offering Portal for Windows and Mac for free until May 24th, 2010.

For Mac OS X who encounters Steam requires that Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS be created on a case-insensitive file system, with read-write access error, here’s the workaround to install Steam on case-sensitive file system.