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Valve's Steam gaming platform coming to Mac?

Steam is a content delivery system used by a company called Valve to deliver thousands of games to PC users.  

Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute a large number of games and related media entirely over the internet, from small independent efforts to larger, more popular games. Steam is set apart from similar services primarily by its community features, completely automated game update process, and its use of in-game functionality. There are over 1,000 games available on Steam, and in January 2010 Valve announced that it had surpassed 25 million active user accounts. It regularly services in excess of two million concurrent users.Although Valve never releases sales figures, Steam is considered by its competitors and clients to be the market leader, controlling an estimated 70% of the digital distribution market. Many major publishers have catalogues on Steam, including Electronic Arts, Activision, 2K Games, Ubisoft, THQ, Sega, Codemasters, LucasArts, id Software, and BioWare.

Why should you care?  Because MacOSX icons recently turned up in the PC version of the platform:

This could mean a lot of things (including a MacOSX theme/skin), but there’s a chance that Steam might be bringing their platform to Mac, which would be incredibly good news for Mac gamers.

If you are really interested in Gaming (on any platform), you should check out OnLive, which streams games over the Internet –you guessed it– live.

 

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