Fortnite and Gears of War developer Epic Games is in the process of building the Epic Games Store, which could potentially lure Mac and Windows developers away from Valve's industry-dominant Steam platform.
The Epic Games Store is 'launching soon' for PC and Mac, Epic said on Tuesday. The key draw for developers will be an 88/12 revenue split, much more favorable than the 70/30 normally offered by Steam or Apple's Mac App Store. This cut will be even better for companies that rely on Epic's Unreal game engine, since they'll be able to skip royalties, according toTechCrunch.
MacOS on Steam Browse the newest, top selling and discounted macOS supported games New and Trending Top Sellers What's Being Played Upcoming Results exclude some products based on your preferences-20%. BOT.vinnik Chess: Opening Traps. Chess, Artificial. Apple users arguing that the Mac is a viable gaming computer will have a significant addition to their army: Valve has now confirmed Steam will be coming to the OS X.
Valve has in fact announced its own change in revenue payments to keep developers onboard. Though the company is still claiming 30 percent from developers with under $10 million in revenue, from that point the cut drops to 25 percent, and lastly 20 percent at the $50 million mark.
Steam has had little real competition for years, its main multiplatform rivals at the moment being GOG (Good Old Games) and the Humble Store. There are other online stores for Mac and Windows, but many of them are publisher-exclusive, such as EA's Origin.
The Mac App Store has been held back by mostly by its audience, since the Mac userbase is still a minority that developers consider secondary. That's in part because most Macs are equipped with mobile or integrated graphics chips, which can't keep up with the full-sized GPUs found in many Windows PCs. Even within those limitations developers have been keen to avoid Apple's strict rules and 30 percent cut.
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For years, the Mac gaming has been about kids games, new releases released a year after the PC version ships, and lousy gameplay. Now, it’s all been changed.
We first posted about this back in February, but now it’s all been confirmed. Steam is coming to the Mac.
For the uninitiated, here’s what Steam is, according to their website.
Free Games On Steam For Mac
- Instantly access your favorite games
The full Steam library and all future Steam releases are at your fingertips. After you’ve purchased a game, download it immediately and start playing. - Join the Steam Community
Now it’s easy to find someone to play with, meet up with friends, connect with groups with similar interests, and host and join chats, matches, and tournaments. Best of all, it’s all free. - Chat with your friends while gaming
With Steam’s “Friends” service, you can talk to your friends while you play. You can also see when they’re playing games and easily join the same servers together. - Easily browse multiplayer game servers
Steam’s integrated server browser makes it easy to navigate thousands of Internet game servers. - Receive automatic game updates
Hunting for patches and downloading from unorganized web sites is so twentieth-century. On Steam, your games stay up-to-date by themselves. No hassles. - Play your games on any PC
Once you have a Steam account, you can sign in from any PC to access your games. Your games are associated with your account, not your computer. - Enjoy Steam-only special offers
From pre-release discounts to free-play weekends, Steam delivers what gamers value most.
Now take out all of those “PC” references and swap them with “Mac,” and you’ve got online gaming for the Mac, all ready to go.
But wait, there’s more.
Mac Games On Steam
“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”
Meaning, if you already play Steam games on your Boot Camp drive or on another PC, you don’t have to buy anything new to play on the Mac. They also announced that the Mac is going to be under the same release schedule as games for Windows and the XBox 360. All of a sudden, things are looking up.
Mac Games Coming To Steam Mop
It’s about time someone started taking Mac gaming seriously.