The world has changed forever for Apple gamers around the world, with the launch of the Steam digital distribution platform, specifically for their operating system.

Gabe Newell, president of Valve has a few words to say:

“The Mac is a great platform for developers, and it’s also great that we now have the ability to connect with Mac gamers via Steam. This is the beginning of a groundswell of games coming out for and fully utilizing the openness and power of the Mac.”

Finally.

Today’s launch comes with a collection of games available for purchase, each one showing off “Steam Play”, a feature which allows customers to buy a game once – on any Steam-supported platform – and then play it on all other supported platforms (at the moment, you have a choice of two – but who knows how far away a Linux version really is?). Gamers who have previously purchased the games in this list via Steam will find them available in their Mac-installed account as they are released.

…oh, and if you download Steam between now and May 24th, you’ll get a free copy of Portal, Valve‘s action/puzzler Game of the Year award-winner. It not only supports Steam Play, but will be the first Source Engine-based game available for the Apple. Icing on the cake, really!

In fact, the company is not just bringing the online part of Steam to the new platform, they’re also dragging their Steamworks suite of development/publishing tools over as well. This will make it easy for game devs to include anti-cheat technology, matchmaking, social networking, copy-protection, product key authentication, and of course auto-updates (plus more) in their products – free of charge.

Torchlight - now on Mac!

Tucked away in today’s game release list is the critically acclaimed Torchlight – and Max Schaefer, co-founder of developer Runic Games, is pretty chuffed:

“We’re very excited to be bringing Torchlight to the Mac. Having Steam for the Mac solves so many problems for us as a developer. We look forward to our future games coming out on the Mac as well.”

Next week and ‘subsequent Wednesdays’ will see the release of additional collections of Mac-friendly games. Each of these collections have been carefully crafted to highlight ‘specific functionalities’ of the new Mac version of Steam.

Personally, I’d have thought “it works” would be sufficient, but it seems that the fellas at Valve want to do a bit of showing off. And who can really blame them?

…meanwhile, if you’re interested in all of this, you’d be well-advised to spend some time over at MacSteam, an aggregator that’s got all your Steamy Mac news covered. Handy!