Steam for Mac2.0

easy to use, download apps, and keep in touch with teammates

must-have if you like playing gan=me and watching streams

Today's "2.0" = 1613176728 [I'll stop now. The actual version number of Steam can be found in its About box. And yes, Steam's version numbering system is dysfunctional and stupid.]

Today's "2.0" = 1612763122

Today's "2.0" = 1603992987

Today's Steam "2.0" = 1603487799. (>_<)

Today's Steam "2.0" = 1602795778. (o_O)

Today's Steam "2.0" = v1599174997.

I keep getting emails notifying me of 'access to my Steam account from another computer'. However I have no Steam account and never have had. Contacting them seems to be impossible without-you guessed it- logging into my non-existant account. I have looked and looked but there seems to be no way of contacting these people. Any ideas friends? :/

'1596217132' = Current Steam version. Why do they make this difficult? (o_0) Just 'Check for updates...' under the Steam menu to stay up-to-date.

The current version of Steam is '1591251555'. It's from June 3, 2020. You can find this by visiting 'About Steam' under its 'Steam' menu. The best way to keep Steam up-to-date is to 'Check for updates...' under the same menu. Steam continues to be amateurish about its development and numbering system for Mac. But at least it works.

Steam on Mac is as good as it is on other platforms, which is to say that it is sufficient. It's decent at everything from downloading games or other applications, their downloadable content (DLC), or helping you keep contact with friends. It still has some trouble keeping the messenger window out of the way, and it isn't very helpful finding games that actually will run on the machine you have. Lately, they've had warnings about what won't work on macOS Catalina. When I view my queue, the live browser doesn't work, saying that the browser is lacking. Considering that I've never had this problem on the Windows version of Steam, I'm thinking that they need to work on a multi-platform solution. They always have more work to do.

Trash. I've on and off been trying to use this app on mac for a year now. It won't even open. I get a "failed to load Steamui.dylib" error literally every single time. I've reinstalled it 10 times alone today.I've tried every dingle thing online for a fix and this problem can never be resolved. I've seen people asking for a fix on this issue for over 7 years now with zero assistance whatsoever. It's either "uninstall and reinstall" or "restart the system." Absolutely nothing works and that's pathetic. I absolutely despise this app on mac.

Love it, but its always freezing on my computer

Great app! Just want it on another computer.

Very nice program to play games with friends

It works for me. Yes it doesn't have all the features that the Windows version does, but it has enough for you to collect and play your games. (Whether they're per-steam-license actually yours or not is a whole other ball o' wax.)

On OsX 10.12 (16A323), everything is gone, the login panel is all white, no input fields, cannot login and play. And I have 100 games in my library. Time for me to go DRM free.

Soooo sick of constant updates, especially ones that break Steam altogether. Just had the latest update install itself and now I get 'Failed to load steamui.dylib' error message which means Steam won't even open. Steam, you take our money for games then fail to deliver a stable environment to play them in?!?!?!? Turning into rip off software.

Steam cannot play on mac osx 10.5.8. so sad :(

Everyone knows the Steam Store is a great place to pick up games at a reasonable price. This review is purely for the client software… …Which is not that great. Its major flaw is that it tends to forget that you've chosen to be Offline, and will ask you to connect to the net and log in before allowing you access to your purchased software. The Internet isn't as ubiquitous as Valve would have us believe, and when it is there it isn't always accessible (high costs, slow speeds, unreliable connection etc.) ATM my desktop has no Internet connection, and now that Steam has "forgotten" I chose to be Offline (because I knew it wouldn't have an Internet connection for the foreseeable future) I can no longer launch the app at all. The only way to restore functionality is to move the whole desktop to a location with Internet access - annoying and frustrating. The app also has a tendency to believe there are updates available despite not having had any internet access that could have alerted it. Add on to this the often excruciatingly-slow responses to Support requests, and you've got reasonably-priced games let down by a terrible client and support platform. Maybe they should stop offering the cheap deals and use the extra cash to provide a better platform instead - do it the Apple way…

The main feature of Steam I like is multi-platform support. If I buy a game for the Mac, I can usually play that same game on a PC. That's useful to me in two ways: (1) With friends or relatives who only use PCs, I can download the same games to play with them while visiting. (2) I'm often busy with processor intensive tasks on my Mac, so I prefer a dual-machine setup, where I can do work on the Mac, but then switch to a PC and play games while taking a break.

I been using Steam for years and was so excited when they opened for Mac users. If you want great access to your favorate games while being part of a community this is the app for you. Already own the game np just add the key to steam and it will track it for you!

Steam phones home to Google Analytics. The only reason to do so to my knowledge is to allow Google surveillance of my computer behavior. If your app is going to surveil my computer use, then ASK MY PERMISSION FIRST, DAMMIT. I have used my reverse firewall Little Snitch to deny Steam access to Google Analytics forever. I suggest other folks with reverse firewalls consider doing the same.

The actual current install size of Steam.app on my Mac mini after yesterday's self-update is over 325MB. Ridiculous: it's now amongst the largest apps on my Mac.

Have a Great games!!

I would steer clear of this turkey. I have used Steam almost since it came out and it worked fine, though it was veeeeerrrrry slow to start up. Then a week ago I tried going back to play Portal 2, and the game crashed. I've sent off two requests for support, and now I can't even log into their support page (which, by the way, requires a totally separate login). I have tried uninstalling (according to THEIR directions) and then reinstalling Steam FOUR TIMES and now my library is empty - even the Steam store shows a blank page. Stick to the App Store, it installs directly on your Mac, and that games cost the same. I have about $200 of games that I can no longer access. Thanks Valve for the crappy application and horrible (read: nonexistent) customer support. Even their help pages offer minimal information on Mac issues.

Besides all the other problems with Steam that have already been mentioned, you cannot paste your login password. I use a long, random character pw and don't allow Steam to store it for security reasons, Steam forces me to type it manually every time I launch it. Or to be more precise, it forced me to type my password in manually until I un-installed it. Now I don't have any Steam related problems.

The new update released today prevents me from playing any games. SteamStartup() failed: SteamStartup(0xf,0x0xbffff28c) failed with error 1: Failed create pipe: 0

Gave this a go. Apart from numerous crashes, Steam has nothing interesting to offer. Games are priced at RRP (App Store has an advantage here) and to play these games I must have Steam installed in the future too, so I don't agree with their DRM methods. Also, there're hardly any titles available for the Mac that the App Store doesn't offer at a cheaper price. Wouldn't recommend using this service.

Pls spend your Money to the great Games in the App Store. The Makers of Steam must be totally mindf****. You can't play your favorite games when their Server are down, the game must be updated (in 120 kb/s für two houres), or you can't play if you don't have a connection to the internet.

Total crap couldn't launch a single game and would have to force quit every time wasted about 6gigs of bandwidth downloading games i couldn't play

This app is slow and unstable. It crashed twice on a fresh install during downloads. So unncessary.

Piece of C#@!p. Downloads it's update and then says 'you need to be online so check connection' Where does it think it got it's download dumb@ss!

Requires case insensitive file system. Epic fail.

I'm loving it. Steam allows me to play my licensed Windows Steam games on my Mac without needing to buy a new license. Steam also opens up a library of games I can use on my Mac-only. After 6 months, no problems with the application itself at all. BUT... don't think you can play cutting-edge games without cutting-edge equipment. Depending on what you want to do, you will need decent specs on your machine... including a decent graphics card (some new MBP built-in cards may be OK). Some new games just require this kind of power, so don't blame Steam.

FYI, Check out the Steam user HW survey results: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

Overall, a bad experience. Forced to use when buying Civ V. This is my second time downloading the app on which you maybe get 100kb/sec. If this is the Mac gaming environment of the future, I'm buying a cheap PC rig. I will not support the Steam platform until they get their act together.

Steam on the Mac = great. More games on the Mac = great. Utterly lousy AIR-based app for their delivery on your Mac = terrible. See reviews by others for the reasons.

Steam is not a mac-like app, and in fact isn't even a terribly good Windows app, the DRM is very restrictive in spite of the initial impression that it isn't as restrictive as most (see below), but there's just no way to not be happy that Valve is bringing there games to us, as well as other developers. The Steam client and DRM is utterly crappy. The games are great. One thing I dislike about the Steam client is it has a really lousy way of browsing games. It shows you 10 (or some number) of games at a time and you have to click to go to the next page. You can't just scroll through the list. Worse, if you get 6 pages in, then click on an app to read about it and then click the back arrow, you don't end up on page 6, you end up back on page 1! That's not a good way to encourage use of your application. Also that you can't paste into the password field (or any other field) is another way to discourage purchases. It's a nuisance to buy anything with Steam. On top of all that, Steam comes across as an attempt to be something like the Xbox, but it's DRM is more restrictive and that's highly disappointing. On the Xbox we can have multiple profiles on one Xbox, each with their own save(s) and their own sets of achievements, and if we buy a download game for it, all the profiles on that Xbox can play them. With Steam, when you buy a game it is only playable in the Profile that purchased it. For someone like myself who has two gaming kids, this makes the value of Steam seem questionable. I'm not going to buy any games on Steam that I think my kids would want to play because there's no way I'm going to buy 3 copies of it just so they can have their own achievements. That's ridiculous. Still, Portal was free and I got it and it was great. I also own a copy of Team Fortress 2 which I bought a while back when they had it on sale for a ridiculously low price, and I'm looking forward to when they enable that on the Mac. When I can get stuff that's just for me and is super cheap, I'll buy it, but no way am I ever going to pay full price for anything on Steam - it's not worth it.

This is a terrible application. I understand that there seems to be "love flowing over" because Valve is great and people are just so excited this is "finally available for the Mac!!" But it's an absolutely terrible application, and that is what is being reviewed here, not Valve, not any of the games that run on it, but Steam, and Steam for Mac is horrible: - Basically a very slow web browser - Takes a ridiculously long amount of time to launch on the latest MBP - Puts itself on your list of login items without asking - Installs stuff into ~/Documents instead of ~/Library/Application Support/Steam - Crashes - Throws ads at you In my experience it wasn't even able to complete the basic task of downloading a game (Portal). It stopped half-way through and hung, so I had to force-quit it. The UI is horrendous. Even basic functionality like copy/paste doesn't work. When I clicked "remember password", where does it store it? Not in the Keychain, I have no idea, and I bet it's storing it somewhere in plaintext. Conclusion: slow, broken, possibly insecure, and violates most OS X conventions.

It's crashed on me once. Not from playing a game, but from clicking around in the client app. The look of the client is not very "macish". I believe i've heard it's a carbon app at that. Steam adds itself to "login items" automatically. Not what i would expect from a mac app, but rather something a windows application would do. I would seriously advice the steam developers to avoid doing that. We really don't want the equivalent of a "crowded windows system tray" on our dock. Still, i did play "portal" without any problems. I'll probably buy a game or more before i'm prepared to review (rate) steam though.

My Macbook stutters with the crappiest games as Steam hogs all the resources in the background.. Its a cool idea though. I hope the developer seriously tweaks this software, or perhaps implements a setting that quits steam upon a games launch

The main steam app is pretty unstable on my 2009 mini, but it's early though, and I'm sure they'll work that out. Portal does take at least 2-3 minutes to load, but I suspect it's running through some kind of crossover-like emulation, and not a full Mac app. It played fine though once on, and it worked with my Kensington mouse. The Mac steam isn't perfect, but at least it seems like it'll be comparable in features to the PC version. It's a great start so far honestly, something like this has a lot of potential.

So bug riddled and slow that it is best to avoid this release. Not only does Steam crash often and frequently, but Portal itself takes 6 minutes to launch! Both are horribly slow and sluggish to respond on my BRAND-NEW Mac Pro. Plenty of memory and a zippy graphics card to boot. Steer clear of this stinker and wait for the devs to put out a more quality product.

Thanks for this! I finally downloaded Portal (where on the hard drive I'll NEVER know) and not only does my 3-BUTTON MOUSE not work well with Portal, it just does not WORK! And, I can't even move in the first scene! So, Steam "developers," thanks for nothing, Steam has been deleted from my Mac and all is well again. You just drove me to investigate these wrapper thingies, since all I hear about them is how they WORK. Shame on you all for this flop version 1.0. It should at least respond to my inputs! Bye!!

Kudos to Valve Corp. for getting this on Mac. When I was using Windows I would buy games through Impulse but when I got a Mac I couldn't find anything similar to it. Along comes Steam and now I can organise my games and buy some too. Oh, and thanks for the free copy of Portals.

Anyone have some insight into how to completely UNinstall Steam and Portal? I downloaded them both (since you need a game to really test this app), found both to be sluggish on my system (love the way they don't bother to tell you the system requirements till AFTER you have downloaded the game), don't like AIR apps, don't like the Steam interface AT ALL, and Portal was (IMHO) lame (I'd be much more into something like Torchlight. That's just my preference). I particularly didn't enjoy the bugginess of the Steam app (thanks for nothing AGAIN, Adobe!) and the forced storage in my Documents folder. Yes, they'll probably clean that up at some point. I may give it another try when they've significantly cleaned up the bugs, given users real management, and written an actual MAC NATIVE interface for their app (this is the part I'm most disappointed in -- it's really pretty piss-poor, lazily written in AIR when doing a native app would have been no more difficult -- it's hard to believe an app this buggy was privately beta-tested!).

Love it.

Great! Already deep into Torchlight. Thanks Valve!

Finally, great move by Valve.. looking forward to the GNU/Linux version as well. Thanks Valve!

Who really cares that the interface of Steam is crappy and "un-Maclike"? The fact that I'll be able to play top PC games on my Mac without Parallels, CrossOver, Bootcamp, etc. is a major plus for me. It crashed on me once, but this is version 1.0! A lot of people here seem ready to "rip them a new one". What a way to treat the developers of Steam after they bring tremendous gaming possibilities to greatly-ignored gaming platform. Just chill... It'll get better.

Downloaded quickly, a few hangs on first startup, downloaded and playing free portal, which runs just fine on my penryn macbook pro. Waiting for more good games. Thanks, Valve.

It's, actually, not hours. What you're talking about may take very little time for the initial setup but they then have to go and test EVERYTHING again and that alone takes a lot of time. There's also the fact that Valve has promised not to use that kind of tech for their games because they'd rather just go native from the beginning. The thing is, those "wrappers" give you a hit in performance. Every action has to be translated and because of that there's a noticeable decrease in horsepower from your system. Valve is porting all their Source games over from DirectX to OpenGL. Also, Valve never said all their games would be Mac-ready on launch day. They said a few games would be ready and they'd quickly start releasing the others as fast as they could. By the way, the wrapper you're probably referring to is Cider by TransGaming. It's been used on a number of games in the past.

I've been looking forward to Steam for Mac for weeks now, and I have to say that so far I've been disappointed. Firstly, it's an Adobe AIR app. Now I acknowledge that this was probably the only way they'd bother getting a port for OSX, but it looks like it was designed by a 2-bit Flash developer and seems to barely work. It took me a few tries to figure out how to download Portal (though that could be my own failing) but when I did I needed to restart the app to 'enable the update'? What does that even mean? It then crashed on me twice while downloading and browsing the store simultaneously so I just left it and went to bed. This morning Portal still hadn't downloaded because it was suspended for some reason. I don't know why, but I resumed and went to work. Maybe it'll be done by the time I get home... Is this really on-demand gaming? Steam is set to auto-run at startup by default, which is pretty ballsy, but at least you can easily turn this off. A bigger problem is that all game data is saved to the ~/Documents directory and there is no apparent way to change this. I don't know what the Windows setting is, but I imagine it's got to be somewhere more logical. All said, it is an app that reeks of sloppy decision making and implementation but hopefully over time it'll mature because at this point I don't know if it's worth my time and effort.

Great, great news for the Mac, although the Steam 1.0 application has its share of bugs. I downloaded 99% of Portal overnight, and woke up to find Steam crashed. Fortunately Steam does recover well from this, and just verified the files and then continued the download. There are other issues - I tried to download a demo of a game, Quantz, that says it's for PC and Mac, but every time I try to download the demo it downloads it, but it appears that what it downloaded was the PC version and I can't run it! There are also annoyances like a password entry dialog that doesn't let me paste into it, some wonky dialog behavior with dialog windows sometimes switching to the background when I click in them. But... this is still fantastic for the platform and I'm sure the bugs will get worked out with time. Plus who can complain about free Portal? Also the demo of Torchlight looks great and I'm probably going to buy that.

Steam is a good shot in the arm for our beloved platform. Thanks guys! Perhaps now Apple will do some OpenGL tweaking.

One of the most important software we needed on Mac. This first version have few issues but it is quite good already.

This is possibly the most important addition to the Mac platform this year. This makes releasing games for the Mac platform much easier and most importantly, it acknowledges the Mac as a serious gaming platform in that valve makes the complete steam tools available and also port all their own games natively to the mac.

About time...

I will always love Valve if only for one reason. They gave us the greatest FPS in the history of gaming: Half-Life 2. This Mac release of Steam gives me one more reason to love Valve.

Playing portal, everything working as expected. Application could look more native, but works great, so no other complaints.

Can't get this thing to work...When first time launched, it downloaded a 33MB "update" file that took several minutes. After that, Steam hanged. Tried to force quite and relaunch, but still hanged upon launch. It's unlikely that the cause of application crash is due to the heavy loading of their server; any programmer with common sense won't let it happen. But I'll give it a trial later.

Wow, now I find Mac games on Steam - THEY'RE ALL RINKY DINK PUZZLE GAMES that I could get elsewhere! And to add insult to injury Portal is free, yeah - But when I go to download it - it downloads the Steam app again! I think that the folks behind this just don't know what they're doing. Take Steam back to the PC world and leave it there, we don't need this headache… Please, take it back…

All working as expected. A great start for a 1.0 on a new platform, the potential for this to improve gaming on the Mac is wonderful. There are some minor issues, as detailed in some on the reviews below, but I don't think that is any reason not to give this a high rating (given that it is a 1.0 product on a new platform). I have multiple games in Steam on Windows, can't wait for them to be (hopefully) ported! If the games appear as suggested, then I no longer have a reason to boot Windows - that is worth 5 stars to me.

I've been part of the closed beta testing, and all I can say is that it was a blast testing Portal and Team Fortress 2. I've used Steam for Windows for years, so I am ecstatic that Valve's client software has finally made it to the Macintosh platform. It is a good day to be a Mac user IMO. Thank you, Valve Software! I never played TF2 before until this past weekend - played/tested for over 17 hours. LOL I'm really looking forward to seeing Day of Defeat: Source and Counterstirke: Source be made available for Steam on the Mac. Steam for Mac is one less reason to own Windows.

Probably the single best opportunity for game development for the mac. I am hoping this turns out to be a huge success and other developers follow suit. There are many PC users who want to switch to the mac but simply won't because of games, it's time to end those days! Can't wait for Counter-Strike Source! =]

Just heats my computer up an extra 20ºC or so, but does nothing. Damn. Guess I'll try again.

Works like a champ...tells me the Steam servers are too busy to accommodate my request to install Portal but that's cool...waiting for Company of Heros to be ported since I finished Portal in Windows.

Thank you Valve! I've been waiting for ages for this to come out >_< Interface is just like the PC (for better or worse) and well... its Steam! WOOHOO :D

A few of you are already "Steaming" along quite well.

I was so excited to get Steam. I was even more psyched that it installed like a real Mac App, just drag it into the app folder. And then I was totally bummed beyond belief to see the following error: "Steam requires that /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS be created on a *****case insensitive**** filesystem, with read-write access." Are you freak'n french fry kidding me? The only other company so lazy as to not modify some file system string code is Adobe. Their solution for installing Acrobat Pro on a system with case sensitivity is to WIPE it clean. Let me provide you an alternative. You can make a case insensitive read-writeable disk image and install the application in that. Then drag out the application and put it on your dock. Then every time you click on the app, the OS will automatically mount the DMG image and run the app. It's a ridiculous solution. I hope they fix this. The case sensitivity has been a primary format option for years.

The 5-star reviews must be fakes. The application endlessly seeks updates that aren't available, won't let you download games (servers too busy), and without asking sets itself to launch on log in. The application itself is ostensibly based on WebKit, but the scrolling is laggy and the UI is shoddy. It reminds me of an Adobe release (but their software is based off of decades of code). I'm guessing this application will get better, but 5 stars? No way!

Works as expected. MANY many kudos to Valve for making this happen.

I downloaded Steam and Portal with no problems. It just worked. It worked just as it was supposed to. It is wonderful that Steam will let me play these excellent former PC only games natively on my Mac. This is a major milestone in Mac gaming.

works great.

Downloaded it and... wow. What a piece of crap. It's extremely slow and horribly non-native and unintuitive. Windows-esque references (e.g. minimizing, flashing windows) are everywhere. Most actions (such as installing, etc) either have no feedback at all or pop up little dialog boxes that steal focus from other applications. Seriously, after trying to install Portal several times and just getting a blank screen (web screens for user interface - the cheap and shitty way out of UI design!), I finally checked my game library and there it was. Trying to play it just brings up another tiny modal window that seemingly does nothing - but hey, I've given up 400MB of my disk so far for this! All content is being downloaded to a "Steam Content" folder in ~/Documents, instead of to ~/Library where it belongs - this is going to screw with a bunch of people's backup strategies to be sure. It's also something I haven't seen done since AppleWorks in the late 90's. The Documents folder is sacrosanct, you asshats - put your application support files in, I don't know, "~/Library/Application Support/Steam"? Crap like this has no business being on the Mac. I'm happier deleting it entirely than dealing with this awful steaming heap. And on top of it all, I never managed to actually load a game (Portal), so all of the frustration of using this abomination of a system has been for nothing.

Aside from a small glitch, mostly to do with starting Steam I have had no problems at all running both Portal and Torchlight. This is a huge day for the Mac and will grow the community.

Nice to see my original comment removed. Why is it that Steam requires you to run from a case insensitive file system? As I don't have any Mac at my house formatted case insensitive, I guess I won't be using Steam... Would be really nice if that was listed in their system requirements (both on this page and the Valve site).

Downloads fine, updates, then NOTHING. "Application Unresponsive." Lowest rating because I'm unable to get this thing to work. When it becomes responsive, I'll change my rating.

As a long time Team Fortress 2 player, I can attest that this is absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much Valve for being an awesome gaming dev. and bringing Steam to the Mac. It works just like its' Windows counterpart and has been very stable for me so far. Keep up the good work guys! :)