Steam1.5

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.

Very nice program to play games with friends

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!!

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!).

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.