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$1 Million for Half-Life 2 Mac

Published on 9th October 2007 by Joe Martin

Valve apparently wanted $1 Million for the rights to a Mac port of Half-Life 2.

Valve has always been a PC-centered developer, thankfully, and they've always focused on bringing excellent FPS games to life on the PC platform before consoles. It would stand to reason then that they may be at least a little interested in doing a Mac port of their games for Apple, right?

Wrong.

Gabe Newell has previously spoken to Kotaku about why Valve won't be making a Mac port of the Half-Life series, giving the reasons that; "they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do."

Inside Mac Gaming obviously has a slightly different spin on it however and says that Valve wanted an advanced payment of $1 Million for whoever was going to to develop the port. Of course, that's an outragerous amount and everybody knows that there aren't enough Mac gamers to even come close to recouping that large a figure.

Insider Mac Gaming claims that their information comes directly from Apple and that they've seen a email conversation between Gabe Newell and Steve Jobs.

With The Orange Box set for release this Wednesday, it seems like this might be an appropriate time to put the question to you: what platform will you be playing the new Half-Life installment on? PC or Xbox 360? Or will you be twiddling your thumbs and waiting for the PlayStation 3 version, which will arrive in a few weeks? Would you really play a Mac version if one were available? Answers in the forums, if you please.

29 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

Mankz 9th October 2007, 10:57

I though people who bought MAC's were too cool for gaming?

will. 9th October 2007, 11:01

Also... 1 million dollars...

That is like pocket change for apple. Expecting it for freebies is just stupid. Investing $1mil on the source engine is a potentially brilliant investment for apple.

chiper136 9th October 2007, 11:22

I love my mac and do all my work on it (animation), but I spent over a grand to get my sexy PC purely for the reason that Macs are not for games. If they ported it and I didn't have my PC I would more likely buy it on the 360. The gaming community on the Mac is very small. TF2 would have a fraction of the activity its going to get on the PC and 360.

Mac's are good, just by no means are they for games.

samkiller42 9th October 2007, 11:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mankz.
I though people who bought MAC's were too cool for gaming?

heh, well put.

Sam

[USRF]Obiwan 9th October 2007, 11:32

I thought those people that buy macs, do it because it looks nice in contrast to the wallpaper of their livingroom...

adam197 9th October 2007, 11:34

So many people in this thread being added to my ignore list :)

Jamie 9th October 2007, 11:56

As great as my mac is I think I'd still rather play orange box on my 360.

Darkedge 9th October 2007, 11:56

seems sensible as a bad port could hurt the HL brand. Not many Mac gamers either - most use parallels or bootcamp anyway.
It was a loss making idea and Gabe didn't want to do it. Whoop de do.

riggs 9th October 2007, 11:59

Mac owner here...love it to bits (despite the problems I've had with it). However, Macs aren't gaming machines, period.

As for the Orange Box, I'll be playing on the PC (and no doubt my housemate will pick it up for the 360).

mikeuk2004 9th October 2007, 12:07

Im currently thinking about getting it for my 360 and not Pc. I have HL2 on PC and never played it, only CSS. I think getting the complete game on 360 will make me play HL2 at last :). Anyway Im more interested in Portal than the rest of the bundle. If Portal was on Live arcade, then id just buy that. Its a shame CSS aint in the box as that might do much better than CS did on the original xbox.

Rebourne 9th October 2007, 12:13

Seems rather trivial, both companies could probably just flush 1 million dollars down the toilet and it wouldn't make much difference. I'm sure this would have made many users really happy too... Oh well...

z3rb 9th October 2007, 12:41

I think the author of the original article is talking out of his arse; I'd jump at the chance to be allowed to port such a massive franchise, even if it were more than a million.

phat-ant 9th October 2007, 13:02

PC all the way consoles are not for FPS gaming!

SlickGnome 9th October 2007, 13:10

Macs are great, but not at gaming. PC for me. Only FPS I've ever liked on console was Halo, (and the only one I've played that I think works on a console)

Fod 9th October 2007, 14:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jamie
As great as my mac is I think I'd still rather play orange box on my PC.

fixed.

Boswell 9th October 2007, 14:26

$1 million...I wanted say this is a large figure at all. You would get the money back with around 100,000 buyers...with a large profit.
Comparing this to halo 3, I know halo 3 is a bigger game on platform designed for gaming (360) but anyway - the figures for making the game were $30 million and $10 million for advertising.

So this is at 1 million to have the game ready..that's 3.33% of the cost of making halo 3, Microsoft then went on to make $300 million in the first week, saying that half-life 2 on the Mac was a meer 5% as succesful as halo 3... thats $15 million (giving you a profit of 1500%)....to get that $15 million...say the game was $50 a pop... they would need 300,000 people...World Wide... to make this sort of profit + with the benifit of bringing more people to Mac's as gaming (or lack of) on Mac's are probably one of the main reasons why people don't buy them (along with the price and compatibility); people will start to think this is a change in direction and there could be more games coming.
Please comment if you think i'm wrong.

Ed

Nova 9th October 2007, 15:31

I am a US college student in a Graphics Major and i see plenty of macs. i dont own a mac yet, but its on the todo list. but ill still be gaming on my PC desktop, and using the mac laptop for class/day to day stuff.

no mention of bootcamp?

devdevil85 9th October 2007, 15:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by CardJoe
Or will you be twiddling your thumbs and waiting for the PlayStation 3 version

Is there going to be M+K support? I would sure hope so......also, is there going to be cross-platform support, as well?

mikeuk2004 9th October 2007, 17:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by devdevil85
Is there going to be M+K support? I would sure hope so......also, is there going to be cross-platform support, as well?

I guess no and errr no. :)

D3s3rt_F0x 9th October 2007, 18:10

orange box on the PC all the way it aint the same playing an FPS on the 360

HandMadeAndroid 9th October 2007, 18:57

A Mac computer will always beat a pc period

End of story

Neogumbercules 9th October 2007, 19:41

Not in gaming

End of story

GoodBytes 9th October 2007, 21:24

I don't like the sound cards for Macs, and didn't find any replacement sound cards that I can easily get. So I sold my mac 2 years ago.
And I found that I just can't use a MAC fast as a PC (but that's just me), nor have good mouses like the MX1000 or MX revolution and fully enjoy all their features which makes using a computer better.

Max Spain 10th October 2007, 00:26

Am I the only one wondering how much they'd charge to port it over to linux ;-)

HandMadeAndroid 10th October 2007, 01:14

the irony of it all

Hanz 10th October 2007, 06:42

I'll play it on a PC. If I owned a 360 or PS3 I might consider waiting to get the game for the console. I'm not familiar enough with Mac's to comment on them.

Hanz

johnnyboy700 10th October 2007, 21:19

PC for me, I'm too old school to use a console for FPS games - although I did weaken with the original Halo and bought an X-Box - but only because they said it would never be released for the PC and like a fool I believed them. I simply prefer the keyboard and mouse combo as opposed to a console controller.

I'd always thought of a Mac as something that you used if you wanted to do proper computer work and you used a PC for anything else. Besides, I recently had a look in my local Apple store and was completely horrified at how much they were charging for a Mac copy of CoD2 - I think it was about £45 to £50. At least PC games drop in price after a short while and eventually get released on budget, it doesn't seem that the same holds for Mac games.

supermonkey 10th October 2007, 21:48

So, what have we learned here? PCs are better for everything. No, wait - PCs are good for gaming, Macs are good for everything else. Wait, actually - Macs are good for everything, because they're cool. Hmm. Maybe it's that PCs are good for gaming and all-around computing, but Macs are better at graphics. Oh, that's right - Consoles are for gaming, computers are for e-mail. Err, hold on, I got it - Linux is the answer.

:(

No? I give up. If anyone needs me, I'll be outside working in the garden.

-monkey

The_Beast 10th October 2007, 22:10

haha mac