I’m not much of a PC gamer (beyond casual games anyway), because I’ve always liked that consoles are always capable of playing the games I want to play, and I don’t have to worry about constantly upgrading parts. But one thing in the PC realm that I have always admired is Steam, Valve’s gaming service.

Today, Valve announced that Steam is coming to the Mac, with the first title expected to be Portal 2. Good news for the Steam platform in general, and great news for Mac owners, who can now look forward to simultaneous releases on PCs and Macs.

“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.”

“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. ”The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”

The option to play the same game on your PC and Mac free of charge is a great feature that could have easily been excluded, and a small example of just what makes the Steam platform the future of computer gaming.