It’s that time of year again: the Steam Holiday Sale has returned (from today through January 2nd) with over 1,000 titles on sale. As is holiday blog tradition, here is my guide to help you maintain some dignity and fiscal responsibility. (Here’s last year’s guide, for reference.)
About 10 years ago, when I was wearing the very unique hat of “Mac gaming journalist”, I got to meet a lot of remarkable people. One such person was Corey Tamas, who I met just as he was taking over Mike Dixon’s much beloved Mac Gamer’s Ledge and transitioning it into MacGamer.com, which recently relaunched after a few years of hiatus. Corey is a family man with a huge heart, a big Doctor Who fan (like bow ties, Doctor Who fans are cool), and one of the people that I will forever consider part and parcel of “Mac gaming”. He’s good people.
That said, sometimes he writes things I just can’t agree with, which brings us to today’s “10 Reasons Gamers Should Choose a Mac Over an iPhone/iPad“. Besides being a weird apples vs. oranges comparison – why not have both? – the ten reasons range from shaky to silly to flat-out wrong. Corey has authorized me to do my worst, so as a general survey of what’s going on with iOS gaming, here’s 10 Reasons Corey Tamas Is Wrong.
Given the realities of the Mac gaming market, our Mac customers were always going to be mad at us. They were always going to be second-class customers where we couldn’t invest to the same degree in the Mac version as we did elsewhere. I don’t want to be in that business. I would much rather we just eat the money we’ve spent so far than take money from Mac customers and short-change them.
Valve, May 12th, 2010:
Whether you’re a Mac or a PC, Steam has the games you want to play and a global community of gamers to play with.
What a difference a decade can make.
For those of you taking the plunge tomorrow for the first time, I am more than happy to take questions and help you make heads or tails of a fantastic (yet sometimes intimidating) gaming platform. Just visit my Steam Community and add me as a friend after you get it installed. (I would do a longer post, but there’s still a lot about the launch that we won’t know until tomorrow.)
Hope to see you there.