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In a recent interview, Valve’s Gabe Newell spoke about Valves lack of support for Apple’s OS X platform. Newell confirmed that Valve were in talks with Apple, but said that nothing more happened because Apple couldn’t stay focused.
However, there’s another side of that story. According to Inside Mac Games, Apple did talk to Valve, but Valve demanded a million dollars up front in order to port Half Life to OS X, which most likely ended the talks.
One can understand why Valve would demand such an amount up front, primarily because porting to OS X isn’t easy, and because sales of the game would most likely be only a fraction of the PC sales. On the other hand, one can certainly understand Apple’s decision - a million dollars is a million dollars.
To read the full interview with Valve’s MD, Gabe Newell, click here
Source via insidemacgames
57 responses so far ↓
1 Spork // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:30 am
Nope, I really can’t understand it. Apple screwed over bungie, who flew into Microsoft’s money-filled hands, and now they’ve screwed themselves out of one of the biggest selling game engines in gaming history. It’s this control-freak totalitarian BS that keeps Apple from doing anything but selling to the already converted.
2 Peter // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:40 am
Pfft, Apple sneezes $1M. Not even a noticeable amount for them.
$1M is a great investment in HL2 - If Apple ever wanted to enter the gaming market, they’d really regret not investing $1M.
3 Surfer // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:41 am
I doubt Valve wanted a million from Microsoft. That’s just selfish crap. I suppose it made no sense to program it in a platform independent manner…
4 sbjobs // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:45 am
a million dollars is very little in this context
5 me // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:47 am
I knew there was something behind it, but at least they could make it native os x instead of that battlefield 2142 cider port but i guess they not demanded 1 million in advance, and apple doesnt have much graphic power so dual boot if you want to play some games
6 asdf // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:50 am
$1m is nothing to these guys
7 bob // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:52 am
A million dollars is chicken feed for Apple…
8 applefan // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:01 am
So whats a million to Apple, it would help give the impression that they are serious about gaming…which we all know they are not.
So they have to sell a few extra iphones and ipods, not a big deal when those things sell with zero effort on Apples part.
9 Joseph // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:04 am
Except a million bucks probably isn’t much to Apple today, and would certainly be a great way to get their collective foot (back) in the door.
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11 Matt // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:12 am
I am not sure I understand Apple’s reluctance. Apple has paid quite a few companies in the past to port their software to the Mac. Why wouldn’t they be will ing to pay to port a popular game to the Mac?
12 Greg // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:17 am
Halflife isn’t that great of a game anyway, never was.
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15 mikemil828 // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:30 am
Seeing how Microsoft gladly paid 50 million just for exclusive extras for the x360 version of Grand Theft Auto 4, that Apple would turn their nose up to paying merely 1 million for one of the greatest franchises in PC gaming history is rather penny pinching.
16 Rodney // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:32 am
Wow. What a bone-headed move by Apple… $1,000,000 is absolutely nothing to a company of that size. Checked out Apple’s stock price lately?!? Are they ever going to get serious about gamers or are they still hung up on the artsy-fartsy crowd?
17 boris // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:34 am
well if I am a Mac user I would definitely loved to play HalfLife on my Mac since I am HF fan
18 Mr Chéz // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:35 am
I think that Apple needs to take a serious look around, and see that the ONLY thing holding many windows users back from the mac are its lack of games. 1M seems a lot for one game, but maybe this would spark into even more games being made for the mac.
Or, apple can just ignore everything a die a slow, drawn out death like they did before.
19 Karachi // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:57 am
But on the other hand Cider for OSX could be used to port the games. EA uses this technique for all there games for example.
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21 Jamie Souef // Oct 8, 2007 at 3:59 am
If 1 million dollars (can’t help but think of Dr Evil) is a lot of money for Apple, the company is in big, big trouble.
22 virtual worlds hub // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:01 am
Basically, if Mac sales are not worth for Valve, one million dollars is not worth for Apple for those sales.
23 steve // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:05 am
Apple makes a million dollars every few hours, don’t pretend like its a lot of money for them to make one of the biggest games ever available for their own platform.
Its just stupidity thats all. Apple refuses to play the game everyone else plays, you have to make concessions for certain things to become possible.
24 Harry // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:05 am
That’s some bull.
25 Blog Oh Joe // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:13 am
Half Life never really interested me much. I played it a couple times on the PC but got bored.;)
26 Mike // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:42 am
uh, so where’s the source to back up this story?
27 I have a memory... // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:04 am
Spork said: “Apple screwed over bungie”
What? Explain that one to me. MS saw the halo demo and went under the board and stole key employes away, then bought out the whole shop.
Personally, I tend to think that it’s not the price tag that made the million dollar difference
it’s the way you say it that matters most.
28 Jon // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:05 am
Are we taking back in the original Half-Life days? If so, times were not that good at the old fruit ship.
29 Wam Schmenkins // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:16 am
/Valve/…..One MEEEELLLLIIIIION Dollars!
/Apple/
/Valve/ Hmmm….
/#2/ Don’t you think we should ask for…a little MORE than a million dollars?
/Valve/ Hmmm….
30 Hellboy // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:34 am
This may or may not have been a wise move on Apple’s part but we obviously know very little of the story, also the value of this investment has nothing to do with how much money apple already has, wtf! Should they spend $500K on pogo sticks just because they have lots of money to play with?
31 Sean // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:35 am
Wow. Gabe Newell’s past as a Microsoft employee really shows through in his business tactics (Microsoft, back in the day, “offered” to port Windows to M68k if Motorola would pay them several tens of millions of dollars).
If it didn’t make enough business sense for Valve to port Half-Life to OS X on their own (as in, they didn’t expect the increase in sales to make up for the cost), then it wouldn’t make good business sense for Apple to *pay* them to do it.
And, as somebody else said, it’s not just the price, it’s the manner of asking.
32 drj // Oct 8, 2007 at 5:55 am
Just like someone else said, if Mac sales are not worth it for Valve, than a million bucks isnt worth it for Apple. Mac’s already have bootcamp… if you want windows games, dual boot w/ windows.
Many other game shops seem to be able to pump out osx/windows cross platform games no sweat, I wonder why its such a challenge for Valve? World of Warcraft, Unreal etc etc. All these guys find it worth their time and find it profitable to port their games to the mac platform without asking for a ridiculous fee.
I think its more of a talent issue with Valve. They certainly have a top notch creative staff, but I cant help but get the impression they have less than stellar programmers working for them.
@mikemil828
Getting custom content developed and having exclusive rights to said content is a far cry from a paying an upfront fee to have the privilege of someone porting their software to your well established platform.
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34 bigBADguy // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:27 am
1M is nothing to Apple, if they consider gaming is serious.
Did Apple guys know how important if the HL2 engine was ported/optimized on OSX? Obviously, they don’t.
I don’t know how many 3D game engines are there on Wintel, but there are even much more game build on top of those engine….
35 Jackson // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:38 am
LOL @ “I have a memory…”
Or Microsoft saw the demo and bought Bungie because they knew Halo was going to be a massive franchise.
Apple didn’t see this and so lost one of the best FPS’s ever made.
36 LianYL // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:44 am
Think of it this way, games are an optional bonus for the relatively useless mac. If Mac dwells too much into games, it would lose its appeal to those who buy into Mac in order to stand out.
Being all fluff and gameless is a trademark trait of Macs, assimilate too much and you’re just another PC which can do everything.
37 Keehun // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:46 am
I will pre order that if they port! C’mon there is a big base of players that are anxious for this… Sure there ain’t as much as PC but still!
38 Kyle // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:55 am
I can see why they wanted money up front, it is a huge investment for them to port the game over, especially since they are a small company with limited resources. Also, it sounds like Apples commitment may change over time; there is however no doubt that they would get the money back if they were to invest. Too bad, but that is what boot camp is for.
39 frogger // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:59 am
If Apple were serious about gaming, they would change that goddamn mouse to have 2 real buttons!!
40 minkis // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:33 am
you guys forget about publishing costs, development costs? Sure valve has money, but like anything development needs backing of a strong publisher, and $1 million would really really be fair for porting a game like Half-life over to OSX, considering the cost to create it on the PC. Apple has a small fanbase in comaprison, a little commitment on their part would be nice given the risk valve would be putting financially.
41 Mark Nutter // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:50 am
Not that it matters anyways - doesn’t half-life 2 run via Crossover on the Mac?
42 deadeyes2021 // Oct 8, 2007 at 8:07 am
you can go and blame mac because it’s a big corporation but then again at this point what is valve? I think valve got a bit too greedy themselves considering that they’ve made their millions possibly billions on the half life series, counter strike, and their revolutionary physics engine. I myself and a mac user but I’m still a counter strike and halflife fan, I feel that in the end valve let down fans and what could have been people new to the series for the almighty dollar.
43 Rs // Oct 8, 2007 at 9:23 am
one thing you may be overlooking as that the devision of apple that makes ipods would be completely separate from the apple games devision (assuming such a thing even exists). And knowing apple, odds are pretty good the games devision doesn’t get nearly the budget that the iCrap devision gets. Just my $0.02
44 WHat!? // Oct 8, 2007 at 10:43 am
“One can understand why Valve would demand such an amount up front, primarily because porting to OS X isn’t easy”
You obviously don’t code. It’s quite easy to port software to the OSX platform now.
45 MrX_TLO // Oct 8, 2007 at 1:35 pm
The way I heard it was Valve told Apple the same thing iD did -
First you need to put a real gfx chip in your machines or at least allow 3rd party gfx cards in common machines.
And that Job’s response was supposedly something along the lines of: *I* design Macs, not you!
46 miguel // Oct 8, 2007 at 4:09 pm
For the quater ending in June Apple reported $818 million in profits and they had $6.6 billion in cash.
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48 Nathan // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Apple would be foolish to just give away money to a developer. That would be called financial stupidity.
If a developer is willing to take the risk and expand their market to more users and reap the potential profit, it is incumbent upon that developer to shoulder the financial burden. They should not ask for handouts in order to pursue this goal.
If, however, Apple were investing one million dollars in the company, with an equivalent stake in future profits, that would not be foolish, merely risky.
It’s Business 101, folks.
49 Ben Lindstrom // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:25 pm
If Apple approached Valve and Valve stated they needed cash and hardware to help jump start their Mac division then I’d find that reasonable, but every article I’ve read it was the other way. And if that is the case then to me it is utterly rude to call this Apple’s problem.
Why doesn’t Gabe come out and publicly state what his issues are?
50 Brian // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:30 pm
If this is true, I would have said no in Apple’s position too. Not because $1m is a lot (to Apple) but because it sets a bad precedent. That would have basically opened the doors for anyone to hold a game hostage for Mac porting until Apple paid up.
51 marlon // Oct 8, 2007 at 7:54 pm
First off I’m not a Mac loving zombie or Half Life freak.
As an experienced programmer its alot of work to optimize a game to work fluidly on different platforms. There is “NO WAY” to code a complicated game in a platform independent way. There are simply too many differences between loading, parsing data, driver support, and performance issues. You may have to make thousands of small updates for the game to run similar.
In other words to port a game takes time, money and rigorous testing. Gaming on Macs shows pitiful sells compared to PC’s, and “any” console. Valves decision to ask for 1 million up front seems fair to me since HL may not sell well on the Macs. But it does raise the profile of Macs as a gaming machine so theres the benefit.
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53 matt // Oct 8, 2007 at 9:18 pm
it’s amazing - i’ve seen this conversation a few times before, and whenever someone asks “why isn’t this a problem for blizzard/epic/id/etc” nobody has an answer. i think valve might be doing something to p!ss apple off. i’d love to see half-life on the mac… none of us really knows exactly what’s going on between the two but i think we can all agree that it’d be great if they joined together and got valve’s awesome franchise on the best computing platform out there (i mean OS X for anyone thinking it’d be cute to be obtuse and chime in about linux) =)
54 Jordan Lund // Oct 8, 2007 at 9:48 pm
$1,000,000 = 2,500 16GB iPod touches (retail).
55 Dan // Oct 8, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Why would valve want to port Half Life to OS X?? They can’t even get it to work on windows vista!
56 anigger // Oct 9, 2007 at 12:39 am
yeah well now you faggots can play it via bootcamp
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