The Real Reason Why There's No HL2 For OS X?
Only a few days after Valve's Gabe Newell dished on why Valve, makers of the Half-Life series, doesn't develop for OS X, it seems that Apple decided that they needed to make their position known as well.
Bear in mind that Newell's general explanation revolved around Apple changing their support team rather frequently, and not seeming to have any continuity between the outgoing teams and the incomming teams. The net result, Newell claims, is that every time Apple approaches Valve about gaming, they do it with a completely new (small) group of internal engineers/developers that seem to have no idea that a similar group met with Valve about year ago. Those people from approximately a year ago were in the same situation.
So an e-mail was sent to Steve Jobs and here's what happened:
“Within a day or so I got a call from one of Apple's developer relations manager who said my email to Jobs had made some kind of impact because Jobs forwarded the email to developer relations and told them to get on it. At some point Apple did meet with Newell, but I guess nothing came of it except that the project never could take off because of Valve's insistence that anyone who wanted to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac had to advance $1 million to Valve. That's right, that's $1,000,000. That might be peanuts to someone like Valve, but no Mac publisher in their right mind would have given Valve that kind of money just for the rights to publish Half-Life 2 for the Mac.”
So Valve doesn't want to develop the game themselves, they just want a cool million in advance and possibly more depending on other contractual stipulations that aren't mentioned
Is this Valve's way of saying that they just don't want Half-Life to appear on OS X any time soon, or is this a reasonable business proposal? Let us know what you think.
Bear in mind that Newell's general explanation revolved around Apple changing their support team rather frequently, and not seeming to have any continuity between the outgoing teams and the incomming teams. The net result, Newell claims, is that every time Apple approaches Valve about gaming, they do it with a completely new (small) group of internal engineers/developers that seem to have no idea that a similar group met with Valve about year ago. Those people from approximately a year ago were in the same situation.
So an e-mail was sent to Steve Jobs and here's what happened:
“Within a day or so I got a call from one of Apple's developer relations manager who said my email to Jobs had made some kind of impact because Jobs forwarded the email to developer relations and told them to get on it. At some point Apple did meet with Newell, but I guess nothing came of it except that the project never could take off because of Valve's insistence that anyone who wanted to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac had to advance $1 million to Valve. That's right, that's $1,000,000. That might be peanuts to someone like Valve, but no Mac publisher in their right mind would have given Valve that kind of money just for the rights to publish Half-Life 2 for the Mac.”
So Valve doesn't want to develop the game themselves, they just want a cool million in advance and possibly more depending on other contractual stipulations that aren't mentioned
Is this Valve's way of saying that they just don't want Half-Life to appear on OS X any time soon, or is this a reasonable business proposal? Let us know what you think.
