The Republic of Heaven

* Wants Portal 2 so badly*

According to the accounts of many happy Mac gamers, last week's launch of Steam on the Mac has been a huge success. Those of us on the Steam team were especially pleased to be able to include Portal as a free download to celebrate the launch, and it appears that many of you agree it was a good idea - there have been approximately 1.5 million downloads so far. Aperture Science, we've heard, is pleased. Be sure to pick it up today - the offer ends on the 24th of this month.

As we've mentioned, Steam is going to be adding a new set of Mac games every Wednesday for a few weeks. Here is today's dozen new Mac titles:

Altitude
Caster
Chains
Eschalon Book 1
Europa Universalis 3
Hearts of Iron 3
Killing Floor
Madballs in Babo: Invasion
Sam & Max Season 2
Sam & Max Season 3 - Ep. 2
Simplz Zoo
Windosill

All of these titles support Steam Play, meaning that you'll be able to play each title on both Windows and the Mac from any computer with just a single purchase. Several of the titles also support cross-platform multiplayer action - a first for games on Steam.

In other Mac news, we're getting ready to add Mac numbers to our hardware survey. As longtime Steam customers are aware, our Steam Hardware Survey has become an industry benchmark for gauging what kinds of computers gamers are running around the world. We are in the process of updating this monthly report with Mac information and other new aggregate data. Here's a sneak peak at some of the preliminary findings we've gathered about Mac hardware since we launched on that platform just over a week ago:

Roughly two thirds of all Steam Mac users are running on a laptop.
Portal (with the same code base across platforms, just different compilers) is one fifth as likely to crash on a Mac than on Windows.
And one week after launch, already more than eleven percent of all Steam purchases are for the Mac.

You'll be able to dig deeper into those numbers sometime next month, which is when we're planning to ship the complete report. After that it will be automatically updated each month with new survey data.