Cook: Steam on Mac is “a great shot in the arm”

By Patrick Garratt

Apple COO Tim Cook has just lauded Valve’s recent launch of a Mac version of Steam, calling the venture “a great shot in the arm”.

Speaking at Apple’s Back to the Mac event in CA today, Cook singled out Valve as a pusher of Mac gaming.

“We have new devs like Valve,” he said. “They’re bringing titles simultaneously to the Mac and PC. Like Half Life. This is great for the Mac, and a great shot in the arm for gaming on Macs.”

The Mac version of Steam launched in May, with Portal given away for free.

The latest round of Steam stats, released in August, showed that only 5.07 percent of the download service’s users were playing with Macs.

MacOS 10.6.3 64-bit accounted for 4.3 percent of total Steam use, with MacOS 10.5.8 64-bit adding the extra 0.77 percent.

Of those using Steam on Macs, a whopping 47 percent owned MacBook Pros. Nearly 54 percent of all Mac users packed 4Gb of RAM.

Check out Engadget for a Back to the Mac liveblog.