UPDATE: note that a petition asking Valve to bring Half Life 2 on Mac is already running here [1].
According to sources, for whose reliability has yet to be verified, game software developer Valve is considering porting the second part of its best seller-game "Half Life 2" to Mac OS X.
Actually, in early June, Andrew Meggs who was originally hired to develop Half Life for Mac, had posted some comments on the viability of a Mac port of Half Life 2 on IMG [2] forums. So I wanted to know more about it and I tried to contact people from Valve who did not reply to me at first. However, in late June and early July I (coincidentally?) received reports from anonymous sources claiming that it is likely that we will see a Mac version of Half-Life 2 and explaining their thoughts.
As already described by Andrew Meggs: it is technically easier to port Half Life 2 on Mac than it was for its predecessor. There are some other issues though. According to the sources, Valve's biggest hesitation isn't about the technical point but rather the financial one as Apple's market share, especially if we count only gamers, is currently very small and entry level Macs' graphic chips aren't powerful enough to fully support this game. The result is that the market for this port is really small, and can be qualified even smaller than it was for the development of the first Half Life which was discontinued.
"Valve is certainly going to wait and see if the Mac market share looks better in early 2004 before making any announcement of the port of Half Life 2 on the Mac platform. They don't want to disappoint Mac gamers as they did with Half Life" says one anonymous source but he also adds that it is just his opinion and that an announcement might happen at any time.
Sources also indicated that if Half Life 2 is ever released for the Mac, it will be a Mac OS X only game and that we shouldn't expect it before mid or late 2004. In other good news, its graphics core will be fully optimized for Mac, and the Mac OS X version of the game will have all the features of the Windows version.
We can hope these rumours will become reality soon because Half Life 2 is probably going to be a killer-game like the first Half Life was on PC. In my opinion, even though the market is indeed quite small, a Mac version of Half Life 2 is financially possible as is the case for games like Unreal Tournament and Quake. The only thing that can make a difference is the fact that these games run well on the current installed base of Macs. I could not verify whether or not these anonymous e-mails came from Valve and I'm still expecting an "official" answer from them. I'll let you know if and when I receive further information. If any of you has further information to provide to me about that, please e-mail me here [3].