In a Monday announcement that reflects game company Valve's inclination towards the Mac platform, Valve revealed that it is finally bringing its digital distribution service Steam, and its proprietary gaming engine Source, to Macs.

The 2003-founded Valve, a leading online distributor of games, intends launching Steam - its one-stop shop for buying and playing games - on the Macs in April; alongside the Mac-specific launch of the company's games running on the Source game engine, including Portal, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, and the Half-Life series.

Though Valve has taken a fairly long time to recognize Mac as a viable gaming platform, the company now appears committed to progressively add cross-platform features in its games. It has recently upgraded its Source engine to perform natively on the Mac, in order to ensure that performance of the games on the new platform at par with their performance on the Windows PCs.

As per the information forwarded by Valve, Steamworks for the Mac will support all of the Steamworks APIs; along with a new feature - Steam Play, which will facilitate the purchase of the product for the Mac or Windows, to be played on the other platform free of charge.

Thus, the cross-platform feature will allow gamers to play the PC version of a game via Steam Play; and later continue on the Mac version, sans any extra charge!