[OmegaZero_Alpha]

Emulation isn't part of the discussion - just as new games to the Mac platform are released as Intel only, there's no reason to think Valve would do any different if releasing theirs (though I don't doubt they'd release older Mac ports from other developers that work for the old platform as well as new). So for the sake of discussion running TF2 on XP in Parallels is the extreme when talking overhead for running the game in OSX via a virtualization wrapper (CrossOver or Cider - the same tech used in WINE).

You completely ignired the point I was making. Your display of performance was based solely on emulation. That and running the game in a virtualized environment would be bulky and inefficient (or have you forgotten about the PC port of Grand Theft Auto 4?)

And Cider doesn't 'handle' middleware, true, because it doesn't need to; the example you used isn't because it's a technology that's missing, it's licensing. Furthering the example, Valve would (probably) have to get a new license from Havok for Half-Life 2 for releases on Macs. That's money and it's really in Valve's court if they want to front the money for a (much) smaller market of gamers.

There is no way that valve would make enough money to cover the money cost to renew a contract with THROUGH a third party. I could see them porting new games, but making older games (even TF2 isn't making much money) would be a financial disaster.

To the bit about them saving people 5-10 minutes to reboot: My XP partition is only used to play games. I don't have a chat client, IRC client, etc installed. I could install those programs, but I could also just forget I have OSX and do everything in Windows. Having a Steam client native on OSX lets me use the OS I want to use, and gives me the option of Gaming in it as well (or idling in TF2 and getting actual work done while that happens), and for Valve that means I spend more money on games since it's no longer an inconvenience to play. And that's not even taking into consideration the hordes of social/casual gamers that would have an app store to find games they couldn't otherwise get as they don't even know what bootcamp is (e.g. my parents).

It sounds like the only inconvenience is coming from your own inability to use the one operating system that does everything that you need it to. Everybody I know has no problem with either running bootcamp when they want to play games or just not using a mac (which is what about 92% of all computer users chose to do)