I was sad not to get into the Steam Beta for Mac, so I decided to do something about it. I did a simple Google search for “Steam Mac Torrent“, and found the steam.dmg file that exists in quite a few places. Installed it, logged in, and get a nifty little message:
Well, a lot of people have talked about going to http://store.steampowered.com/macbeta/welcome and then clicking “Play Portal now for free!”. This will bypass the message telling you that you are not in the beta. All this link does is open the browser protocol “steam://run/52003”
This is where I decided to hack around, and found out something that I haven’t found anywhere else yet. I have purchased quite a bit of games on steam, so I decided to try to install one of them and got this message:
The developer wiki of for steam fully discloses all of the browser protocols (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_browser_protocol). One such protocol is “steam://install/<id>”. Well, I have bought Portal already, so I figured why not try to go ahead and install it. I opened up Firefox, and typed this into the address bar: “steam://install/400“, as Portal’s id is 400 (I am guessing 52003 is the mac version). Low and behold, it worked!!! I can now install portal. Just out of curiosity, I looked up other gameid’s of games that I own, and sure enough, you can install every game that you own. Here is a comprehensive list of the games I have been able to install:
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Braid
Counter Strike: Source
Portal
Trine
World of Goo
Of course, all this will do is bring you to another place where you cannot do anything, you still can’t play them, but I figure, hey, at least I was able to install games, now it is up to the next guy to figure out how to play them.
Enjoy!
Update: Just for testing purposes, I tried to run steam://run/52003 on Windows 7, and got this message:
This confirms that there are different gameid’s for mac and windows games. Looks like a script will have to be run on Valve’s side to enable the games you own. I would guess that 52003 will NOT be the gameid for Mac Portal when out of beta, but we will see.
