A company I’m working with sent me a redemption code for their new game on the Steam network. I’m a Mac guy, not a gamer. What do I do with it?

If you’re even a casual gamer, you know about Steam. It’s an amazing platform that lets you have all your games, all your saved game data, and all your buddies in one place, even across individual games. That’s how you can play The Sims 4, for example, as I’ve written about over on my dad blog. Steam also works with Mac, Windows PC and Linux, so it’s impressively cross-platform.

If you use Steam, you may want to quit out of Steam when playing non-Steam games. Steam can sometimes cause problems by intercepting the Bluetooth signal. This is only a problem when playing wirelessly. Parallels 8 is an excellent product that is easy to use and integrates Windows 7 with OS X beautifully. You can also opt to simply fire up Windows in a Window if you prefer that for some reason.

If you’re a computer gamer, it’ll run on your computer, and do a good job. Like an iTunes Store redemption code, however, you can’t really redeem the Steam code without having Steam installed and running on your system, and without you then also signing up for a (free) Steam account. So let me show you how that goes To start, head over to and click on that lovely download link (or just hit the one below): Once it downloads, it’s a pretty typical Mac app installation process where you just drag the app into the Applications folder and it does whatever magic is needed on first launch: You can do that!

Now double-click to launch the app and once it’s done its initial data download from the Steam server, it’ll ask you to log in to your existing Steam account or create a new one: Since I have an account (on my PC), I’ll log in by clicking on “Login to an existing account”. Then once I enter my account and password, it’s no surprise that, well, I don’t have much there as of yet: Pretty sad, actually. Now, finally, you can redeem the code that the company sent you. Click on “+ Add a Game” on the lower left edge: As you can see, choose “Activate a Product on Steam” Now you’ll have the chance to enter your redemption code, as I’m going to do with my review copy of the upcoming game A Golden Wake: (I’ve blanked out most of the code I used for obvious reasons, but it was in the AAAAA-BBBBB-CCCCC format) Enter the code carefully, then click “Next >” to submit it to the Steam servers.

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If it works, you’ll see “Activation Successful!” Almost done! Click on “Next >” again to actually download the game: I find that the time estimates for downloading software are very off-target. This game took about 45sec to download on my Xfinity connection, no complaints about that! Finally, it’s installed and ready to run. Click “Play” and you’re in your new game. And when you’re done, do explore Steam a bit, especially the Steam store. Lots and lots of gaming goodness.

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Advertisement The Mac App Store doesn’t hold a candle to the same store used by iPhone and iPad users to guzzle apps, games and in-app purchases. On a Mac, you’re not limited to one store, and if you’re into gaming you should take full advantage of that privilege.

Despite being a relatively consumer-friendly way of discovering and installing apps, the Mac App Store is fraught with restrictions and drawbacks from a developer’s perspective. It’s thanks to these issues that we recommend buying your games elsewhere. Multiplayer Madness When a developer decides to put their wares on the Mac App Store, they agree to submit to Apple’s rather restrictive sandboxing rules. Sandboxing is a safeguard that stops the app from straying beyond its boundaries and affecting your system in other ways — deleting files, changing settings or more malicious behaviour. It’s there to protect you and it applies to all apps in the Mac App Store.

From a multiplayer standpoint, this restricts developers from using shared, cross-platform APIs and instead forces them to use Apple’s solution instead. Apple's Game Center strives to make playing mobile games a social activity again, but using the service isn't quite so straightforward any more., the not-so-mature matchmaking service you’ve probably noticed on your iPhone or iPad. Serious problems arise when you consider that the majority of gamers playing these titles will be doing so on Windows, usually using a You probably think you know how to use Steam pretty well. As with any piece of software, there are features you use everyday, and those you don't know you have until you look.

Due to Apple’s restrictions, games that rely on Steam for multiplayer (say Borderlands 2, for example) must have their multiplayer elements rewritten in order to accommodate Game Center. Playing with Steam gamers simply isn’t an option: you can have two versions of the same game on two different app stores, but they can’t communicate with each other. Borderlands 2 is a bit of an oddity in that it got both a release on Steam and in the Mac App Store. You can guarantee that the Steam version will have considerably more multiplayer activity thanks to the huge community of players who already own the game. However, not every game is as fortunate as Borderlands 2, so don’t be surprised to see developers refusing to dedicate months of development to rewriting the multiplayer components; opting instead to ditch the multiplayer modes entirely. Keep an eye out for anything that says “Campaign Edition” or words to the effect of, “We cut the multiplayer aspect so this is now a single player game.” Full Steam Ahead The audience for games on Steam is something like ten times that which use the Mac App Store, so if you’ve got an option between the two, Steam is always the better choice.