Steam and Mac games

[Baldrake]

I've been really surprised at how many games are available for the Mac, but where Steam doesn't get them. For example, Spore, some of the CoD games, AoE II, and most recently XCom are PC-only in Steam, but can be bought for MacOS through the Mac App Store. Does anyone know what gives?

(Yes sue me, my main computer is a MacBook Pro these days. I boot to Windows for games, but obviously would rather play natively on the Mac when it's possible.)

[Surlyboi]

You partially answered your own question. Licensing deals and such sometimes make it easier to sell things through the app store than through steam.

[Kageru]

I read a comment on this suggesting there's basically one large game porting company (Aspyr media?) and they have a mixed loyalty to steam. Though in this article they point out that working with the app-store means the version sold is basically a product in it's own right compared to the steam / retail / other digital.

Given they're a small company not surprising there's not commonality of games I guess.

[Baldrake]

Oh ok, that makes a lot of sense.

I had assumed that by now, companies that had Mac versions of their games were using platform-idependent engines like Source or Unity. I had hoped the crap Wine-based porting was behind us.