Their recruiting is equally enigmatic. Colleagues of mine far more talented than I mentioned how they had sent in resumes, but never heard back … Internal documents include long target lists, where Valve employees add names of the best and brightest innovators in the industry, and if/when they will be available.

★★★★★

But knowing what not to do is the reason Newell is on top. As EA Chief Riccitiello says about why Newell succeeds: “I don’t know what would be the right expression . . . maniacally focused?”

Now that Steam is running on the PlayStation 3, the service may be added to other games as well as Portal 2, but Lombardi refuses to give any specific news. “We are hoping other titles will benefit from the Steamworks tools and services we’ve created for Portal 2 PS3, but we don’t have anything to announce today.”

I live and die by the niche, basically. I write all these geeky songs. It’s Internet people who keep me afloat for the most part. But then, suddenly there was this Portal thing, and it was a global phenomenon, and it reached all sorts of people that I wouldn’t have otherwise reached.

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

To say that Steam is important for the viability of OS X as a gaming platform would be an understatement.

The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360.

A formal announcement is likely during the 2010 Game Developers Conference, scheduled for March 9th to the 13th.

I’m betting we will hear about a Steam client for OS X then too.