By Slash Lane

Published: 12:00 PM EST

Money -- and lots of it -- rather than a lackluster approach to gaming on the part of Apple may be the primary reason why Valve's popular Half-Life 2 title has thus far eluded the Mac platform, according to a new report.

Responding to recent comments by Valve Software co-founder Gabe Newell, an insider for IMG is reporting that while there is little doubt that Newell waged a few valid points about Apple's lack of focus when it comes to games, the real reason Half-Life 2 never made it to the Mac is because of Valve's outrageous asking price for the Mac port.

According to the report, representatives for Valve met with Apple over the prospect of porting Half-Life 2 to the Mac a few months before the title was due to out on other platforms. The project never took off, however, because of Valve's insistence that any game publisher who wanted to port Half-Life 2 to the Mac had to advance $1 million to Valve.

"That's right, that's $1,000,000," the report states. "That might be peanuts to someone like Valve, but no Mac publisher in their right mind would have given Valve that kind of money just for the rights to publish Half-Life 2 for the Mac."

In a recent interview with Kikizo, Newell insisted that his firm's titles have failed to make their way to the Mac as a result of Apple's half-hearted attempts to comply with the requests of game developers.

"We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming,'" Newell said. "And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better,' and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow through on anything. So, they seem to think that they want to do gaming, but there's never any follow through on any of the things they say they're going to do."

Valve, whose estimated revenues for 2005 totaled just $70 million according to some reports, is also responsible for producing gaming titles Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Team Fortress 2.