Friday, May 30th 2008
Valve Announces Steam Cloud Service
Valve Software, the master mind behind Steam is now seeking to expand with Steam Cloud, the next major update for the digital distribution service. Steam Cloud will allow gamers to store not only their game profiles and graphics setting, but also all of their savegames created through Steam for life. You won't need to worry about your savegames anymore. All the data will be automatically uploaded to back-end servers whenever you go online. It will be accessible from any PC at no cost and there will be no space limitations to worry about. The first games to offer Steam Cloud support will be Half-Life and Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and the forthcoming co-op shooter Left 4 Dead. Steam Cloud will also be freely available as part of the Steamworks set of developer tools. In addition, Valve plans a couple of other updates for the Steam platform in near future. They will include auto-updating of your computer's device drivers, social features including events and calendar systems, 'official' community pages for games, pricing localised to your country's currency, Amazon-style recommendations and shopping cart systems, and more payment options.
Source:
GamesIndustry.biz
21 Comments on Valve Announces Steam Cloud Service
Please steam, for our sake stop using Nvidia's left over bandwidth or whatever bone they threw you.
You register your games with Steam.
You download and install a bunch of user created mods and install them.
You create save games and upload them to Steam.
Your computer gets borked and you have to reload.
Is steam going to tell you what mods you need to re-install for each game so that the save games they are storing will work ?
If not, it's no better than just saving them to a CD or whatever.
And for Valve, that is excellent. I have started HL2 so many times. WIth Cloud maybe I can actually finish sometime. :slap:
An other unique point to steam :toast:
yea i like to do my own updates, i like to be in control.
overall though steam is pretty neat, even though i dont use it that much.
...and maybe they will add a "PC Upgrade suggestion" feature to stem... maybe
I just keep my Steam folder on my second drive, and that means there's no need for a re-install. I just make sure the second drive is still D, and copy the shortcuts into my start menu's folder upon a reinstall, run Steam, set the password, set some options, and it may update, and I'm done.
Save games are saved in files in the game's folder, it's just some settings that are saved in the registry, which is why it needs the password again.
If you go to an other place to play with steamgame, you dont need to bind keyboard & mouse setting, again
Makes me think that my investment in a Lycosa was mostly for nothing, but I do like typing on it.
While it has it's conveniences, I will always believe it's just an attempt to combat things like piracy and cheating; which I entirely welcome, but not at the expense of being beholden to some online master service.
Here's what you do. You host the servers on your networks, and I join them with MY game content. My content is clean, I get to play.
Simple.
Personally, I hate any utilities running in the background.
I also hate applications "phoning home" and submitting information to servers.
I don't know about anyone else, but I have never used and wouldn't want to use any of these community things, or calendars etc etc either.
Plus, I'll take care of my own back ups and my own device drivers thank you!
nice one valve,i've spent a cuppla hundred quid on my steam account,nice to see they look after their customers.