Valve Unveils Steam Cloud

Erik J tips us to news of Valve's announcement that their content distribution system, Steam, will receive an update "in the near future" called Steam Cloud. The new service will allow users to save games and configuration settings online. According to MaximumPC: "This system will be completely transparent to the user. The files cache locally, and will upload when Steam detects an internet connection. There will be no restrictions on users - no save quotas or file management - the system will 'just work.' Any Steamwork game will be able to support these features, and it'll be free for customers and developers."

Comments

A great adea

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, it's about time. I've loved the fact that I can access my Steam games anywhere (like from work ;), but hated that I couldn't continue my saved games...

Sounds great

[88NoSoup4U88]

Such a coincidence; This week I've been backing up most of my config-files for all of my Steam games (and sent them off to my email to be stored there), as I became quite fed up with having to re-bind my keys on each install (and since I'm preferring ESDF-config over WASD, it's quite some work to get everything bound for each game).

So for me, this is one of the better improvements coming from Steam the last few months.

One thing I'm very curious about is how much of the config files are saved though: For example, my TeamFortress 2 configs are very much deviating from the default: I have seperate class-configs, voice-commands configs and some other .cfg-files which are referred to from the default-config file: If this would only store the default-config file, it has no use for me.

Also, it would be quite cool if the configs would be saved for the several mods for HL/HL2.

Fun with Statistics

[Clovis42]

Valve really loves statistics, and if you've ever listened to a commentary track they are very intent on players making it through their games. I wonder if they will be scanning these save game files to create statistics on how far players get in the games they play, or how long they spent in various areas, etc.

Even the save game habits of players would be interesting. I always create a new save game file for every save. I can't remember the last time this was actually helpful. In the past some games would actually make it impossible to continue if you forget to pick up a certain item. If you kept replacing your save game file you were forced to start from the beginning. In FPSs I'm always afraid that I'll start chewing through ammo and get stuck in an area with sparse ammo and be screwed. So I'll make saves with titles like "GoodAmmoGoodHealth5", and "nearlyDead7".

They already have a lot of this information anyway, like how long you play a game, and what achievements you've completed. I'd like to see some of their statistics if they do datamine the files.