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Steam Cloud Launches This Week

Posted by Soulskill on from the names-that-are-puns dept.

Valve announced yesterday that their extension of Steam, called Steam Cloud, will launch later this week with the Left 4 Dead demo. Steam Cloud is "a set of services for Steam that stores application data online and allows user experiences to be consistent from any PC." We discussed an early announcement for it back in May. Valve adds that "Steam Cloud will be available to all publishers and developers using Steam, free of charge, and Valve will add Cloud support to its back catalog of Steam games. Cloud services are compatible with games purchased via Steam, at retail, and other digital outlets."

7 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Not the same, but... by MR.Mic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have just been performing a file sync with all my saved games every morning between my laptop and desktop for about 3 months now.
    It saves internet usage, costs nothing, works for all games, and provides a backup in case one machine dies catastrophically.

    Steam cloud is an interesting concept, but it really doesn't provide any additional functionality against what I have already been doing.

    1. Re:Not the same, but... by Xest · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Apart from say allowing you to go to a cyber cafe or friends house or similar and play Half-Life 2 there with the same settings you'd use at home and without having to plug your laptop into the cyber cafe's/friend's network or PCs and sync your data back to said PC?

      The point of it is that you don't need to prat about with syncing and you don't need to worry about re-syncing. When you change the settings on one machine, it handles this all for you because the settings are stored online.

      In todays connected world worry about internet access is rather a non-issue and it's even much easier to connect to the internet and have Steam update for you than it is to handle a sync!

  2. They have their work cut out by mattbee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I spent about 4 hours playing Stalker, bought off Steam, and eventually gave up in frustration because it was failing to save *and* it was failing to notify me that it had failed to save, so I only found out I'd lost a chunk of progress once I'd died. I *think* it was just hardwired to save its games to a path starting in c:\ and my Windows machine is installed on h:\ (I don't understand that either, but no other games seemed to have a problem making one lousy system call to find the right path to save under!). Never got to the bottom of the problem either, and I daren't start the game again for about the fifth time.

    I had already assumed Steam forced games to do its saving via its own library calls so they could do this kind of trick more easily, so I'm not sure how they're going to do it other than by updating every single game that will need to support it.

    --
    Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
  3. Interesting... by Notabadguy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When a community of people talk about DRM, I find it interesting that Steam has a unique role; people are quick to slam EA for the debacle of Spore or its various other IPs, (and now Epic for their own anti-PC gamer shenanigans). Yet it seems like Valve is consistently viewed with the attitude of, "Well, their DRM isn't so bad." Personally, the only time I used Steam was when I bought the Orange Box, and then only because it literally forced me to - I found that to be quite annoying, but then again, I didn't get them for the multiplayer aspect. Egads! No TF2 for me. It would be fantastic if the EAs and Epic studios of the industry would STOP blaming pirates for lost revenue (when the problem is really the crap that they're releasing and expecting us to buy)and using it as an excuse to stop developing PC games or stuff DRM down our throats. Instead, they could look at the companies who *are* being successful - Valve primary among them - and use them as case studies for their own business practices.

    1. Re:Interesting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      (all IMHO)
      Steam does "DRM" correctly.They don't attempt to cripple your pc, or punish people for things that pirates do. They don't assume you're a pirate. another thing that has made me a valve fanboy is that they always release the sdk (for free). Back to the point again ,when EA stops assuming everyone is a pirate (see also:"stops selling their poop"), I may look at it again.

    2. Re:Interesting... by internerdj · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That feature itself makes me consider buying through steam rather than buy a physical copy.

  4. Cool but... by dafradu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Different hardware demands different configuration.

    Everytime i setup a computer to play Counter-Strike i have to tweak my mouse settings for the windows/mouse/hardware configuration for that machine.

    This could work to store my config for THIS computer, or saved games when applied, but game settings depend heavily on the hardware and Windows configuration.