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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."

2 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!