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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."

22 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. The only service by martinw89 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the only service where I won't get pissed off about that god awful buzzword "cloud". Puns make the world a better place.

    1. Re:The only service by Spasmodeus · · Score: 5, Funny

      I dunno. Sounds like a lot of hot air to me.

    2. Re:The only service by martinw89 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, you're right. It's probably just vaporware.

    3. Re:The only service by Sulix · · Score: 3, Informative

      Steam Cloud != Steamworks (Steam Cloud may be a _part_ of Steamworks, but they're not the same thing)

    4. Re:The only service by martinw89 · · Score: 5, Funny

      -Insert steamy pun in here-

      OK, but I wish you'd get your mind out of the gutter.

    5. Re:The only service by n3tcat · · Score: 4, Funny

      Maybe I need more info, because I'm still a little hazy on the details.

    6. Re:The only service by somersault · · Score: 2

      yeah that's why it's already (partially) in use by every auto-updating game on steam and several HL2 mods.

      There's an awful lot of superheated water vapour whooshing right over your head there - be careful!

      --
      which is totally what she said
    7. Re:The only service by ben0207 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Could someone give me a condensed overview please? I'm a little foggy on the concept, and that would really clear things up for me.

      --
      cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
    8. Re:The only service by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just wait until you actually try to use it.

      I'll let someone else be the guinea pig. I've been burned by this sort of thing before.

      --
      This guy's the limit!
    9. Re:The only service by PearsSoap · · Score: 2, Funny

      I've been burned by this sort of thing before.

      Scalded, surely?

  2. 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. Re:Not the same, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, I know.

      I print all of my POPed emails at home and then manually type them in at work, so I have the same ones everywhere.

      Dunno what this fancy IMAP is good for anyway.

      I also run to and from work (about ten miles). No use for fancy cars or public transport.

      I also hate everything that's new and I happen to love to brag about my pretty cumbersome workarounds.

  3. 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
    1. Re:They have their work cut out by zombietangelo · · Score: 2, Informative

      Steam doesn't need to know anything about the format of the gamesave, only to deliver it to the user, wherever s/he may be.

    2. Re:They have their work cut out by angusr · · Score: 4, Informative
      That's a known issue with S.T.A.L.K.E.R (standalone and Steam). I will now no longer stick all those dots in.

      Ran into it myself because I have XP on I:. You need to edit the fsgame.ltx file which is in the STALKER program directory and edit the data path at the top of it to match your system.

      I'm surprised you didn't notice quicker because your display settings would also not have stuck.

  4. 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 SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is, Steam, though DRM, isn't anything like as intrusive as SECUROM...Hell, it even provides features that are actually useful, this service being another example of same. Install Steam on a new machine, log in, and have it rebuild your whole setup. That's pretty cool.

      That's why people put up with Steam.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    2. Re:Interesting... by Chyeld · · Score: 5, Informative

      Steam is proof that there is a working middle ground between absolutely no protection on your software and simply hoping everyone is honest enough to pay for their games and locking the games down so hard that only pirates can play your games.

      While there are disadvantages to Steam, especially with games that weren't written with it in mind or adapted to it later on, on the whole Valve has done an excellent job of making their 'restrictions' reasonable and in providing extras that make up for those restrictions.

      As you said, more companies need to look at what is working and emulate that. Unfortunately, like DRM on music, I don't think the actual purpose of EA's style of DRM to be the same purpose as Valves.

      EA wants to keep selling you the same game over again, literally. Look at how they handled the Sims series. Every time they released a bundle, it would include expansions from the previous bundles. But it wasn't as simple as "everything in the old bundle". They'd release one set with expansions 1, 2, and 3. One set with expansions 4, 5, and 6. Then the next year it'd be expansions 1, 3, 5 and 2, 4, 6 with the original game matched up with 7 and 8. (Not the actual order, I'm not that invested in looking them up on Amazon, but it is fairly close)

      DRM that limits installs and prompts you to buy a new copy when you run out instead of reminding you that you can call customer support to reset the installs, works to that purpose. EA's version is designed really for only one thing, making it so that two years from now when they release the 'Game X collection', with five old games that they haven't even bothered to update to be able to run on the current version of Windows, you'll have to buy it to play any of the games in it because your orginal copy is out of installs.

      Valve on the other hand wants to keep selling you new games, to the point where they allowed people who had Half-Life prior to Steam to convert to Steam versions and where they have set it up so that buying a 'box set' like the Orange Box let you re-gift the games in it that you already had. Valve's version is the real DRM, the point is to allow you to play your game almost everywhere without being able to give away free copies to all your friends.

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

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

  5. 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.

    1. Re:Cool but... by malakai · · Score: 2, Informative

      You need to add:

      -noforcemparms -noforcemaccel -noforcemspd

      to your cstrike.exe command line.

      That will prevent any of the OS level mouse tweaking from interfering with CS. That is your multi-computer-mouse-sensitivity-rosetta-stone.

      --
      -Malakai
      A Dragon Lives in my Garage