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Steam Cloud Launches This Week
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.