Valve continues to impress with every one of its announcements! We heard of Steamworks a few months ago, which has made professional video game publishing within everyone’s free hands. Now Valve announces Steam Cloud, a revolutionary service that will allow you to store savegames and configuration files online; that is, forever.
Hit the jump to read more and become darn excited!
Steam Cloud, which doesn’t seem to have a release date yet, will store saved games and configuration files on Valve’s servers forever (according to Valve, at least). In the scenario that you are not connected to the Internet, Steam will store the saved games and upload them as soon as possible (a bit like Last.fm’s audioscrobbler, you can say).
Half-Life (people still play that?) and Half-Life 2 will be the first to be supported. Keyboard mappings are also going to be supported for Counter-Strike and Left 4 Dead. In addition, of course, all of your options and settings will be saved untouched. For one, this gives considerably increased flexibility in customizing gameplay. I gave up on customizing key mappings under the belief that I’d have to reset them in case of an uninstall or if I played the game on another computer. Not anymore!
What’s more, the service will be completely free for developers to use, like Steamworks. This should mean that more and more developers will take up the offer (we hope), and that can only mean we, the consumers are benefitted! I’d hope that RPG developers take this up first, because it can be a real pain in the arse if you don’t save for a few hours and lose all of your newly gained statistics and such.
Also in the pipeline is a calendar system, a system requirements checker and a driver auto-updater; all coming for Steam. Valve is really pimping out Steam to make it the service to use for PC gaming, and that isn’t a bad thing. With revolutionary ideas and force like this, PC gaming could very well be changed forever; it may even overtake the console industry!
Source: Shacknews
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